How to Analyze Competitive Messaging in Four Simple Steps

During my decades in marketing, I’ve seen nothing that comes close to engaging the interest of top management as much as competitive messaging does. Michael Treacy and Fred Wiesema's "The Discipline of Market Leaders" adapts Harvard guru Michael Porter's Five Forces model to market positioning. It outlines three "disciplines" companies can embrace in business strategy: product/technology leadership, operational excellence, and customer intimacy.

The task becomes a simple matter of counting how many words or phrases associated with each value discipline appear in each competitor’s materials. You can also use a semantic pyramid to create a broader view of the value disciplines. Pointing out similar phrases on important pages of a competitor’s site illustrates how a competitor is positioning itself.

Knowing the relative arrangement of your company’s and its competitors’ positions on the market landscape helps you shape the content you will use for all your marketing materials. Technology leaders can talk about customization or levels of purity, but they generally won’t want to focus on those benefits. Having employees know they work for a market leader in product technology, customer affinity, or operational excellence is priceless.