When your job is designing and delivering a product or service to the market it is altogether fitting and expected that you'll take an initial and then periodic view of the competitive landscape for said product or service to see how your offering stacks up in the marketplace, and to attempt to find and exploit perceived weaknesses and differences that (hopefully), present your solutions and services in the most positive light.
It just makes sense, and is typically a fundamental piece of any company's 'go to market' strategy. What is the other guy doing? What features does their product have? Should we build those features too? What does our solution provide that the other guy can't match? And how do we best communicate and reinforce those differences that we 'win' on in the market so that there is no confusion about why our products and services are better?
But sometimes, perhaps more often that we like to think, we focus too much on what our competitors are doing, saying, building, etc.; and not enough on what our current and potential customers are saying and doing with our products.
Last week I caught a really interesting piece on the Fast Company CoDesign site titled 'Think You're An Industry Leader? Not So Fast', that makes an interesting point - that often as product and service designers and implementers, (and that for the most part is everyone working in Human Resources, recruiting, HR Technology, and so on), that this primary focus on competitors detracts from what should really be our true goals - to understand the customers, to empathize with their problems and challenges, and to build systems and solutions to address their needs primarily.
From the CoDesign piece:
This is the first mistake organizations make when thinking about digital interactions with their customers. They measure themselves against the competition instead of really understanding what their customers actually need.
How can you improve your understanding of customer needs? By connecting with customers more deeply and in ways that move the dialog beyond simple check the box RFP exercises.
Again from CoDesign:
In short, you gain empathy for them, (customers). Great applications are created by those who fully empathize with the user’s needs. Our team must walk a day in the life of the person they are designing for and act as a proxy for the user in the design and integrations processes. I was once asked, “Is there such a thing as a stupid user?” The answer is no; there are only ignorant designers. Any good designer will tell you there’s no such thing as user error -- anything the user can’t figure out is just bad design.
It is not easy, I think, to try and lower your sights against your competition. After all, in most purchase decision processes the customers pick one 'winner', while leaving the also-rans to contemplate the reasons why they did not win the contract and secure the customer's business. Perhaps the first step into really thinking more from the customer's point of view is to frame these kinds of post-mortem discussions less in terms of 'Why Did Company 'X' beat us?' and more in terms of 'What customer problem were we unable to solve?'.
What do you think - would more time being spent on understanding and truly empathizing with your customers and less time worrying about Brand 'X' help your business?