You're doing competitive analysis wrong
Why Milky Way and Snickers don't compete against each other
👋 Welcome to all the new subscribers who joined in the last couple of months! I’ll be writing at least 15 articles this year that will help you avoid the voodoo that’s in design and instead equip you with a better perspective on solving problems. Ok here’s this month’s article…
Milky Way and Snickers are two chocolate bars that look very similar and are found on the same shelf right next to each other, but they don't compete against each other (I'll come back to this).
Competitive analysis is supposed to help a designer see how well a product competes in its respective market. But designers compare products that don't actually compete against each other on attributes that are irrelevant to customers’ actual needs.
How designers do competitive analysis today
Step 1: Choose a product that you want to compare against others. Competition typically means other products in the same product category and same price point.
Step 2: Create a chart and compare the performance of each product. Performance often means how intuitive the UI is, the number of features offered, or comparisons about the service itself. It might look a little like the chart above from a popular article about how a designer should do competitive analysis.
Step 3: Identify gaps in performance compared to the competition you've defined then improve on those attributes to be more competitive. Your competition added new filters or has a new search UI, then you should do the same. At least that's the conventional wisdom.
This all sounds reasonable, but that doesn't work.
Milky Way "vs" Snickers
Milky Way and Snickers are chocolate bars that can be found on the same shelf, at the same grocery store, and both in the same product category, but they don't compete against each other. Understanding what causes a customer to buy either chocolate bar helps understand why they don't compete.
Snickers: When I'm going to be on the go, I'm running out of time, there's a meeting or an event that's coming up, and I'm low on energy. I need a quick boost of energy to get me out of this slump so I can take on what's about to come. That's where a Snickers bar is fitting. Snickers are more like food. It has peanuts, it's crunchy, it has caffeine, and you can chew it down pretty fast. Snickers marketing leveraged this demand by using their popular "you're not you when you're hungry" slogan. When you find yourself in this situation other products you'd consider to the get job done are Coca-Cola, a power bar, or an apple.
Milky Way: When you've had a long day, you're exhausted and stressed. You've had a bad day at work, and you want to take a moment to yourself. Then Milky Way is a great product for that. Its creamy with dense chocolate and caramel will take you forever to finish. You don't want to finish a Milky Way as fast as a Snickers, you want to take that time to yourself. Milky Way used the slogan "get lost in a Milky Way." Because Milky Ways are more about a self-indulgent experience that gives you that "ahhh" feeling after a bad day. When you're in this situation other products that compete are a bottle of wine or chocolate ice cream.
Both these products compete in totally different situations, but they're still chocolate candy bars.
A better perspective
It's not intuitive to figure out what your product competes against. It's also not intuitive to figure out what attributes your customer's value.
Your product's competition and value are relevant to the context of the struggle that customers want you to solve for them.
Once you understand the full context of why customers want your product, it's much easier to see what other products are also part of their consideration set. Starting from the perspective of what causes demand uncovers much more meaning than looking at surface-level features.
Conventual wisdom would have deemed Milky Way and Snicker as competitors and then judged them based on taste, branding, and price. There isn't one yardstick of performance for a given product category. The line that groups competitors and defines what attributes they compete on aren't drawn by product categories. Instead, it's drawn relative to the struggles and context people want to overcome.
I’m new on Twitter but I’m sharing tidbits that will help you design more effectively. How to build a better design process? Thoughts on disruptive innovation or jobs-to-be-done and other mostly design-related tangents.
Resources
The Milky Way story is originally a project by Bob Moesta and re-told by Ryan Singer in this lecture.
https://uxplanet.org/top-things-to-know-about-ux-competitive-analysis-d91689fd8b36
The Bob Moesta lecture is not linked.
How would this translate to other industries? Booking flights for instance? Or McDonald's vs Burger King?