Brand Positioning: Use Competitive Analysis to Find Your Fit

No matter how hardworking you are, there will always be things beyond your control. 

Change is a constant. With your audience’s attention span spread thin from the sheer amount of information from all corners of the world occupying their screens, what could be relevant and interesting now could be history years or months down the line. The effects of what happens at large trickle down faster than ever before. 

The answer isn’t to overexert yourself to match the speed as things happen. 

But to anticipate things before they happen and understand what you’re going into before committing to an idea. Although the former requires time to sharpen your senses, the latter is what will start you off. 

Doing a competitive analysis sheds light on the broader factors that will impact your brand, giving you the transparency to enter a market with enough space to grow, foresight to adjust for changes, and visionary control amidst the pressure of shifting trends.

Each round of brand idea refinement is a cycle of expanding our options based on the research we gathered and narrowing down the focus of what your brand will be about with more detail. 

If the audience research in the previous phase was meant to expand the bandwidth of your brand to include the values and needs of your audience, narrow down your raw, free-flow brand vision into a structured brand idea that protects your original curiosity and speaks from your genuine compassion to help others. 

Revisit how audience research shapes the first iteration of your brand idea before you build on it here.

Then, the competitive analysis you will be doing in this phase is to expand your brand’s viability by assessing your current capabilities against the larger market landscape to narrow down where you fit in the market. A position that not only takes into account your brand’s approach for long-term growth but also your personal well-being. 

Let’s refine your brand idea further with the second round of refinement in Competitive Analysis & Self-Evaluation.

• Phase 1: Audience Research 
• [This post] Phase 2: Competitive Analysis & Self-Evaluation
• Phase 3: Competitive Advantage Brainstorming & Brand Idea Finalization

The second round of refinement is about discovering where you fit in the market, leveling the playing field with open-source industry knowledge, and setting aside your ego to assume the role of the strategic creative and visionary owner that’s indicative of your brand’s progress.

When you’re building a brand out of your passion, it might feel more like a necessity for survival rather than what you really want to do. You want to proudly showcase your work and turn what’s meaningful to you into something that helps others. But this doesn’t exempt you from doing the business groundwork, nor is the economy any less forgiving on your next project’s funding. 

It’s as if competing with others for attention and money is all there is, like you’re betraying your good faith and passion altogether, but can’t back out of it. And so, your ego can easily take the reins, gradually closing you off from outside feedback as you retreat inward to avoid the discomfort of this contradiction that feels impossible to resolve. 

That’s why competitive analysis is the second round of brand idea refinement. Because a brand you hold in high regard deserves to participate on the grand stage with others. 

The more you study how others operate, their strengths, their struggles, and their motives, the more you begin to see that everyone, at every level, is simply trying to offer something valuable.

Some begin with the same genuine compassion you lead with, while others adopt a values-driven model as a strategy to stay relevant with their audience. Either way, it’s a liberating affirmation that your compassion isn’t just appreciated and respected but expected in a hyperconnected, value-conscious world overflowing with choices. 

You will want to earn this worth that aligns with your inner compass. It becomes all the more empowering when you use not just your strengths, but even your weaknesses, turning personal accountability into a tool for meeting a real market need in your own way. In doing so, you live up to the title of the strategic creative and visionary owner behind the brand you hold dear. 

Just as you complete an audience persona to focus your research direction and organize your insights, you will be doing a SWOT analysis to guide yourself through this round of market research with the same strategic intent. 

SWOT Analysis: SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It’s a strategic planning framework used to evaluate both internal capabilities (strengths and weaknesses) and external factors (opportunities and threats) that may impact the success of an initiative, project, business, or individual. This analysis helps identify areas of advantage and potential obstacles to help you make more informed, balanced decisions before taking action. 

See Investopedia’s breakdown of the SWOT framework for additional structure and examples.

In the context of defining your brand as a solopreneur, you’re defining your personal strengths and weaknesses across multiple factors and researching external opportunities and threats at varying levels of scope. 

Identifying external opportunities (O) and threats (T) first can make it easier to reflect on your personal strengths and weaknesses with better context, revealing how well you’re positioned in response to what’s happening at large. 

Opportunities and Threats: Familiarizing with the External Levels of Scope

Understanding the underlying drivers behind external factors allows you to evaluate the potential of each brand idea. This will help you narrow, expand, or refine your brand’s initiatives based on factors like ease of entry, market volatility, and projected growth.

National-level: These external factors include government stability, changes in laws and policies, cultural trends, technological innovations, lifestyle changes, interest rates, etc. Explore the PESTLE framework to map national-level factors like policy and tech shifts more systematically.

These changes tend to have a broad and lasting impact on your industry and audience, often marking a drastic systemic shift in societal expectations and market trends. Although some unfold more gradually or even require immediate action, most show anticipatory signs that are typically well-documented and widely publicized, making them easier to monitor and plan for in advance. 

Industry-level: Those external factors include industry leaders, primary/secondary competitors, industry trends/drivers, barriers of entry, industry standards, etc.

These changes help you understand the current standards within your industry, standards that often shape what your audience comes to expect. These expectations signal quality and build trust when you include them in your brand consistently. 

This influence often stems from industry leaders who have spent years refining their understanding of their audience and responding strategically to national-level trends, effectively setting the tone for the rest of the market.

However, it’s also important to recognize that highly visible competitors are often well-established and operating with far more resources than you may have at the start. Instead of replicating their scale, observe their best practices to understand what’s possible, then strategically scale those ideas down to match your current capabilities while keeping the long-term vision in sight.

Audience-level: Those external factors include size/demand (growth potential), risk/reward, pain points, ease of monetization, engagement level, trends/interests, etc.

National and industry-level trends will cascade down to the audience level. This is where change becomes more personal and emotionally resonant, helping you form a closer connection with your audience through mindful and up-to-date messaging. 

Because the audience is the group you engage with most consistently and is tied to your brand’s core purpose, audience-level factors will help you build a community with high growth potential by uncovering needs that your brand can fulfill long-term.

The degree of impact, the speed at which changes ripple through to your brand (anticipatory change), and the potential for secondary effects, even if your brand isn’t directly affected, will progressively sharpen your ability to recognize opportunities and threats and gauge the optimal time to act. 

This enables you to realistically align with your current capabilities while planning your next growth initiative with greater precision over time. 

Knowing Where to Begin: Lead with The First Iteration of Your Brand Focus 

A SWOT analysis is a summary of the internal and external factors that could influence the success of your initiative, helping you assess the market landscape before taking action. This initiative is the first iteration of your brand focus defined in the Audience Research section. 

See the audience persona and research process behind your first iteration in detail.

Combined with the previously mentioned external factors, the first iteration of your brand focus can help guide your SWOT analysis. Here are some research questions on how to apply them in research: 

First Iteration Components	Questions to Explore in a SWOT Analysis
What will your brand be about? = topic category	What are the barriers to entering this industry? If all factors are neutral, a low barrier to entry signals a saturated market where you have to compete with more brands. A threat (T).  However, with a high barrier to entry, assuming you can get in, it’s easier to become one of the main players in the field. A strength (S).
Who is it made for? = target audience	What is the projected growth of your target audience?  Some members of your audience may drift away due to shifting trends or temporary changes influenced by national or global events. Others will stay because they have a genuine, lasting interest in the topic.  The growth of your target audience could either be a threat (T) that is vulnerable to external factors or an opportunity (O) to establish a long-term connection.
What does your audience sound like? = brand voice	What roles do your competitors play in your audience’s lives (a friend or an expert)?  The type of voice brands use to communicate with their audience reveals the role they want to play in their audience’s lives. The nature of the topics themselves may dictate each of your competitors’ market position, great for detecting opportunities (O) to fill a market void or enter a sub-market with fewer competitors.
What does your audience want, and where does this “want” come from? = brand messaging	What is your audience’s expectation in _____?  Depending on your target audience, their expectations have a trickle-down effect on your competitors and vice versa: an unspoken set of standards and deliverables that may signal quality and trust instinctively.  This could represent an opportunity (O) if you have the resources to capitalize on it, a strength (S) if you’re already equipped to meet the expectations, or a weakness (W) if you fall short, one that may require finding alternative ways to adapt or overcome.
How will you meet your audience’s needs?= brand offerings	How does your competitor currently satisfy this “want?”  Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors helps you build unique solutions that utilize the success of your predecessors, draw inspiration, and identify your competitive advantage within their weaknesses.  This is a strength (S) and an opportunity (O).

Strengths and Weaknesses: Personal Assessment Factors  

With a clearer understanding of the external landscape, you can now identify your personal strengths and weaknesses in relation to the key opportunities and threats already identified. 

This will help you achieve a clear, objective level of self-awareness and create a plan that is both sustainable and truly fulfilling to maintain over the long term. 

Here are some assessment factors to help jumpstart your personal evaluation: 

• Your Skills/Expertise: Are you especially good at what you plan on doing? What do other people compliment or rely on you for? What are your skill gaps?

A strong professional background establishes credibility and trust upfront. The breadth and depth of your expertise, especially combined with your hobbies and interests, add a multi-dimensional layer that helps you stand out in a crowded space. You’re not just a walking textbook, but a person who’s down to earth, breathes life into your work, and sparks a conversation with your audience.

Examples of Strengths: 

Higher Potential to Become a Thought Leader: Easier to get backlinks from authoritative sites to increase your Google online rankings. 

Be Your Own Critic: Already know industry standards and hidden rules that your audience is used to seeing with more established brands. 

Speed of Adaptability and Innovation: Using the entirety of your skillset from both your personal passions and professional background results in creative perspectives that your audience hasn’t heard yet, and gives you more options on how to adjust your approach. 

However, not having a strong formal professional background shouldn’t stop you. 

It’s important to evaluate your weaknesses, not to shut yourself down, but to identify solutions to navigate around those obstacles. 

In this case, it’s about framing your position honestly and effectively, while recognizing that weaknesses are still weaknesses for the very reason that they require upfront explanation, preparation, and time, along with other factors that may take longer to implement or adapt to.

Examples of Turning This Weakness into Solutions: 

Gain Trust From Your Honesty: Be upfront about your background, not to undermine, but to create an honest expectation that you can comfortably uphold. Originality, reinvention, and fresh perspectives often emerge from a blank slate because preconceived limits are loose. 

Build a Bond Through Closeness in Skill: You can share your learning journey and experiments to foster an authentic connection with beginners. The experts could show your audience how high they can climb, but their peers can show them exactly how they can grow from where they are currently. Learn how to reframe informal experience into credible, professional value.

• Your Workflow/Systems: Do you have a repeatable system to help you organize, manage, scale, and set a balance between your professional and your personal life? What are your anticipated bottlenecks? 

The better you build systems to manage and run repetitive tasks, the more mindspace you have to see the bigger picture and make better decisions. Get a practical system for planning and writing without stalling out mid-project.

Examples of Strengths:

Faster at Learning & Adapting: The more familiar you are with the tools and workflows, the less time you’ll need to spend getting up to speed, allowing you to focus more on growing your brand strategically. It shows that you can adapt quickly, process trends in real time, and take purposeful action without unnecessary delays, wasted effort, or overcomplication. 

Reliable in Detecting Patterns and Identifying False Positives: The beginning stages of building anything new are a set of trial-and-error experiments that’s meant to help you collect first-hand data, validate your strengths/weaknesses, and back your decisions with evidence. Having a consistent system and workflow nurtures this failure-growth environment with fewer distracting data disruptors. 

Knowing Your Energy Bandwidth: Understanding your highest threshold can’t be replicated every day, and instead operating at your average threshold ensures that you’re working consistently without falling into cognitive overload and burnout. Treat your brand as a daily habit that will last, not a one-time sprint. Read how rebuilding after burnout reshaped a sustainable, energy-aware workflow.

Starting a personal brand is a new responsibility that you need to actively make space for in an already busy life. Without a system to churn the backend gears and the discipline to press your own start button daily, this new initiative will be pushed behind priorities with more immediate rewards or burn out with an unmanaged workload and subpar quality. 

Examples of Turning This Weakness into Solutions: 

Build Tailored Systems: Create a set of routines that safeguard yourself from your own human fragilities to remove personal bottlenecks and design your brand strategy that is both mentally and physically comfortable while adding the appropriate amount of purposeful challenge to increase your threshold over time. 

Design a Productive Working Space: Organize your workspace in alignment with your workflow, position objects that encourage the development of good habits, and declutter your space to minimize distractions and cognitive overload. 

• Financial Assets & Social Network: The amount of assets and the people you currently know are major factors in how much you can do for the initial stage of your brand strategy. The more financial stability you have, the more leverage you have in devoting your time and effort to this project. The more people you know and can help, the more outside feedback and manpower you have, so you don’t have to exhaust yourself with everything. 

Examples of Strengths: 

Outsourcing Work to Others: Reducing your workload on non-control-sensitive work or repetitive tasks to focus your energy on higher-level decisions by employing workers. 

Ability to Experiment More and Boldly: The more financially stable you are, the more you’re able to conduct experiments, be able to recover, and continue after failing. 

Outside Feedback: Able to get unbiased feedback, opinions, and connections that will help you expand your audience research, be more sensitive to news/reactions of external factors directly, and get more opportunities to learn, collaborate, or partner. 

However, having fewer resources to start could also be a good thing. 

Examples of Turning This Weakness into Solutions: 

Defined Rules for Resource Allocation: When working with a limited budget, you’re naturally pushed to spend more strategically. This constraint forces you to prioritize based on a clear hierarchy of needs. 

Creative Solutions: Budget constraints often spark the most innovative ideas. Sometimes the best money-saving strategies come from repurposing what you already have and approaching problems from unexpected angles. Sometimes, constraints reveal opportunities we’d never see with an open wallet.

Leadership Control: When leading a team or managing outsourced work, you still need a foundational understanding of each area to effectively guide and evaluate the work. Relying too heavily on others without that insight can lead to blind spots and overdependence.

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Conclusion: Visualizing Where Your Brand Idea Stands in the Market 

In this second round of refinement, you’re not just adding more context to answer the “whys” behind your brand idea, but also connecting the dots between internal direction and external forces to build a system that will enable you to act swiftly and objectively in a competitive market. 

This process of opening your brand up to a larger playing field beyond your own and then refocusing only on the factors that matter most is a critical step in gauging your brand’s real value, realizing a substantial share of its potential worth, and creating an effective brand strategy that matches this reality. 

It’s an empowering exercise designed to help you transition from a creative hobbyist into a strategic creative, protecting your passion by being in the know while easing into the responsibility of what it means to be a business founder firsthand. 

With the insights gained from your SWOT analysis, you’re now equipped to refine and expand your brand idea into its second iteration. 

The Second Iteration: Adding the Pretext Before Defining Your Competitive Advantage 

• What will your brand be about?: This is the topic direction you’ve chosen, determined based on the best overall factors like industry growth, barriers to entry, your level of expertise, available resources, and market opportunity. It also represents your market position, where your brand can gain the most traction.
• Who is it made for?: This refers to the specific audience segment(s) you’ve chosen to form a long-term relationship with. These are the people you’re genuinely interested in knowing because you share common interests, values, and motivations that build a meaningful connection that feels intuitive and natural. 
• What does your audience sound like?: People connect more easily with brands that reflect how they speak, think, and feel.
  • Method #1 for Finding Your Brand Voice: Your brand voice should align with your audience’s tone and energy, whether that’s casual, professional, bold, or thoughtful. 
  • Method #2 for Finding Your Brand Voice: Your brand voice comes from the overlap between the type of relationship you want to build with your audience and the kind of guidance, connection, or authority they’re most receptive to. 
• What does your audience want, and where does this “want” come from?: This is the core value behind every message and what your brand must meet. It also reveals the underlying drivers you must be mindful of or keep track of to update your messaging on values, motivations, and behaviors that will shift over time. This keeps you in control rather than following others, giving you a larger window of time to update how you communicate and take action. This is also part of your brand management system.
• How will you meet your audience’s needs?: This determines what products or services you can offer to your audience that best satisfy a current market gap in a way that fits your schedule, personal well-being, and long-term fulfillment as the driving force behind your brand’s longevity. 

With all the pretexts in place, you will have enough knowledge to uncover your competitive advantage. 

Taking you to the next phase of this market research series, Phase 3: Visualize Your Brand Idea into the Present – Maximize Your Brand’s Competitive Advantage and Identify Key Areas of Growth.

Here, you will use all of your research insights to narrow down areas of focus for your competitive advantage, visualize your market position against your competitors, and brainstorm and finalize the specifics of how you should carry out your competitive advantage. 

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Kind Note: This series contains creative use cases of research frameworks and decision-making tools that stem from my own marketing expertise and personal branding experience. It offers plenty of strategies to give you the room to use this series as part of your solution, all of it, or none at all. Feel free to go off script to follow your heart, which aligns with the visionary ownership nature of defining a brand you want to devote significant time to building. 

You can take control of your own pace while navigating through this blog series and fast-forward to get a preview of the other blogs in this series to judge if this series truly works for you. 

Expand the links below to see where this journey leads next. 

🔗 Explore the full series roadmap here