Brand Market Research Strategy: Find Your Competitive Edge

Frankly, building a brand that will last and stand out in today’s crowded market, which is already brimming with great solutions, is a tall order as a solo creative. 

Although understanding your market levels out your playing field, it’s important to remember that the same information is available to your competitors. What you can research and learn, they can too, if not more. 

In the early stages of building your brand, there’s only so much research you can realistically conduct and even less that you can immediately apply. Established competitors often have in-house research systems and insider knowledge that give them a head start long before their insights ever reach the public for you to know.

Instead of unrealistically trying to know more than everyone else, it’s far more productive to focus on how you can apply what you already know. 

Rely on a handful of credible, high-quality sources, and adapt the proven strategies of established brands into versions that fit your current scale. This approach helps you level the playing field with other small or emerging competitors.

Younger competitors may not have much data available online for comparison, but what’s often true is that they look to the same established players as you do, benchmark themselves against the same examples, and draw from similar insights. That means they’re likely to reach many of the same conclusions you will. 

So the differentiator is: how you can creatively combine what you know about the market with your unique set of strengths, weaknesses, interests, and skills. 

If the audience research and competitive analysis in the previous phases prompted you to be aware of and understand the influence you and the overall market have on your brand, then this final phase will help you: 

1. Define the main area of focus where your competitive advantage should lie, 
2. Finalize the specifics of how to carry out your competitive advantage, and 
3. Reveal key areas of growth that maximize your brand’s “stand-out” potential with the least resistance. 

Let’s refine your brand idea further with the final round of refinement in Brand Idea Innovation & Finalization.  

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

The final round of refinement is about defining the specifics of your unique edge, turning an idea into a brand you can clearly envision it becoming, and leading your strategy efforts with a well-honed competitive advantage. 

What you’ve done until now in this series is define your brand so you can have an actionable brand strategy that you can actively reference throughout the life of your brand.

A brand strategy, at its essence, is only a plan. What matters is the actions you take. 

The anticipation and excitement of building your brand can give you a temporary burst of motivation, helping you power through deliverables and early milestones. However, when the end goal of establishing your brand still feels far away, that vulnerability can quietly convince you to give up when you should keep moving.

The key is to visualize your idea so vividly that it feels real right now. Not as something distant, but as something already taking shape. 

Let’s first organize and translate complex research insights into an easy-to-understand visual that helps you see the “gold” hidden within. 

Satisfying the first objective of this round of refinement: Define the main area of focus where your competitive advantage should lie.

See to Believe: Visualizing Your Brand on the Market Landscape  

A competitor map is a two-axis scatter plot that compares your brand against key competitors to find opportunities for improvement. In the process of condensing your research into a visual framework, you narrow down your competitive advantage’s area of focus by identifying attributes that best set your brand apart. 

Here is how you can create a competitor map. 

1. Choosing 2 Attributes: Since the goal of doing a competitor map is to better pinpoint your area of focus, where your competitive advantage should lie, it’s best to 

• Choose the first attribute that matters the most to your audience, and
• Choose the second attribute that either represents your best personal strength or a market opportunity you can comfortably act on. 

Look back at how audience research turns your passion into what your audience values, so the attribute you pick is based on real insight.

The attributes could be a SWOT factor or a collective term used to represent multiple, similar SWOT factors researched in Phase 2.

Revisit how competitive analysis and SWOT research show where your brand fits in the market, so choosing your two attributes feels grounded instead of like guesswork.

These two attributes will be the top areas of focus for your competitive advantage.

Example #1: Level of Brand Expertise in Topic (factor that matters the most to your audience) + Years of Experience in Market Niche (factor that’s relevant to your brand)

Example #2: Having a Specific Brand Voice (factor that matters the most to your audience) + Number of Accommodations/Focus on Creating a Community (factor that’s relevant to your brand) 

2. Identify 5-10 Competitors: Include primary and secondary competitors. 

• Primary competitors have similar product and service offerings that directly compete with you for the same target audience. 
• Secondary competitors have different product or service offerings than you, but may satisfy an underlying need that indirectly competes with you for the same audience.

3. Quantify Your Attributes: Rate your brand and your competitors for each of the attributes you selected in step 1 on a scale of 1-10 by using the insights gathered from your audience research and competitive analysis. 

Example: If you rate your brand a 5 in Level of Brand Expertise (Attribute 1) and a 4 in Years of Experience in Market Niche (Attribute 2). Then, your brand’s coordinates are (5, 4), positioning your brand 5 units on the x-axis and then 4 units on the y-axis. 

4. Create a 2×2 Scatter Plot: Plot your brand and each competitor as a point on the scatter plot. The x-axis is used to plot your first attribute, and the y-axis is used to plot your second attribute. 

5. Analyze Your Competitor Map: After plotting all of your competitors, you should be able to identify areas on the map. 

• Crowded areas: suggesting high competition or low barriers to entry
• Empty areas: suggesting a market gap, low competition, or high barriers to entry.

Explore the Strategy Canvas from Blue Ocean Strategy, another way to chart where you and your competitors compete and where you could stand out.

What if you don’t like where your brand is currently positioned?

You have two options:

1. Changing Your Area of Focus (also known as Strategic Repositioning): You can change your attributes if the current area is overcrowded or doesn’t fit your true strengths. 

1. Redo your competitive map until you’re happy with your market position. 
2. Then, proceed to the next section, where you can brainstorm innovative or creative hooks to defend your market position by strengthening the specifics of how you carry out your unique edge. 

2. Keeping Your Areas of Focus (also known as Defensive Differentiation): If you think the current areas of focus for your competitive advantage still feel true to your brand, you can stay in your current position. However, you will need to be creative in how you can differentiate yourself in the market and resolve anticipated obstacles in the next section.

Innovative Brainstorming: Making Your Competitive Advantage Stand Out 

Once you’ve defined your area of focus for competitive advantage, the next step is to maximize the “stand-out” potential of your competitive advantage by creatively combining your knowledge of the market with your unique set of strengths, weaknesses, interests, and skills. 

Satisfying the second objective of this round of refinement: Finalizing the specifics of how to carry out your competitive advantage.

This can be achieved through Logical Creative Thinking (LCT), a collection of brainstorming techniques that help you think of innovative solutions to resolve challenges and capitalize on opportunities within a set of constraints. Problem-solving strategies that move your brand from Point A (its current state) to Point B (a new state that will satisfy a new end goal). 

For defining how to carry out your competitive advantage in a way that maximizes your “stand-out” potential and respects your personal constraints, here is the tailored step-by-step guide for using LCTs in this use case. 

Step 1: Define the Challenge or Opportunity  

What is your Point A?: This is your brand’s current makeup, which is your brand’s current iteration plus your brand’s competitive advantage area of focus you’ve defined in the previous section. 

What is your Point B?: This is your desired outcome of how you wish to best carry out your competitive advantage.

Here’s an example entry point on how to better define your desired outcome: 

In the previous section, if you’ve repositioned your area of focus for your competitive advantage, then your desired outcome is to defend your market position and communicate the value and relevance your brand offers to an audience that may not be familiar with its importance. You will need to elaborate on what it means to defend your market position. 

On the other hand, if you choose to keep your area of focus despite an adverse market position, then your desired outcome is to endure market pressures and persuade your audience to break their existing habits in favor of your brand. You will need to identify the specific market pressures and what tools you may have to push through and survive. 

What are your Constraints?: These are your restraints based on market threats and personal weaknesses. This ensures that all the solutions you’ll be brainstorming can be realistically actualized for long-term sustainability. Learn how to use the predictability of your human tendencies to build a workflow you can actually sustain, so your constraints work with you instead of against you.

Step 2: Choose an LCT Method to Generate Ideas 

This step is about choosing the method of brainstorming. You can use one or multiple LCT methods listed below to create a list of diverse solutions through which you can carry out your competitive advantage and make your brand stand out. 

• Reuse: This method is about repurposing existing ideas, formats, or trends creatively into your competitive advantage. Inspiration could stem from previous projects, schoolwork, past viral trends, etc. 
• Augmentation: This method is about adding a feature, context, emotion, or even a surprise factor to your competitive advantage. It could involve combining your brand idea with a factor that’s totally irrelevant to increase your audience’s curiosity. 
• Contrarian: This method is about adding an unconventional element to your competitive advantage that deviates from standard expectations to provoke thought and audience interest in an already saturated topic. It could include offering shock value, but it’s all about reframing and advocating a new perspective. 
• Amplification: This method is about exaggerating or emphasizing something that’s often overlooked, which your competitive advantage brings to light. This involves a deep understanding of the underlying drivers behind your audience’s needs and the hidden influences that made your audience take action. 
• Parallelism: Draw metaphoric parallels from other industries or cultures, such as stories, business models, and ideas, to frame your competitive advantage and add multidimensionality. 
• Real-time Generation: This method is about reactivity and relevance, using real-time inputs to produce or adjust content dynamically. This requires your competitive advantage to be speedy, able to anticipate trends, and utilize the trend in alignment with your brand’s focus. 

This isn’t an extensive list of the LCT methods available. Feel free to brainstorm your solutions using an LCT that isn’t above. Try SCAMPER, a seven-prompt brainstorming method (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, and more), if you want a structured way to stretch your ideas beyond the six LCTs above.

Step 3: Evaluate & Select with a Decision Matrix 

A decision matrix is a great decision-making tool that helps you evaluate and choose the best LCT solution across a set of criteria and identify areas of growth that best maximize your brand’s “stand-out” potential. You will personally assign each criterion’s weighted importance out of 100, multiplied by how well your LCT solution meets that criterion on a scale of 1-5. The overall score of each LCT solution will help you decide the best idea on how to carry out your competitive advantage. Watch a 2-minute walkthrough of decision matrix analysis to see how weighing your criteria turns a gut-feel choice into a clear one.

Here’s a list of criteria you can include in your decision matrix: growth drivers, consumer attitudes, barriers of entry, ease of entry resolution, brand fit, and potential for better future opportunities. Feel free to add your own, personalized to your unique brand vision. 

Here are the steps on how to use the decision matrix: 

1. List your LCT solutions across the top row of your decision matrix table. 

Group similar brand ideas if they can be incorporated into one. 

2. List your criteria in the first column. 

Group similar factors together for condensed clarity. Examples: cost, feasibility, impact, time, risk.

3. Assign weights (out of 100) to each criterion based on its importance.

Example: cost 20%, feasibility 40%, impact 15%, time 15%, and risk 10% = total of 100%

To assign weights more accurately, you can use anchor points, such as 10%, 50%, and 90%, an approach where you use a proxy to compare each criterion to a familiar area of your life where it’s easier to judge importance, allowing you to frame its weight with greater clarity and context.

A 90% proxy example will be paying rent is non-negotiable with minimal flexibility. If the cost is similar to paying rent in relation to other criteria, then assign its weight to 90%; otherwise, reevaluate against other proxies to help you calibrate a more accurate weight somewhere in between.

4. Score each option for each criterion, typically on a scale of 1-5 (where 1 = bad and 5=good). 

5. Multiply the score by the weight for each cell.

6. Add up the total weighted scores for each brand idea.

7. The brand idea with the highest total score is typically the strongest LCT solution of choice, or it may highlight a need for further refinement in a specific area of concern.

Decision Matrix Example 

Step 4: Analyze Your Decision Matrix Results 

LCT Solution 1 stands out as the strongest choice, but it will require a well-crafted marketing strategy to effectively engage your target audience. 

However, the LCT solution with the highest overall score may not always be the best choice, as it could perform poorly on a specific factor that represents a weakness that might not be captured in the competitive map or that could diminish the impact of other factors where the brand idea scored highly. An LCT solution that has scores evenly across all the criteria could sometimes be better. 

LCT solution 

• with the highest score + a relatively even spread of scores across the criteria: how you can deliver your competitive advantage right now. 
• with the highest score + a substantially lower score in one area: the next top choice on how you can further enrich how you deliver your competitive advantage after improving the low-score area of concern in the future. 
• with other scores: a top priority reservoir of ideas on how you can further enrich how you deliver your competitive advantage in the future after improving on several areas of concern. 
• unmeasured in the decision matrix: a reservoir of ideas on how you can further enrich how you deliver your competitive advantage in a distant future that often requires a reevaluation. 

You not only know how you can carry out your competitive advantage, but also the key areas of improvement you need to prioritize after the launch of your brand to further enrich and support the relevancy of your competitive advantage. 

Satisfying the third objective of this round of refinement: Revealing key areas of growth that maximize your brand’s “stand-out” potential with the least resistance.

This also helps you outline your brand’s stages of growth: what you can do right now, what you could do in the near future, and what you can do in the distant future. All of which are developed ideas that are backed by research, objective self-assessment, and strategic evaluation, and can be revisited later. 

But it is important to note that the analysis we’ve done is theoretical, backed by self-assessment and external research. The results are based on the best of your logical assumptions, which could deviate from actuality. The more you take action to experiment and prove your decisions, the more accurate your assumptions for the next round of results will become. The last step is done after your brand’s launch. 

Step 5: Test the Value of Your Competitive Advantage 

The value perception of your competitive advantage could be measured by a variety of metrics, which could be tracked and monitored by tools like Google Analytics and MonsterInsights. New rounds of audience research, such as forum conversations and surveys, could be used to explain the reasoning behind the quantitative metrics. Learn how to build your analytics strategy step by step, so you know which metrics to track and how to read them after launch.

Conclusion: Lead Your Brand Strategy with Your Competitive Advantage

In this final round of refinement, you’re not only uncovering the specifics of your competitive advantage based on your market research know-how but also identifying important areas of growth to further maximize your brand’s value in the market. You’re able to put your brand idea into perspective, filling your brand idea with details and transforming it into actions. 

You are now able to build a brand strategy out of your combined efforts and knowledge accumulated from all three phases. 

The Third Iteration: Filling in the Components of Your Brand Strategy 

A brand strategy is a long-term plan that defines how your brand will build a connection with its target audience and interact with the market. It defines the specifics of your brand and contains methods and strategies that can be actualized by you, the owner behind the brand, to sustainably build and manage your brand over time. 

1. Brand Purpose & Vision: What is the reason your brand exists? What’s the future that you wish to create? What are your projected stages of growth?
2. Brand Mission: What is your brand about? Who is your target audience? 
3. Brand Voice: What is your brand’s personality? What relationship do you want to build with your audience? 
4. Brand Positioning: How does your brand satisfy a market need differently? What’s your competitive advantage? How do you want your audience to consistently perceive your brand?
5. Brand Experience: How are you able to target them? Which touchpoints does your audience typically reside in? What methods of communication best influence your audience?
6. Brand Values: What are the principles and beliefs that guide your brand’s behavior and decisions?

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.