Competitive analysis plays a key role in understanding your market’s landscape, but it's not always easy to know what to do with the information you gather from those competitor reviews.

Often, these insights end up collecting dust, kept under lock for fear that sharing them with investors or customers might backfire.

Today, we’re diving into how you can use the value curve framework to turn those competitor reviews into actionable insights and strategies.

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Here’s the thing, a good product pitch should never ignore the competition.

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In fact, it should do 3 important things:

1. Name the old way
2. Break the old way
3. Cause a switch to the new way

By anchoring your value proposition against the competition, you create an irresistible offer that stakeholders can’t resist.

This concept is known as value innovation and involves leveraging the power of the value curve framework to position against existing alternatives, differentiate and render the competition irrelevant.

The value curve framework allows you to plot the available products in your marketplace (the alternatives your customers consider to solve their problems) based on their ability to provide value to customers.

This visual representation helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses of each alternative. This way, you can define which competitive characteristics you must maintain in your offering and where you can differentiate.

This empowers you to develop a unique and irresistible value proposition.

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Ask yourself questions like:

• What is truly important to the customer?
• How can we manipulate those factors to create a unique value proposition?
• What do we need to maintain and where can we stand out & differentiate?

Value curves enable you to pinpoint your unique selling points against each alternative the audience considers. You’ll discover which characteristics make you stronger than your competitors, or even better, the ones only you can offer.

If you’re new to value curves or need a refresher, check out our handy how-to guide that’ll help get you started on leveraging this robust framework.

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💡 Conclusion

Understanding your competitor's strengths and weaknesses is just the beginning. The real magic happens when you transform that knowledge into actionable strategies.

Our key takeaways:

👉 Embrace the competition - ignoring them is not a sound strategy for success. Instead, focus on using competitor intelligence and a value curve to position your product or service in the market uniquely.

👉 Look at the market through your customer’s eyes and determine what competitive factors need to be maintained and where you can differentiate.

👉 By plotting the competitive landscape and understanding customer priorities, you can break away from your competitors to create a unique value proposition to use as the basis of your growth strategy.

What’s next?

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📝 Conduct your own value curve with our free how-to guide.

🖥️ Dive deeper into audience research for your start-up.