Mapping Competitive Advantages: Positioning Your Business as a Market Leader (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Once you've identified your top few advantages, there are a few frameworks you can use to outline them. We're going to use a grid to map all your competitors on one slide and position you as the leader. You're going to create something like this for your final project. Let's start with focusing on two things that you really excel at. These are your competitive advantages. We'll use these to label the two axes of the grid. And we want you to place your main competitors here. But again, you'll be positioned as the leader right in this area. These competitive advantages can be price versus value, or you can write a specific value to your customer. Maybe think of something that your potential users or investors would be really, really interested in or excited about. So we'll have to name our two axes accordingly. So if it's price, it'll be low price and high price. Now let's say our value is innovation. We can have high innovation and low innovation. Or you can choose something else. So for specific and generic, let's talk about this. For Embarkment, we started to realize that the general market was a bit crowded. So we needed to find a unique value to differentiate our app from, let's say, a dog kennel. So we decided to focus on a niche market and go with the same idea, but only for fancy dogs with the most refined taste. We're going to offer high-end services. We'll only accept sitters who have nice homes and nice backyards. Those sitters must take the dogs on multiple walks a day. And the sitters must only offer the highest quality food and care for the dogs. For the more refined Embarkment, we chose a grid that includes one axis for quality. Let's change that now. One axis for quality, so we have high quality and low quality. And we're going to keep the specific and generic axis. So now that we have our grid, we're going to choose competitors from the product form category. So these are our direct competitors. And we might also find a few other relevant competitors. So we have the local kennel, which is pretty generic. And the quality's not great, but sometimes they're associated with vets, so that's good. Then we have the dog house, which is more specific, because they only take dogs, but they're not as specific as we are. And the quality's not super great. They don't really vet their sitters. Then we have Doggy Vacay, which they have pretty good quality, but they're not as specific as we are. And finally, we have Rover, who also has great quality, but they're more generic than we are. So notice that we're here, in the top right-hand quadrant. This is the best place to be, and it really sets us apart from all of our other competitors.