Figuring out your competitors’ strategies can be tough.

So let’s make it easy.

Here’s a framework I put together to help you bundle your competitors by strategy. I call it the 3C Framework.

“3C” refer to three common company strategies:

• Competing for marketshare

• Carving a niche

• Creating a category

As I describe these strategies, think about your company’s category. I’ll bet specific vendors will start coming to mind.

Competing for market share 🥊

What to look for:

• very flexible pricing

• double down on being easy to use

• are great at just a few important things

• have solid SEO / are easily discoverable

Carving a niche 🔪

These companies target a specific persona, industry, or segment WITHIN an existing category. e.g.:

• CRM for small businesses 

• Video conferencing for educators 

• Project management for creative agencies

Creating a category ✨

What to look for:

• company is creating a unique narrative and positioning

• company is investing heavily in educating the market on why the category is important

• company acts as a consolidator of different use cases and workflows

  • e.g. Gong with Revenue Intelligence, HubSpot with Inbound Marketing, or Qualtrics with Experience Management.

The most important thing about going through this exercise isn’t to determine what strategy is “good” or “bad” for your competitors—it’s to determine what gaps in your landscape exist that you can fill.

You might find that your top competitors are all niching down on different personas or industries, but nobody is offering a simple, affordable solution that anybody can use.

Or maybe you’re seeing a larger market trend that nobody else is pursuing—this might be an opening to create a new category and claim that market trend for yourself.

Hope this helps 🫡

PS: this lesson was borrowed from my course, The Competitive Playbook. 150+ students have used it to help them build their company’s competitive strategy. If you’re interested, check it out here.

PPS: if you want to save $50, you can buy an annual subscription to the Healthy Competition community and I’ll throw the playbook in for free 💚 

From the Podcast Archives

Emma Stratton is the founder of Punchy, a consulting and training firm that helps B2B tech companies tell stories that stick, stand out in the crowd, and sell more.

In our conversation, we talked about:

• her favorite messaging frameworks

• how she got her consulting business started

• how she evaluates competitive landscapes to help her clients differentiate.

Advice from the Community

1,000+ messages are exchanged every month by your favorite Product Marketers in the Healthy Competition community. Here are some recent threads that got the community talking.

Not a member? Easy peasy. Just join here.

In the News

Streaming platforms have been going crazy on each other lately 😅

🥥🍍🥑 Fruity Memes 🍎🍉🫐

@healthycompetition

Yeah I'm gonna pass #competitiveintelligence #businesstok #techtok #saas #techfounder

One last thing: a couple months ago, we rolled out a salary survey for folks in Competitive Intel & Product Marketing. We initially had ~50 responses, but after partnering with The Compete Network, I’m stoked to say that we nearly doubled our original number of responses.

So it’s safe to say that the data should be more robust now. Feel free to make your own copy of the updated survey responses here and slice the data anyway you please. Hope it helps in your next salary conversation 🤑

Stay Healthy, my friends.

💚Andy