Drop Dead Simple Competitive Research

Last updated: 6/5/2002; 8:34:15 AM

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Drop Dead Simple Competitive Research

Tackling Competitive Research When You're New to a Domain

A company that I am working with just asked me to help out on their business plan's competitive section. Here is a great technique for tackling competitive research when you need to do it in a hurry. Problem: Your company is being compared to others and you need to figure out who else you might be compared to / find more appropriate companies to position yourself against. Solution: Follow these steps (it is this simple).

Begin with Known Competitors

Step 1: Start with a list of known competitors. Everyone knows who at least 1 of their competitors is and that's the whole key. Let's say that they are:

Step 2 : Go to Yahoo and plug each of these into the search field on the home page. For example: "Plumtree".

See Where it says: "More Sites About: …". This is the Yahoo category which groups all "vendors" together.

What this is going to return is a page like that shown below. Here's the link too.

If you look at where "Here" is pointing, this is the Yahoo category for that "type" of company. If we go to it then we'll see this: