AMA: Amazon Product Marketing at Fire TV Edition Smart TVs, Amey Kanade on Competitive Positioning

Early on in my career I use to spend a lot of time analyzing my competitors. I closely followed everything on their website, product pages, old blog posts, social media handles etc. Youcan almost make a mental model of how the company, product and their marketing strategy has evolved over the years. It is good learning but it is very easy to fall into a rabbit hole and spend hours reading. Nowadays I have a google alert set on a bunch of keywords. I get a daily email report with information just enough to keep me aware of the important movements in my space. I think if you spend too much time on your competitors, your prodcut is only going to be marginally better than your competitors. This may sound cliched - but start with your customers, spend a lot of time analyzing your customers and then work backward to improve your product/strategy.

Another great question, thanks! I have been in a few roles where my job was to provide market data, competitive intelligence etc to other teams (CEO, Product, Sales etc) within the org. These teams would use this information to make strategic decisions, use them in sales presentations, etc but to put a common metric on providing competitive intelligence was hard. So we would send a quarterly survey to other teams within the org to participate in an anoynmous survey asking them about the usefulness of the competitive intelligence my team was providing. Think of it as a CSAT or a NPS survey to measure if they found your services helpful, will they come back to you etc.

I always start with defining the customer and then working backwards. 1. Define the customer: Based on the market data, I come up with a few personnas. Personnas makes is easier to tell a story and it's easier for your audience (in your case your - CMO) to visualize the customer. Use all the data you have to build a semi-fictional charater and the world around her/him. Use images, videos. 2. Define the probelm this charater faces and the current solutions (or lack thereof). Talk about her frustrations, likes, dislikes, usage behavior etc. 3. How does your product fullfill this customers needs -Your products USPs/KSPs and in order of importance. For e.g. If you are selling a sports camera - A surfer would find the waterproof feature of highest importance whereas a skateboarder would rate it's scratchproof lens as #1 feature. 4. Repeat steps 1-3 for personna #2, 3 ....and so on. I try to define at least 5.

Here are some tips based on my eperience: 1. Keeping up with competitive product research, especially in tech, is hard: The tech space evolves at a rapid pace and your research can become absolute/stale within few weeks. Provide competitive intelligence back to your CEO/Product teams at an agreed upon cadence. 2. Try to templatize your findings. You will likely find your data on various product pages, press announcements and internet in general. Following a common template where it's easier for your audience to see this data consolidate at once place is very valuable. 3. Include your PoV/Inference. #1 and #2 above are relative easy but involves lot of work, but what is most important is what you infer from this information. Think - where the trends are leading, potential risk, benefits for your product. 4. Be the Voice of customer: In many tech orgs, especially orgs where the technology is very sophisticasted e.g. hardware, AI etc it is more likely that the product/engineering team will have a deeper understanding of competitive products. As a PMM bring in the voice of customer into your research.