“You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people.” Dieter Rams
Weeks ago, I set out to define the customers of my brand, Ommoso. I want to target them directly by creating products or services that solve their problems. Before getting far into the process, I realized that I never defined Ommoso. So I took a detour and ran a brand sprint to discover what Ommoso is about—self-mastery, in harmony with nature. After that revelation, I told all who would listen about Ommoso and its mission :) Now I’m back on the road to defining Ommoso’s ideal customer. In this newsletter, I’ll show you how I did it without having any customers to begin with.
If you are just joining us, welcome to the FollowTheFox skulk. At FollowTheFox I’m revealing my process for launching 4 products online over the next 12 months. With one product already released, I have three to go. These newsletters will give you my behind-the-scenes details and the steps to launch products. To start at the beginning of the journey go here or skip right to the 2020 highlights here.
Learn from the competition with a targeted analysis
Since Ommoso hasn’t launched yet, it currently has no customers. So, I looked at similar brands to get a picture of my ideal customer. Companies engage in this process of analyzing competitors (aka competitive analysis) all the time. This analysis can include anything from their founding date and revenue streams to website analytics and marketing strategy. It also can take months to complete or, like in my case, a few hours.
I did an abbreviated/targeted competitive analysis which only looks at the dimensions of companies that are important to answer a few high-priority questions. “High priority” is defined by whoever is doing the research. I’m focused on who my customers are. Therefore, when I conducted my analysis, I only considered aspects that helped answer my research questions:
What problems are my ideal customers having? What do other productivity products help these customers solve?
Steps to a targeted analysis
Now that you have the gist of what a targeted competitive analysis is, here is how to do one:
Start with a research question - Identify why you want to do a competitive analysis. What question do you need to answer that can be informed by what your competition is doing?
List dimensions to explore - Create a list of company dimensions to explore that will help you answer your question
Choose competitors - Select 5 to 7 competitors for your analysis
Capture data - For each of your competitors, capture the information that you’ve identified as pertinent to your question(s)
Analyze - Review the information you’ve captured and decide on an answer to your research question
Start with a research question
As mentioned earlier my overarching questions are
What problems are my ideal customers having? What do other productivity products help these customers solve?
This is where I focused my energy on my targeted competitive analysis. By understanding why customers bought products A, B, or C I inferred the problem they were trying to solve. The outcome of my competitive analysis, which I’ll share later, is a list of pain points experienced by my ideal customer.
List dimensions to explore
Using various competitiveanalysistemplates as fodder, I narrowed down the information that I thought would be useful to answer my research question to the following:
Company mission/tagline - to make sure the company’s aim is similar to Ommoso
Company founding date - to get a sense of how long the company has been around (Admittedly, this information doesn’t help answer my research question but it puts into perspective the amount of time it takes to be successful)
Products - to understand what products available to their customers
Price range - to get a sense of how much customers are willing to spend
Customer benefits - to understand why the user bought the product
Once I knew the dimensions I would explore, I customized this free Google Spreadsheet to fit my needs. (If you’re a paid subscriber, you can access my customized spreadsheet and a blank version that can be filled in with your competitors here or subscribe now to get access to this an other bonus material)
Choosing competitors
I started with the companies that I brainstormed during my brand workshop. (If you’re a paid subscriber you have access to my brand workshop results which can be found here (paid subscriber link). Zen Habits is a site that is similar to what I envision for Ommoso. It’s part blog and part membership community with the goal of “finding simplicity and mindfulness in the daily chaos.” It also has several products and experiences customers can buy. Zen Habits was the perfect competitor for me to explore.
To find more companies like Zen Habits I looked it up on SimilarWeb.com. There, I found a list of companies that are competitors of Zen Habits and websites Zen Habits customers also visit, like JamesClear.com and Tinybuddah.com. I searched those new websites on SimilarWeb as well to discover more companies. Once I gathered 15 or so companies I eliminated the ones that were not closely aligned to the mission of Ommoso. In all, I ended up with 7 companies in my analysis.
Capture data
Once I had my shortlist of companies to analyze I simply gathered the information for each company and inserted it into my spreadsheet (paid subscriber link). Capturing the customer benefits was a tricky bit of information to get from this exercise. I looked at product reviews, customer testimonials, and other blogs for articles describing the product. My goal was to hear, in the customers’ voice, what problems each product solved for them. For each company, I wrote a few lines that captured their sentiments. (side note: This process goes a lot quicker when you have help. My spouse helped me during this stage. Thanks, love!)
Analyze
After filling in my spreadsheet, I went back to my original research question:
What problems are my ideal customers having? What do other productivity products help these customers solve?
Then I re-read all of the customer benefits I captured from each of the products and highlighted the ones that resonate with Ommoso. I took those key benefits and reverse-engineered customer pain points. See below for customer benefits and resulting pain points.
List of customer benefits
No pressure guidance
Improve mental health
Nurturing good habits and killing bad habits
Structure
Efficient universal decision-making methods
Learn anything quickly and efficiently
Identifying your meaningful work
Tips to manage time and daily activities more efficiently
Finding greater happiness
Condensed pain points
Worried that being productive is interfering with their mental health
Strict all or nothing discipline tactics don't work for them
Doesn't have the time to create a structured but flexible productivity system
The next step in my analysis was to take those pain points and summarize them into the core problem that my ideal customer faces:
Core needs/wants: "I want productivity gains without overworking or being stressed out."
Lastly, I created a short description to simplify this customer’s core need.
Self-mastery at ease
Putting this together, I have my first persona for Ommoso:
Customer Persona 1: Self-mastery at ease
Core need: "I want productivity gains without overworking or being stressed out."
Pain points
Worried that being productive is interfering with their mental health
Strict all or nothing discipline tactics don't work for them
Doesn't have the time to create a structured but flexible productivity system
There’s a little art and science to this analysis process. I may be reading more into the benefits that are there and coming up with pain points that don’t accurately represent the products’ intentions. That’s fine. These pain points are informed by my research and can be modified as I go along.
Summary
Because my brand is new, I researched my competitors and their products to understand the problems they are solving for their customers. I used the information I captured to derive pain points and core needs for Ommoso’s ideal customer.
What do you think about this process? Have you done something like this before? Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Bonus material
If you’re a paid subscriber, you get the competitive analysis template I used, a blank version of it, and my brand workshop results.
