Competitive Advantage Diagram

No one buys what you sell, they buy what is of value to them.

– Peter Drucker

What is a Competitive Advantage Diagram?

A Competitive Advantage Diagram is a Venn diagram that allows you to clarify what your competitive edge is from the perspective of specific representative consumer types. It gives guidance for your marketing strategy by persona and clarifies what marketing messages will resonate, and what factors, if effectively communicated, would improve your perceived value for that target. Aggregated and distilled factor maps, representing the most influential factors across large groups of personas, also yield guidance on acceptable multi-target messages.

The Brand Value Map is used to distill a list of “candidate personas” (types of people) with whom we will conduct interviews after the workshop. These interviews yield persona-specific information: needs, behaviors and other information that we can then use to guide the development of your marketing strategy. We plot each persona’s needs on a Competitive Advantage Diagram to see more clearly the interaction between that persona and your brand offer.

This diagram maps your brand offer as it relates to consumer needs. It also indicates the strength of your competitor’s offer. Our long-form persona interview process is designed to get past the idealized projection that colors how most people talk about their needs. It serves to unearth a set of factors or needs that are closer to true emotional drivers of behavior than is possible with most survey instruments or typically structured interviews.