• Identifying and learning from competitors can be a great marketing strategy to stay ahead of the curve. 
  • Implementation of this strategy provides multiple benefits for the brand. 

The core of the “Identify & Learn from Competitors” marketing strategy is to gain a competitive edge by understanding the landscape in which you operate. It starts with identifying your competitors and pinpointing the businesses that directly or indirectly compete for the attention of your target market.

Direct competitors offer similar products or services to the same target audience, while indirect competitors fulfill similar needs with a different approach. Once a brand understands the competition, it dives deep into its strategies to gain valuable insights. Marketers analyze its products, marketing tactics, customer service approach, online presence, etc. 

Understanding what your competitors are doing well and what could be better can help you make informed marketing decisions. Identify areas for improvement in offerings, messaging, and outreach strategies. Learning from successful competitors’ tactics improves your marketing, significantly reduces the risk of replicating their mistakes, and boosts innovation. 

How GoPro Successfully Incorporated “Identify & Learn from Competitors” Marketing Strategy? 

GoPro’s success story is a textbook example of capitalizing on the “Identify & Learn from Competitors” marketing strategy & skillfully using competitor analysis to build a winning marketing strategy. They used the following aspects to implement this strategy successfully.

Identifying the Gap and Learning from the Competitors

They found a gap in the camera industry. Traditional cameras were bulky, expensive, and not strategically designed to capture action and adventure. Plus, at the time, existing sports cameras were niche products that catered to professionals and offered a limited range of activities. 

However, GoPro never really competed with established camera brands like Nikon or Cannon. Instead, they channeled their resources and focused on providing niche sports camera makers, skillfully analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. Eventually, they stumbled upon the flaw of limited distribution and focus on professional use. GoPro, with its product offerings, addressed this major concern. 

Developing a Differentiated Approach & Experiential Marketing

Properly researching and developing, GoPro created small, durable, waterproof cameras designed to capture action sports in an immersive environment. Furthermore, they provided various mounting options, allowing users to attach the camera to helmets, bikes, and other gear, providing unique filming capabilities. This way, they focused on ease of use, with straightforward controls and intuitive features that contributed to the sales of cameras. 

Remember, GoPro doesn’t just sell cameras; they sell experience. They heavily leverage User-Generated-Content (UGC) in their marketing campaign, featuring breathtaking videos captured by enthusiastic customers. This helps showcase camera capabilities and the thrill of adventure while providing authenticity and credibility for the brand. 

Furthermore, they built a solid online community around GoPro, encouraging users to share their experiences and participate in ongoing challenges. Users also use popular hashtags like #GoPro, #GoProLife, #GoProFamily, etc, to help fuel organic reach. 

They also partner with extreme athletes and influencers, further amplifying the brand message and demonstrating the camera’s durability and versatility in capturing adrenaline-pumping moments. For example, both partners benefitted from GoPro’s partnership with RedBull in capturing their extreme sports. 

Key Learnings from GoPro’s Strategy

Understanding GoPro’s marketing strategy provides critical learnings for other brands. It starts with identifying the niche market, avoiding trying to compete head-on with established giants, finding a gap in the market, and catering to a specific audience. 

GoPro went beyond just selling the products; they sold the experience of capturing life’s most thrilling and exciting moments. Leveraging the User-Generated-Content (UGC) became a powerful marketing tool for the brand in building trust and authenticity while showcasing the product’s real-world capabilities. 

Incorporating this strategy helped GoPro build a robust online community, fostering a sense of belonging and encouraging user interaction, making them brand advocates. Analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of competitors allowed them to develop unique and differentiated offerings. 

In conclusion, GoPro’s implementation of the “Identify & Learn from Competitors” marketing strategy allowed it to carve out a new market segment in the action camera niche. Eventually, the brand became synonymous with capturing life’s adventures and extreme sports. 

What is the “Identify & Learn from Competitors” Marketing Strategy? 

This marketing strategy hinges on understanding that knowledge is power, especially when it comes to the competitive landscape. When a brand thoroughly identifies its competition and discusses its strengths and weaknesses, it crafts a winning strategy for its business.

The First Step: Identifying Your Competition

Before identifying the competition, brands must first understand the type of competition. Direct competition offers products or services nearly identical to yours and specifically targets the same customer base. For example, Coca-Cola and Pepsi provide similar products and cater to similar audiences, making them competitors. 

In comparison, indirect competitors are companies that fulfill similar needs of the target audience but with a differentiated product or service. For example, in the fitness market, gym memberships and fitness applications cater to people’s desires to get fit, but they are indirect competitors because they take different approaches. 

Different Techniques for Identifying Competitors

Aspects like market research are used to analyze your industry and understand the market. Customer feedback is like asking existing and potential customers what brands are alternatives for the target audience. Multiple industry resources like trade publications, directories, online communities, and relevant hashtags can be used to identify competitors. 

The Second Step: Learning From Your Competitors

After identifying the key competitors, brands must focus on learning from their strategies. Marketers must also carefully analyze their offerings, pricing, features, and Unique Selling Propositions (USPs), as this can be a great source of relevant information. 

They should carefully analyze how the competition reaches their target audience and dissect their brand messages and distribution channels; it helps them gain valuable insights into their marketing and sales strategies. Furthermore, they should evaluate how they interact with customers, address grievances and build loyalty. Marketers must also scrutinize their competitor’s websites, social media engagements and online reviews as they can provide valuable insights. 

Competitor websites provide a wealth of information about their products, services, and messaging. Tracking social media activity, audience demographics, brand sentiments, and what customers are saying about competitors, as well as gaining insights on market trends and competitors’ performance, helps marketers skillfully implement this marketing strategy. 

The Third Step: Putting Learning into Actions

After identifying competitors and learning from them, it’s time to implement this learning. It’s time to identify your strengths and weaknesses through SWOT analysis—strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats concerning the competitive landscape. 

Learning from their offerings, brands can focus on finding their unique value proposition, which makes them stand out. Later, the focus shifts to addressing the areas where the competitor outperforms you, like customer service or product offering, and adapting accordingly. 

Marketers must remember that they must not blindly copy the competition but adapt their strategies to their target market. They can also focus on innovation by using competitors’ insights to be proactive in developing groundbreaking improvements. 

Pros and Cons of “Identify & Learn from Competitors” Marketing Strategy

Like any other marketing strategy, this “Identify & Learn from Competitors” strategy has pros and cons, as discussed below. 

Pros

Understanding the industry landscape and competition scenario allows brands to focus more on customers’ needs and competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, gaining in-depth market intelligence. Learning from successful competitor tactics is like learning from the experts in the field, and it can help identify areas for improvement in your own messaging, branding, and outreach.

It is said that life is too short to learn from your mistakes, so one should focus on learning from others’ mistakes. This strategy revolves around this principle. When a brand learns from its unsuccessful strategies and identifies underlying weaknesses, it significantly reduces risk in future campaigns. 

Skillfully using competitor insights, brands can use this data as a springboard to develop a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that differentiates the brand from competitors. Monitoring the competition helps brands adapt to industry shifts and anticipate their next moves, helping them stay ahead of the curve. 

Cons

Focusing too heavily on competition might hinder the development of your brand’s unique voice and strategy. Copying the competitor’s tactics could also make the brand seem unoriginal, which fails to resonate with the target audience and falls into the copycat trap.

Competitor analysis might cause brands to miss broader market trends or opportunities outside the existing landscape, highlighting the limited scope of this marketing strategy. Incorrect analysis of competitors’ data could lead to misinformed decisions and wasted resources. Obsession with the competition distracts the brand from the core strengths and values of its own business. 
In conclusion, “Identify & Learn from Competitors” is a powerful marketing strategy that helps a brand better understand the landscape. It focuses on learning from competitors, gaining market intelligence, and using this information to improve current marketing strategies, reduce risks, and boost the possibilities of innovation.