Landscape Strategy

What is a Competitive Landscape Strategist?

To fully understand what this is and why you need one, let's consider the following quote by Wally Lamb: "Like water, people mostly follow the path of least resistance." 

Water is drawn by gravity. That means it is also obstructed by walls and upward slopes. As water flows down, it keeps going if there is a lower point that it can follow, or it pools if there isn't. 

Suppose there was a fountain of water bubbling up at the center of a hill. That water would find a way, and would eventually carve one or more natural paths. But a person who wants to direct that water a different way could do so easily by simply carving a path from where the water is already going. If the path is deeper, steeper, or stems from a water pool, the new channel will guide the water wherever the person desires. 

Adding Complexity

In the course of time, many people carve their own paths to try to get the water to come directly towards their respective buckets. And if someone wants more water in their own bucket, they can find a competing channel and carve a deeper or steeper branch off of it at a place farther upstream of the competitor's bucket. This diverts the water towards the desired path leaving the competitor with less. 

As the landscape becomes more complex, it becomes increasingly more important to be informed of the location and depth of these channels in the overall landscape. Many companies are sorely underinformed about the options consumers have access to and the experiences they have with them. So they are unable to calculate the depth and slope of the channel they would have to dig to effectively divert consumers from a competitor towards themselves. 

Likewise, they are unable to see their own vulnerabilities when there is an opportunity for a competitor to go upstream and divert water away. 

That is the essence of the work I do. After I do specialized research to map the landscape, I become your informant and your strategist. I use my knowledge of the competitive landscape from the perspective of the consumer experience as the basis for informing your strategies, product innovations, and communication style at every step of the customer journey.

Every step is an opportunity to win or lose from how consumers see your ads, to how the receive follow up communications and support after the sale, and everything in between. Every step done poorly is an opportunity to pool water, which leaves you vulnerable to a competitor carving a channel from that pool. Just because it hasn't happend yet doesn't mean it couldn't shortly after someone discovers the opportunity. 

The most successful company in highly competitive landscapes is the one that understands business is not an event, it is a decathlon. It doesn't just take the best product, it takes an invulnerable customer journey to finding, acquiring, and using that product. 
 

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