Product comparison analysis is a process by which you can determine the features and benefits of your product in relation to those of your competitors.
It can help you to identify what areas of your product need improvement and shape future product development based on customer demands.
In this blog post, we will outline five steps that will make product comparison analysis easy and thorough and how AI can be used to analyse product reviews and consumer content in order to get a more accurate picture of product performance.
Key Benefits of a Product Comparison Analysis
Running a product comparison analysis allows you to:
1. Establish market position
A product comparison analysis helps you to identify where your product stands in relation to competing products in the market, thereby enabling you to make informed decisions about how best to improve or promote your product offering.
2. Identify needs and opportunities
By studying customer feedback, it is possible to identify unmet customer needs. This helps you to shape future product development so that it serves them better and gives them an improved user experience.
3. Compare features
Comparing features between products can show you where your product is leading or lagging behind its competitors. It also provides insights into customer preferences, which can help you tailor your product to meet customer demands.
4. Discover market trends
Find out what customers increasingly come to expect from their products. Trends can indicate what aspects customers prioritise and where your product might need improvement in order to keep up with the competition.
5. Optimise marketing campaigns
By analysing consumer data, you can see which features and benefits resonate with customers the most. This can help you to optimise your product marketing campaigns so that they effectively target key audiences and drive more sales.
5 Steps to Running a Product Comparison Analysis
1. Identify competitors
The first step to a thorough product comparison analysis is to identify who your competitors are. Determine which products have similar features and benefits as yours and which are attracting the same customers.
A simple keyword search can reveal the brands and products that are vying for consumer attention in your niche. Don’t forget to include indirect competitors such as Amazon or general online stores in your list.
2. Gather consumer data from reviews
Great news! The most readily available and most abundant data is also the most useful. Customers that share their opinions in online reviews and forums provide immensely valuable insights. With the help of natural language processing (NLP), it’s easier than ever to quickly and accurately analyse large amounts of quantitative data, as we’ll discuss later.
At Symanto we help our clients source and gather insights from major social media channels, review sites, forums and more. It’s also a good idea to choose an appropriate date range. For example, given the current economy, customers may more highly prioritise value for money than they did a year ago.
3. Conduct further market research
There are some things that may not be readily available in online reviews such as shipping costs and product packaging. Therefore, depending on what you want to measure you may need to supplement consumer opinion analysis with more specific market research.
4. Run an aspect-based sentiment analysis
Utilising AI-powered sentiment analysis, customers’ reviews can be broken down by product aspect, such as design, features, performance or value.
This provides detailed and easy-to-interpret insights into customer sentiment for each aspect of the product in comparison to competitors. Using a sentiment heatmap, it’s easy to highlight areas where your product might need improvement.
Make sure that your analytical tool of choice is up to date with the latest NLP technology in order to get the most accurate insights. For example, Symanto’s text analysis software can identify synonyms and complex sentence structures to accurately interpret both what topic the customer is referring to, and their sentiment towards it.
Furthermore, if your products are sold across different countries, Symanto enables you to analyse reviews in 50+ languages.
5. Go deeper with your insights
Once you have an overview of your performance in comparison to your competitors, it’s time to look more closely at your data. For example, using a sentiment heatmap you might find that people talk more positively about the pricing of a competitor’s product, but on further inspection, you may discover that your customers highly value the quality and endurance of your product, and are willing to make a greater investment.
Symanto Insights offers a variety of interactive data visualisations that enable you to intuitively explore your data and down to a granular level.
There are other things to consider too. For example, based on their experience, how likely is it that customers will recommend the brand to others (brand recommendation score) and how likely are they to return as loyal customers?
With advanced NLP, you can accurately measure these customer sentiment metrics from a short review. For example, customers that use more positive emotional language to describe their experience are more likely to be loyal, repeat customers.
Other Uses of Product Comparison Analysis
Aside from improving your own existing products and marketing strategies, you can also use product comparison analysis to identify new opportunities. For instance, if you are looking to launch a new product line, analysing consumer sentiment data across different markets could help you decide on which features would be most appealing and successful.
Product comparison analysis is also useful when deciding on the best products and services for your business. For example, if you are a small business looking for the best cloud storage solution, you can use online reviews to compare the services of your potential providers.
Get Started With Symanto
At Symanto, we understand how important it is to stay competitive in today’s market. Our state-of-the-art AI technology enables you to easily gain actionable insights from customer reviews and make more informed decisions about your products and services.
Whether you are looking for an overview of your performance or detailed information about your competitors, with Symanto you can quickly and accurately analyse consumer sentiment data to inform your marketing and product strategies.
Get in touch to find out more, or register today for a free 21-day trial of our Symanto Insights Platform.
