Competitive landscape: what it is and how to map one

A competitive landscape is the full set of businesses and alternatives competing for your customers, organised so you can see who serves which segment, how each one positions itself, and where the gaps are. A competitor list tells you who. A competitive landscape tells you where each of them stands, relative to each other and to you.

Why it matters

It shows you where the crowd is. Five rivals all promising the same thing to the same customer is a fight on price. The same picture often reveals a segment nobody is serving well.

It stops tunnel vision. Watching one rival closely is useful. Watching only that rival is how businesses miss the new entrant or the substitute coming up from the side.

People expect to see it. Investors, lenders and new senior hires all ask some version of "who else does this, and why will customers pick you?" A business plan's competitive analysis usually starts from this map.

How to do a competitive landscape analysis

Three layers: players, segments and positions. An afternoon is enough for a small business.

1. List the players. Everyone a customer might choose instead of you: direct rivals, indirect alternatives, substitutes and the do-nothing option. The types of competitors page has a checklist. Expect ten to twenty names.

2. Define the segments. Group customers by what changes their choice: size, need, budget, location, how much help they want. Keep it to two to four segments that genuinely buy differently.

3. Record each player's position. For every name, write down four facts you can check from outside:

• Price level. From their pricing page, or "on request" if they hide it.
• Main promise. Their homepage headline, word for word.
• Main channel. Where they find customers: search, social ads, retail, referrals, sales calls.
• Direction. Growing, steady or retreating, judged from new pages, new ads, hiring and review volume.

4. Draw the map. Choose two axes that customers actually use to decide, such as price against how much is done for them, and plot every player. The positioning map template has a blank version and the rules for choosing axes.

5. Mark the gaps and the movers. Circle empty areas that real customers would want. Draw arrows for anyone moving. Those two marks are the reason for making the map.

A competitive landscape map, worked as a table

Say you run a small speciality coffee roaster selling beans online. Here is the field from your customers' side. The entries are illustrative categories rather than named companies. A full competitor analysis example works through a similar business section by section.

Three things jump out. The enthusiast segment is crowded, and almost everyone in it promises freshness, so "freshly roasted" is a requirement rather than a reason to choose you. Nobody leads with gifting, even though good coffee is an easy present and a premium price suits a gift better than it suits a weekly shop. And the growing players are winning on paid social, which tells you where the competition for attention will be hardest next year.

That is a real decision from one table: lead with gifts, and treat freshness as proof rather than the headline. A white space analysis is the next step if you want to test whether the gap has real demand behind it.

How often to redo it

Redraw it once a year. Or sooner when something big happens: a new entrant with money behind it, a rival repositioning, a price war, or a change in your own strategy.

Refresh it every quarter. Update the direction column and look for new names: new advertisers in the ad libraries for your category terms, new domains on page one for your main searches.

Watch the closest few every week. Your three to five direct competitors change prices, ads and pages often enough that a quarterly look misses most of it. That weekly layer is the part Figo automates; the map itself is still a job for a person.

Mistakes that make the map useless

Choosing axes that flatter you. If you are alone in the top right corner, check whether customers actually choose on those two things. Usually the axes were picked after the conclusion.

A slide of logos. Thirty logos grouped into boxes is a list with decoration. Positions, gaps and arrows are what make it a map.

Leaving out the alternatives. A map with only direct rivals hides the substitutes, which are often what is shrinking your segment.

Making it once. The version in last year's pitch deck describes last year. Your competitive positioning should be checked against the current one.