Competitive Brand Analysis in the K-12 Education Market: Insights for Strategic Brand Positioning

This blog post was provided by Amy Eccher, founder of StatCAT. Amy is a seasoned statistician, with over 20 years of experience using advanced statistical analysis to help clients uncover opportunities and answer research questions. 

In a world of competitive K-12 brand positioning, new product development, and overall brand health, a thorough competitive brand analysis is imperative. “Competitive Brand Analysis” refers to an umbrella of various types of statistical analyses.

MMS helps clients create a well-developed analysis plan that is aligned with the strategic goals of brands/companies in order to provide actionable and impactful insights. A common approach to understanding a brand is to study it—often in isolation. While this will yield an overall picture of the brand’s inherent strengths and weaknesses, without competitive brand information, this method falls short of providing a true picture of the brand’s position in the marketplace.

Collecting data on multiple brands in the market allows a look into how individual strengths and weaknesses stack up against other brands.

Common questions include:

• Who are the key competitors?
• How are they performing?
• Is my brand seen as a top brand in the category?
• Is my brand differentiated from the other competitors?
• What is the best brand strategy moving forward?

And the BIG question that every organization needs the answer to:  What is driving sales?

These questions can be initially addressed by simply comparing each brand’s scores on a variety of research questions, such as brand awareness, usage, satisfaction, brand attributes, etc. A tabulation of the data will clearly state which brand scores the highest and which brand scores the lowest, and statistical testing can identify the differences as significant strengths and weaknesses.

Driver Analysis: What drives purchase intent?

A critical question for any company trying to understand the marketplace is what attributes drive purchase intent? This is essential for focusing sales, marketing, and product efforts on those aspects of a product, brand, or experience that will impact consideration and sales.

Developing insights around this starts first with a set of assumptions around what those key drivers might be. It is important to test a range of options and ensure they are not too vague or too specific, which is why the experts at MMS guide our clients through this process.

Survey respondents, including both decision makers and influencers, are presented with these attributes alongside a set of familiar competitors. They then evaluate each competitor against each attribute. The resulting data and key driver analysis provides actionable insights that inform leadership, product, sales and marketing about the attributes that matter most to decision makers—and which attributes set a given company apart from the competition. For marketing teams, these insights can illuminate where to invest in influencing market perceptions of a brand. Sales teams can leverage the data to differentiate a brand from its competitors. For product teams, key driver analysis can inform the product roadmap and clarify where investment is needed or where it would be wasted.

Go further with competitive brand analysis by taking a comprehensive look at both absolute and relative strengths of key brands in the market to understand their competitive advantages.

Absolute Brand Strengths:

This analysis focuses on the absolute strengths and weaknesses of a brand and is critical in understanding brand positioning, but it does not fully capture all of the category information.

Relative Brand Strengths:

This analysis looks at the data through a different lens; it focuses on if strengths exist for a brand given how the brand typically performs. As an example, consider the following scenario.

A category leader or a brand with high awareness will usually score higher on attributes simply because it is ‘bigger.’ If a competitor is the leader in the category, and my brand consistently falls below in ratings on awareness usage and attitudes, does my brand have strengths over this competitor? How can I understand my brand’s strengths over this competitor if my brand’s scores are lower?

This analysis goes further by charting all brands’ position in the category while understanding the important individual purchase drivers.

Why every company needs this:

Incorporating analysis around relative brand positioning will provide an excellent snapshot of the market and how each brand/company is perceived by consumers. The information gleaned from this analysis, coupled with the expertise of MMS to interpret the findings, will help inform many parts of a business including:

• Leadership: Inform strategic plans with a deeper understanding of the marketplace and brand positioning
• Sales: Understand competitor weaknesses to exploit and brand strengths to promote
• Marketing: Focus marketing efforts in the areas that matter most for brand perception
• Product: Identify key features to invest in to drive sales

Ready to see where your brand stands? Reach out to MMS Education now to learn more about how we can design a competitive brand analysis to support your business goals.