
Competitor comparison pages - whatthe91
https://www.junction43.co/blog/comparative-marketing-why-you-need-competitor-comparison-pages
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kristianc
Depends very largely on your industry. In enterprise, this is a terrible
strategy as it leads you away from a discussion on value add to one largely
centered around features and price. Deals that are focused on features and
price tend to be harder to close and generate less revenue.

I’d question it for most industries actually - what you are tacitly
acknowledging in the standard feature comparison page is that the features of
the competition are equivalent to yours, but that you have a few additional
ones. Usually people will in that situation go for the solution that does 80%
of the job but is significantly cheaper.

Overwhelmingly the research shows that people buy on value add, not features,
so this strategy is likely to force down your price for marginal gain. Also,
the competitor pages tend to be a competitive paid search for a challenger in
the market. Rare that you see this with organic.

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jarfil
What kind of "value" can not be specified as a feature? Whether it's a better
SLA, expertise adapting the product to the customers needs, or anything else,
those are just features which some clients may want, and others may not.

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kristianc
Value is expected value to the user minus total cost of ownership, and a value
proposition is a promise of expected value to the user.

Products which sell for higher prices and avoid getting into
‘feature/function’ type battles are those that are able to make clear,
measurable and defensible claims about the positive impact that they will have
on people’s lives.

These usually begin with a real pain point that the customer is experiencing
with their current situation (to give an example of say, Dropbox, users having
to email files to themselves and use USB drives, losing data as a result) and
move to something more like ‘Never lose a file again’, or as they do at
enterprise level talk of the costs and confusion of time wasted of legal
departments emailing documents to each other.

Some of the HN crowd would love Dropbox to describe themselves as ‘Distributed
file storage and sync across Windows, Linux and Mac’ but there are good
reasons why they don’t.

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chiefalchemist
Competitor comparison? Most (SaaS) sites would benefit from stating - plainly
and clearly - what features they offer and what are the benefits from those
features. The whole "free trial" approach is a joke. My time, no one's time,
is not free.

If you can't communicate the essence of your product to me [1] then I can only
presume you don't know. That's not a good sign.

[1] Everyone is always asking "Why should I care?" if you don't care to answer
that then I'm not going to care either.

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canada_dry
My suspicion is that if a marketing person passes this idea past their legal
folks (especially in the litigious USofA) will likely get a fairly strong
"nope" to having a 'competitor comparison' page.

