How to find your "whitespace"

When I work on Strategy with my clients I ask the question: "Are you competing to be the best?". The answer is nearly always "Yes, of course, why would we be in business if we didn't want to be the best?" or something similar. My answer to them is if you try to be the best at everything you become the best at nothing, you are invariably better off being UNIQUE!

Differentiating your company and your products and services is crucial to sustainable growth, particularly if you are operating in a crowded or commoditised market. You need to find a way to compete against no one, against a set of dimensions that you specifically choose. The trick is to find a position in the market that is unique, but also valued by enough people or businesses to make it highly profitable and the best way to find this "Whitespace" is to use a technique called attribution mapping.

This approach is part of the strategic analysis process we go through as part of the 3HAG Way Strategic Execution framework and I find it gives the CEOs and leadership teams I work with startling clarity on where to focus their business in the future. Not bad for something that takes about 90 minutes from start to finish.

Finding your most profitable dimensions

Strategic evaluation of the market place you are operating in is a critical part of the strategic analysis process, and the attribution mapping process makes it straight-forward. First of all we are considering the market here NOT our core customers, "aren't they the same?" you say, well maybe not. By considering the broader market you might identify a bigger or more profitable core customer to the one you are currently serving. Your best strategy might then be to pivot to serve this newly identified core customer.

So, ask yourself (and your leadership team) what are the key attributes of the market you are playing in. What is an attribute? well if you think it might be an attribute of the market, it probably is. Make a note of it. When you have about 20 market attributes see if you have any duplications (if you are doing this in groups, there will often be duplication across the groups). If you do, consolidate them down to about 10 - 14 attributes.

Then assess how good you are on a scale of 1 - 6 where 6 is the best in the world and 1 is we don't do it, don't care, we suck at this. Then rank them from best to worst and line them up from left to right along the bottom of a landscape oriented sheet of Flipchart paper (or on a whiteboard). It should look something like this.

Now plot out a line with the scores for each market attribute which should (if you got the order right), go roughly from top left to bottom right.

You now have a view on how good you are at meeting the needs of key attributes of your market. Now assess the companies that compete with you against the same set of market attributes. You will need to analyse each competitor and it may take you some time to get to a level of confidence that your assessment is right. A gut feel is good enough to start if you don't have any real data.

As you can see these graphs can get messy particularly if you are assessing several competitors. That is OK as a really messy graph will present you with some real whitespace opportunities.

Now ask yourselves the question "Where do we want to be in 3 years time and plot this line on your graph. This is the gap that you will need to close over the next three years. This is your 3HAG line.

OK, so what! What is this telling you. Well if you look at the graph above there is clear space at the top left hand side of the attribution map. If you choose to compete in that space, you have little or no competition that can touch you along those specific dimensions. This is your whitespace!

Now that you have identified your white space, you now need to position your business to dominate that white space. To do this you need to build a set of inter-dependant differentiators that will enable you to dominate your market along these specific dimensions.

My next article will show you how to identify what these differentiators are for you.

Thanks to Tom Reich for permission to use his Attribution Framework spreadsheet.