uxGPT: How to perform a draft competitive analysis with prompts and uxGPT Competitive Analysis

Knowing your competitors is important. You have endless reading and categorization to get started to understand the nuances of how they position themselves. It's a time-consuming process.

But not anymore with Chat GPT.

Want an example of performing competitive analysis in minutes? Let's start with ChatGPT to see what we can come up with.

Type in a topic, and ChatGPT will give you insights into each competitor's feature set. Some content may need to be updated (information about certain products is a couple of years old, so I'll move over to Perplexity for a more current answer), but it can highlight emerging industry trends and potentially overlooked features others may have missed.

This summarization is not the final product. It's a starting point for initial alignment and can be iterated for refinement, and it sometimes misses smaller players that may be a thread, but it at least gets you started.

As long as there's enough content for the category, it can return the answer to get you started for your competitive analysis.

Start wide

Begin by declaring the category you want to research or the areas you want to compare across competitors. I will start with this prompt to get a generalized list of competitors for the category.

It’s a good idea to set the context of your research so that you can refine it with deeper analysis and see your journey. To show the answer, you can specify any context, including the number of results or the display form.

Prompt

Create a competitive investigation table of 10 customer relationship management systems, with at least five items for each category.        

Add structure

The initial answer was pretty good, but I might want to add more structure. The framework I’ll use is a SWOT analysis for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s one of my favorites when looking at competitors.

A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to identify and analyze the internal and external factors that can impact a business or project's success. It helps organizations understand their competitive position and develop strategic plans to achieve their goals.

You can use other frameworks (use a prompt of "What are alternatives to SWOT?" for fun). Here’s a list:

• SOAR Analysis — SOAR focuses on positive aspects and is used for strategic planning by emphasizing the organization's strengths and vision for the future.
• BCG Matrix — The Boston Consulting Group Matrix helps organizations analyze their product lines or business units.
• Ansoff Matrix — The Ansoff Matrix, or Product/Market Expansion Grid, helps organizations determine growth strategies.

We’ll use customer relationship management as the category example

Prompt

Create a competitive investigation table of 10 customer relationship management systems, categorized by SWOT, with at least five items for each category.        

Refine

Engage with ChatGPT to iteratively refine the analysis or ask follow-up questions, getting answers in minutes. This interactive process saves time and enhances the depth and precision of your competitive analysis, making it a potent tool for strategic decision-making.?

You can do this by rewriting your prompt to include any information you want by comparing your product with others. An even better approach is to include your company in the analysis (sometimes it won’t show up in the initial answer) to get a sense of where your organization sits in the analysis.

Prompt

Create a competitive analysis table of 10 customer relationship management systems, including HubSpot, categorized by SWOT with at least five items for each category.        

Refine more

Now, request deeper dives into specific areas. We will add small businesses or integrations with MailChimp in the prompt so there is more detail to influence the conversation. Most of the time, it’ll return a few results not listed in the previous prompt, and that’s good.?

It widens the universe of results you can use in your research, showing possibilities you can explore further.

Prompts

Create a competitive analysis table of 10 customer relationship management systems for mid-sized businesses, including HubSpot, categorized by SWOT with at least five items for each category.        

Create a competitive analysis table of 10 customer relationship management systems with integrations into MailChimp, including HubSpot, categorized by SWOT with at least five items for each category.?        

Try out this Custom GPT — uxGPT Competitive Analysis

Don’t want to do the work yourself? Not a problem. I’ve done a lot of the legwork for you.

Try this custom GPT at uxGPT Competitive Analysis .

Articles in the uxGPT series

• What ChatGPT does and doesn’t do well for User Experience
• uxGPT: How to perform a draft competitive analysis with prompts and uxGPT Competitive Analysis
• uxGPT: Create fake data for wireframes in minutes
• uxGPT: Write user research questions with prompts and uxGPT Research Questions

About Patrick Neeman

Patrick Neeman works at Evisort as the Head of User Experience and Research. He has lead user experience teams at many data companies, like Knowable, Icertis, Apptio, and Jobvite and nPario. You can find his blog Usability Counts here, and he also writes on Medium .

He has taught at General Assembly as a user experience instructor.

All his opinions are his alone.

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