Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis is a process of evaluating a business's competitors, including their products or services, pricing, marketing strategies, distribution channels, and customer base. The main goal is to gain insights into the market and competition, which can help a business develop effective marketing and business strategies for achieving a competitive advantage. This is an ongoing process that requires businesses to stay up-to-date with changes in the market and their competitors' strategies.
Our Approach
Letterboxd Community Survey
Our approach to the competitive analysis of Letterboxd involved first discovering the most used features of the platform by creating and sending out a survey to the Letterboxd Reddit community, which garnered 135 responses. We used these features to create a matrix that we then used to evaluate the desktop sites of each direct and indirect competitor.
Top 10 Most Used Letterboxd Features
SWOT Analysis
Additionally, we conducted a SWOT analysis for each competitor, analyzing their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
SWOT Analysis Definitions
Competitive Analysis
Our team utilized Figjam to compare the top features of Letterboxd to those of its competitors. We chose the most commonly used features on Letterboxd, such as "Rating a Film," and compared them to their counterparts on competitor platforms. For example, we examined the process of rating a beer on Untappd, a beer tracking app. We repeated this process for each competitor and documented our findings by taking screenshots of the flow for each feature. We then analyzed the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for each feature and used this information to create a competitive matrix. Overall, this process helped us to identify the key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of each platform.
Competitive Analysis FigJam Board
Direct Competitor Matrix
Indirect Competitor Matrix
SWOT Analysis Breakdown for Direct and Indirect Competitors
IMDB SWOT Analysis
Rotten Tomatoes SWOT Analysis
TV Time SWOT Analysis
Yelp SWOT Analysis
Untappd SWOT Analysis
Goodreads SWOT Analysis
Recommendations
Enhance search box functionality by providing different categories in a drop-down menu (such as Films, Reviews, Lists, Cast/Crew, Members) to help users find what they are looking for more easily.
Improve search box usability by displaying film posters for relevant films in a drop-down menu to help users make a visual connection and find the desired film quickly.
Increase search results efficiency by displaying film ratings in the search results, allowing users to quickly identify high-rated films without having to click into individual film pages.
Boost user engagement and retention by implementing a gamified badge system for Pro/Patron users to mark milestones and incentivize frequent usage.
Streamline film rating process by allowing users to rate a film directly from the search results, eliminating the need to navigate to the film detail page.
Key Takeaways
Competitive Analysis, like Heuristic Evaluation, is subjective and challenging to avoid biases and overlook important details.
It can be difficult to identify what to compare across all competitors, and there is a risk of missing important functionalities or comparing irrelevant features.
Evaluating sites that our group is not familiar with can be challenging, while being an expert in another competitor may lead to biased evaluations.
Some team members may be novice users, which could result in recommending features that already exist or overlooking important ones.
Despite having a mix of novice and expert users, the team was able to reach a consensus on recommendations for Letterboxd.
Based on the survey and Competitor Analysis, the 'Search' feature was identified as one of the most used features on Letterboxd and an area for improvement.