The alternative they are already using

Your competition is not the list of companies in your category. It is whatever the buyer is doing now instead of buying from you, and in most markets the largest single alternative is doing nothing.

This matters more than the competitor analysis it usually replaces, for a reason that becomes the spine of the course. If the buyer's current alternative is adequate, then anyone who buys from you would probably have found a solution eventually, and your marketing has changed the timing and the supplier rather than created the purchase. If the alternative is genuinely painful and nobody has fixed it, your marketing can create demand that did not exist. Those are different businesses and they need different money.

Four alternatives, in rough order of how often they are underestimated.

Nothing. The buyer continues to tolerate the problem. This is the alternative that wins most often and appears in the fewest marketing plans, because it has no brand and no website and nobody argues for it in a meeting.

A manual workaround. A spreadsheet, a phone call to the other branch, a friend who knows how. Cheap, familiar, and defended by the person who built it.

An adjacent product used badly. Someone using a messaging app as a filing system, a general accountant doing a specialist job. This is the alternative that most often produces the questions you can market against, because the buyer already knows it is a workaround.

A direct competitor. Real, and the smallest of the four in most markets outside category leaders.

Ask a buyer what they would do if your product did not exist and you will get an answer that sounds thoughtful and predicts poorly. Ask them what they did last time and you get a fact.

The gap between those two is measured, and it is one of the more reliable findings in this course. In meta-analyses of experiments comparing hypothetical to real valuations, people overstate what they will pay: one meta-analysis of 29 studies put the overstatement at roughly a factor of three, another of 28 studies put the median ratio at 1.35, and the distribution is severely skewed. The two figures are not in conflict and neither is a correction constant. What is reliable is the direction, which is always upward, and what is not reliable is the size, which means you cannot fix a stated-preference answer by dividing it by something.

So the alternative gets established by reconstruction. Not "what would you use instead", which invites invention, but "walk me through the last time this came up, and tell me what you actually did". The answer contains the alternative, the trigger and usually the reason not to buy, all of which you were going to ask about separately.