Litecoin doesn't offer any superior tech side over bitcoin, where as ethereum was made to a place for smartcotracts and tokens and we are seeing that there are many dapps and smartcontracts being built and tested over there. Litecoin was made to be silver to bitcoin as a gold, by tweaking the code a bit litecoin gained faster blocks. If you look in the past it was pretty stable like 4$ until we've heard that they are going to implement SegWit and to be honest with you this was a simple but yet effective marketing trick from their dev side as at that time you had huge bitcoin debate. Litecoin even don't need SegWit nor it was an urgent thing to do, but they saw opportunity and from that point ltc price started to grow. But because there are no sudden pumps and dumps it could be used more for services and merchants as everybody loves stable currency, although it could dump or pump itself of course.