New Concepts on Market Research

If you are doing a competitive analysis and you know already where to search (internal, external sources) it is important to make a list of what you have researched in order to know which information you can get out of it.

… on some or all of the following areas:

• structure, strategy, motivations and objectives
• financial and operating analysis, eg. return on sales, gross profit margin etc.
• marketing strategy, eg. messages and tactics, price flexibility, new services or products, distribution models used, names of key customers
• market perception, eg. why their customers buy from them and their satisfaction levels i. e. what are your competitors’ best practices and key strengths?
• future directions

… then you would be in a strong position to:

• understand their mission and objectives and develop your own accordingly
• develop realistic sales targets through understanding the scale of their operations and turnover
• implement product/service improvements to counter strengths/weaknesses and innovations in their product portfolio
• position your prices appropriately
• target your direct sales policies through knowing their distribution channels
• offer competitive discounts and payment terms
• develop an appropriate marketing communications strategy in response to their messages and where they put them across
• strengthen your products/services and marketing strategy by adopting and adapting the best practices observed in your competitors’ armoury. Not in a blind ‘copy-cat’ way, but creatively shaping those practices to your own circumstances

Source: Business Advantage

… and it is all about comparison:

“Even the simplest competitive analysis displays two critical dimensions: the competitors and the criteria, or what we’ll call the competitive framework. The purpose of the competitive framework is to present the data in a way that makes it easy to compare the various sites across the different criteria.”

Citation of Dan Brown