Competitive analysis is an essential activity that helps businesses to create realistic and viable strategies to gain an advantage over their competitors. In its simple form, competitive analysis can be defined as the practice of analyzing the competitive environment in which your business operates (or wishes to operate).
This usually includes assessing strengths and weaknesses of the businesses with which you compete, strengths and weaknesses of your own company, target audience (including desires and powers of marketplace customers and suppliers), etc.
After conducting the analysis, you can then formulate and implement strategies that can improve your position in the marketplace, identify impediments that prevent you from entering new markets or growing your market share, and erect barriers to prevent others from eroding your own place in the market.
Constructively conducting a competitive analysis can help you learn the ‘ins and outs’ of your competitors and identify potential opportunities where you can out-perform them. It also enables you to stay atop of industry trends and ensure your products/services are consistently meeting and exceeding industry standards.
It also enables you to identify what your competitors are doing right. It tells you where your competitors are falling short which helps you identify areas of opportunities in the marketplace, and try out new, unique marketing strategies they haven’t taken advantage of.
Since 2018, DONE BY US, as part of its strategy consultancy service has been helping businesses in both the private and public sectors to comprehensively analyze their business models as well as their industries, competitors and macro external business environments in order to have a competitive edge over their competitors and achieve their goals.
One of our recent works was a competitive analysis conducted for a client in the logistics industry. In our pursuit to help our client obtain a competitive advantage over its competitors, we used various frameworks to evaluate our client and its competitors – we assessed the micro, meso and macro business environments.
An internal assessment was conducted to determine the company’s resources, capacity and competitive advantages. In addition, an assessment of the company’s demand was conducted to among other things, determine the nature of demand, level of demand and forecast future demands.
As part of our analysis of their internal business environment, the company was able to know their strengths and weaknesses and was able to utilize those strengths to improve their position in the marketplace. Conversely, an examination of their internal weaknesses likewise aided them in spur initiatives designed to address their shortcomings.
We also assessed the logistics industry to help the client understand the competitive dynamics of the logistics industry.
It helped them to get a sense of what is happening in the logistics industry, for instance, demand-supply statistics, degree of competition within the industry, state of competition of the industry with other emerging industries, future prospects of the industry taking into account technological changes and the influence of external factors such as Covid-19 and new tech (automation, AI, block chain, VR, AR, etc.) on the industry.
This abetted them to identify both the opportunities and threats coming their way whilst giving them a strong idea of the present and future picture of the logistics industry.
Most businesses usually conduct traditional environmental scanning without any strategic approach. Likewise some businesses rely on their intuition, hearsay or conjectures when assessing their competitors.
The danger in this approach is the fact that businesses are unable to gain vital insights because of the lack of robustness in their analysis. Do not place your business at risk with traditional environmental scanning. It is important to conduct a competitive analysis at various stages of your business to provide the best possible product or service to your clientele.
When last did you conduct a competitive analysis for your brand? If the last analysis you conducted was a rapid read-through of your competitor’s online activities, you are probably omitting a highly important procedure that can provide you with significant insight that could help your brand grow.
Get in touch with DONE BY US to book a free initial session with our experienced consultants. We are ever ready to partner with you to help your business maximize growth whilst providing value to your customers.
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