Competitor analysis

 

COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

1. The process of identifying key competitors assessing their objectives, strategies, strength, weakness, and reaction pattern and selecting which competitor to attack.
2. Competitor advantage is delivering more value to the customers than competitors do.
3. Competitor marketing strategy-strategies that strongly position the company against the competitors that give the company the strongest possible strategic advantage.

Steps in analyzing competitors

                                    

Identifying companies competitors

This is based on identifying competitors from industry point of view

Profiling direct and indirect competitors

ASSESING COMPETITORS:

1. Determine competitor’s objective:

By identifying competitor profit, market share, cash flow, technological leadership, service leadership and other goals.              

2. Identifying competitor strategies:

Strategic group –group of companies that follows similar strategy

-Assessing competitor strength and weakness

-Estimating competitor reactions.

SELECTING WHICH COMPETITORS TO ATTACK

-Identifying strong and weak competitors

-Usefull tool for identifying competitor strength and weakness is customer value analysis ie how customer value competitors product and rate them.

-Identifying close or distant competitors.

-Identifying good and bad competitors.

DESIGNING A COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM

-Identifying the sources of information

-Designing the intelligent system in a cost effective way

-Analyzing information from all sources and sending it to decision makers to inquire about competition strength and weakness.

BASIC COMPETITIVE STRATEGY

Major approaches to marketing strategy are,

1. Entrepreneurial marketing-pouring huge sums of money in advertising and publicity.

2. Formulated marketing-after achieving success companies formulate basic marketing strategies and follow them regularly.

3. Intrepreneurial marketing-getting back to the basics

-need to develop new strategies that help to move near the customer.

BASIC COMPETITIVE STRATEGY

1. Overall cost leadership

2. Differentiation

3. Focus

4. Customer intimacy-tailored product and services for customer.

5. Product and leadership-

-Opening to new ideas

-Finding new solution to the problem

COMPETITIVE POSITION

1. Market leader-an industry with largest market share

2. Maket challenger-company that is fighting for growing its market share

3. Market follower-a firm that it wants to maintain its share

4. Maket nich-a firm that serve smaller segments.

MARKET LEADER STRATEGIES

1. Expanding the total demand:

-Market leader can expand the market by developing new users, new uses, and more usage of its products.

2. Protecting the market share:

-Firm must  try to protect its market share from competitors attacks to protect its position firm must try to find its weakness ,maintaining prices constant ,and maintaining continuous innovation.

3. Expanding market share:

-By producing high quality products, creating good service experiences and building strong customer relationship.