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ompitatoConducting Your Competition Analysis

Through this article, the manager’s blog explains the fundamentals of competitive analysis: its usefulness, how to do it, and what conclusions you can draw from this part of the market research.

Remark :

Before starting, it is essential to focus on distinguishing between competitive analysis and competitive analysis. A competition analysis is done after a competitiveness analysis. However, these two types of analysis can be included in the benchmark.

Market competitiveness analysis: Global and long-term study to define the competitive position of the company or the offer in the market. (ex: I am opening a fast-food restaurant, what are the other types of restaurants in the area?). Market competitiveness can be studied with a tool like Porter’s 5 forces.

Competition analysis: Study of the players and the offers that will directly compete with my commercial offer. (eg: I look at the other fast food establishments present in my catchment area)

Whether it is for a business creator or for an existing business, carrying out a competition study is useful for any business leader. Here are two lists, not exhaustive, of objectives that the competition analysis can answer.

When an entrepreneur sets up a business, studying the competition allows him to:

To segment the market (understand the typical profiles of consumers who could be led to buy your product/service) and thus target the right audience; To see if the proposed offer meets a potential demand;

To know the means of distribution of competitors (online sales, sales in-store or agency, both at the same time) and analyze which one of those work best;

To build in anticipation a SWOT and/or PESTEL matrix based on what he has observed in the competition and thus plan the strategy.

For any business enterprise, studying the competition is a must. Thereby :

When launching a new product or service. The study of the competition makes it possible to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the offers similar to the offer (product, range of products, services, etc.) that the company will offer (eg: for a company wishing to start delivering, analyze the average delivery times of competitors and thus adapt your new offer);

This makes it possible to know and follow the prices and commercial offers of competitors and thus make your new offer as competitive as possible. Looking at what is being done elsewhere is also an opportunity to improve the organization of society. It is often by observing and drawing inspiration from what the strongest and/or most innovative competitors (a competitive benchmark) do on the market that we are able to innovate.

Competitive research is not just about observing, it is also, where possible, to consume competing offers in order to get a clear picture of the overall service. We sometimes notice that certain invisible procedures play an important role (relaunching meetings, satisfaction questionnaire, remarketing offer, etc.).

There is not one type but the type of competitive analyzes. The key is to clearly identify your needs and objectives, in order to define which competitors you will observe and know what data you will collect. Processing this data will help you understand where you need to focus your efforts.

Define the competitors to observe

In this step, you will select competitors that you deem necessary to observe. You must not target too broad, because it would be too long, nor too narrow because it would not be sufficiently representative of the market.

To define this list of competitors, which you can simply integrate into an Excel table, you can do the following:

Collect from your customers, or from exchanges already made with your customers, information on competitors in the sector.

Contact professional groups. These are professionals from the same field who come together in the form of associations to assert their rights and privileges. You can get information about the target market and your competitors from them.

Conduct a field study with customers to find out about the practices of your competitors. To conduct such a study you can use the method of quantitative market research and/or qualitative market research. The first is to collect quantified data (e.g. the price that a customer is willing to pay for a given type of offer), the second is to precisely understand the customer’s need (e.g. why the customer favors such and such an offer over another).

Once you have listed your competitors, it is necessary to focus your attention on the players who practice an activity close to yours. This is to concentrate your efforts on the most threatening competitors and thus carry out the most effective strategy possible.

Do not measure yourself against market leaders but against those who have market shares similar to yours, the objective being to position yourself against your direct competitors and not to hope for a market share that you cannot achieve for the moment.

Define the data you will collect on your competitors

To effectively conduct a competitive analysis, it is imperative to determine what data you want to collect. A large volume of data will give you a lot of detail but will be difficult to process, conversely a volume of data that is too small will offer too limited a view of the market.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of information to collect during a competition analysis:

Company Name

Creation date

Turnover

Workforce (number of employees)

Nature of target clientele (market, target, or target segment)

Product or service range and product features

Prices charged (unit, promotional, upmarket)

Market share (in%)

Distribution channels (in store / agency or online) and therefore the geographic scope of their activity.

Communication channels (posters, radio, local newspapers, website, social networks, telephone canvassing, etc.)

Company values

Customer satisfaction

Recovery or marketing actions

Additional sales

Quality of advice

Website (nature, visibility, natural referencing, SEA, etc.)

Presence on social networks (Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, …)

Analyzing information about your competition will give you a view of the market that matches your needs. This will allow you, for example, to see if there is a lack of supply in the market you are targeting, in order to position yourself effectively and avoid, if possible, direct competition. The analysis of the information also gives indications concerning the fact of innovating or imitating the market, would it be more profitable to stand out significantly from your competitors or rather to follow the global trend to exploit a growing market? Only the analysis step will give an answer to this type of question.

To effectively analyze the information collected there are many tools and software, the easiest probably being to use Excel tables to compare the different competitors according to the criteria that seem most relevant to you. For example, you can create a table comparing the prices of your competitors, ranking them from the most aggressive to the least competitive. Staying on this example you can also create a table which classifies the companies having the best image with customers, another table showing the market share held by each competitor, etc … All you have to do is cross this information, preferably using a radar chart, to determine your most threatening competitors and thus position yourself in your target market. These elements can also be integrated as part of a strategic approach, for example in a SWOT analysis.

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