Competitive Research
Studying the competition helps you choose the most viable and innovative tactics and best practices. This helps your business create and maintain a competitive advantage with a strong potential for profit.
If you’re not better than your competitors in some way, there’s no reason for consumers to choose you.
Competitive research helps you create one or more of the following: better product/service, better price, better support, better experience, better value, better location, and better messaging.
1. Research
An assessment of your top competitors should include:
Honest analysis of their tactics
The positioning they are building in the marketplace
The value and price they offer
Their advertising
What is something unique they are offering customers
2. SWOT Analysis
In business, you and your team should be consistently evaluating how to improve the way you do things and be prepared to handle threats that could damage the company’s profits or its image.
A SWOT Analysis is a method of evaluating your business and your main competitors by analyzing:
Strengths - What are your the strengths of your business and those of your competitors
Weaknesses - What are the weaknesses of your business and those of your competitors
Opportunities - What opportunities exist for your company in the marketplace and of your competitors
Threats - What threats do your company and your competitors face in the current marketplace
3. Porter’s Five Forces
Another way to analyze your competition – and understand your standing in your industry – is using Porter's Five Forces model. Originally developed by Harvard Business School's Michael E. Porter in 1979, the five forces model looks at five specific factors that determine whether or not a business can be profitable in relation to other businesses in the industry.
Porter’s Five Forces Model looks at an industry’s economy as a whole:
Competitive rivalry
Bargaining power of suppliers
Bargaining power of customers
Threat of new entrants
Threat of substitutes
4. Application
Select a business idea (maybe you are interested in getting a Spirit Box) and conduct the following:
Identify 3 of its main competitors and search online for information about them
Conduct SWOT analysis of your business and competitors
Use the Porter’s Five Forces Model to analyze the competitiveness of the overall industry/market of the business you selected
Write a summary of your findings