Ward's Business Directory of U. Private and Public Companies annual , provides profiles of over , companies small and mid-size companies as well as large corporations, most privately held across the U. Profiles include assets, gross earnings, revenues, and other pertinent information. Online versions of these products not only make their pertinent statistics easy to find. They often permit you to download data so you can combine it with other data to produce your own statistics. Annual Reports If your competitor is a publicly-held company, many of its reports to the U.
Annual reports provide financial information, including sales volume, revenue increases, and their total market share. Annual reports from privately-held corporations are sometimes available through friends, relatives, and business acquaintances who own stock in a competitor's company. Your Sales Force Your sales staff probably has more access to competitive information than anyone else in your organization. Customers often show salespeople sales literature, contracts, price quotes, and other information from competitors.
Part of a salesperson's job is to get customers to discuss problems they have with a competitor's product. Customers will also reveal your competition's product benefits, strengths, and customer service programs.
Instruct your sales force to ask for copies of any competitive literature if and when that's possible. Your entire sales staff should keep a record of all competitive information they discover — even if it's just a rumor or gossip. Devote a regular portion of each sales meeting to a discussion of the competition. Other Employees Your employees working in other areas of the company also become exposed to competitive information. They interact with others in their industry area and often learn what your rival is doing or hear gossip and rumors.
Make sure your entire staff knows they should share any information concerning the competition immediately. Former employees of a competitor can provide you with insight on: your competitor's new products, marketing strategies, how-to improve productivity and employ other resources more effectively, and what your competitor's general working environment is like.
Trade Associations Most professional trade associations compile and publish industry statistics and report on industry news and leaders through trade association magazines and newsletters. Most trade associations also sponsor trade shows and other professional meetings. This is an opportunity to see first-hand what your competition is producing.
It also provides the opportunity to discover new players who may soon become your competition. Direct Observation If you own a flower shop, you should visit all of the flower shops in your geographic region. Act as a prospective customer; ask questions. You can learn about their selection and service and compare it to your own. Do not use an alias or disguise to gather intelligence from competitors.
It may seem like a trivial deception, but it is dishonest, and could come back to haunt you. Call an number and pretend to be a customer with questions and problems. If you sell products through a catalog, you not only want to be on your competition's mailing list; you should order a product from them to determine how long it takes to arrive, the method of shipment, and how it was packaged. Buy your competitor's products. Products can be evaluated and reverse engineered to provide meaningful information about your competitor's capabilities and weaknesses, technological innovations, manufacturing costs and methods.
Your Competitors You probably see the owner of a rival organization at trade shows, association meetings, and perhaps even socially. You can garner a great deal of information through a simple, friendly conversation.
People like to talk about themselves and share their success stories and concerns with business associates. Assign someone to check the competitions' Web sites regularly for pertinent changes and news. And take a good look at your own: Do you say anything there that you'd just as soon not have your competitors see?
Analyze Competitive Information Once you've gathered all of the competitive data you have been able to locate, it's analysis time. You should analyze to determine product information, market share, marketing strategies, and to identify your competition's strengths and weaknesses.
Product Evaluation You should know from your sales staff and customer feedback what product features and benefits are most important to your customers and potential customers. A product's or service's competitive position is largely determined by how well it is differentiated from its competition and by its price. Make a list of product features and benefits in order of importance, and prepare a table to show whether or not each of your competitors fulfill them. For example, Medium-sized companies that purchase copier machines may look for the following product benefits and features when making buying decisions: Competing Company: A B C D Features: 1.
Auto paper feed 2. Auto enlarge or reduce 3. Collates 4. Staples 5. Warranty Benefits: 1. Easy to operate 2. Saves money 3. Good print quality 4. Dependable 5. Features are fairly straightforward, either a product has a feature or it doesn't. Benefits, on the other hand, are not as simple and should only be recorded based on customer feedback. For example, company B may claim in their company literature that their copier is fast, but a user may feel otherwise. Or, company B may indeed have a copier that by industry standards is fast, but you may have a copier that's even faster.
Now, evaluate your competition's product or service. How does your product compare to your closest competitor's product? What features and benefits are unique to your product? To theirs? Finding strengths and weaknesses can be done through secondary data. I am sure my reasons for choosing Starbucks, stated earlier, are similar to other Starbucks loyal consumers. Starbucks can find out its competitors strengths and weaknesses and use them to their advantage. For instance a reason I tend to choose Starbucks is because there are stores conveniently placed everywhere I tend to be.
They can then use this to their advantage and have more Starbucks coffee shops to greater convene; such as, in grocery stores and airports. Lastly to assess a competitor, a company needs to figure out what their competitors will do. If a company implements a new product or price, they need to assume how their competitors will react based on its objectives and strengths and weaknesses.
Every competitor will react differently based on their personal objective. At this point a company has already selected its major competitors, it now has to determine which it will forcefully compete against or try and avoid competing with. When evaluating final competitors, a company will need to factor in: how strong or weak the competitor is, how close or distant the competitor is, and if it is a good or bad competitor. As can be assumed, companies will want to compete against its weakest competition.
This would be the easiest option to succeed, but if a company truly wants to be the best in its industry and number one, they will need to compete against other top companies. With every major company comes its weakness.
A company can use this to their advantage to compete with the top brand and come out on top. Most companies will also want to compete with competitors similar to them rather than ones with no common ground.
Many companies seek to create a market space with no competition. By doing this a company does not need to worry about competitors, for the time being. Those also might be known as, say it with me: your indirect competition. Again, at this stage, keyword research can really help you decide where to put your efforts. If your competitors are targeting specific keywords with their content, where is there opportunity to outperform them?
Are they implementing a particularly strong keyword strategy? What insights can you glean from that? From there, you can look toward opportunities to either compete with them directly for attention around specific topics or questions, or differentiate your approach by looking for gaps in their content or new angles to approach questions your audience is posing.
Lastly, you can always go back to paid data. If your indirect or direct competitors are putting money behind ads, you can be sure those keywords represent important business initiatives. This will also provide insight into where your competition is placing their efforts and money. When it comes to marketing and competition, it is absolutely essential to approach competitive analysis strategically. You have all the tools you need to develop a thorough understanding of your direct and indirect competition, and build a stronger marketing strategy based on that knowledge.
So what are you waiting for? What is Direct Competition? What is Indirect Competition? A few effective techniques for identifying direct competitors: 1. Market Research Take a look at the market for your product and evaluate which other companies are selling a product that would compete with yours. Use your judgement with any information they volunteer. For instance, when customers say your prices are higher than the competition they may just be trying to negotiate a better deal.
Evaluate the information you find about your competitors. This should tell you whether there are gaps in the market you can exploit. It should also indicate whether there is a saturation of suppliers in certain areas of your market, which might lead you to focus on less competitive areas. If you're sure your competitors are doing something better than you, you need to respond and make some changes. It could be anything from improving customer service, assessing your prices and updating your products, to changing the way you market yourself, redesigning your literature and website and changing your suppliers.
Your competitors might not have rights over their actual ideas, but remember the rules on patents, copyright and design rights. For more information, consult Intellectual property as a business tool.
Exploit the gaps you've identified. These may be in their product range or service, marketing or distribution, even the way they recruit and retain employees. Customer service reputation can often provide the difference between businesses that operate in a very competitive market.
Renew your efforts in these areas to exploit the deficiencies you've discovered in your competitors. But don't be complacent about your current strengths. Your current offerings may still need improving and your competitors may also be assessing you. They may adopt and enhance your good ideas. Why are they doing the same as you, particularly if you're not impressed by other things they do?
Perhaps you both need to make some changes. Analyse these common areas and see whether you've got it right. And even if you have, your competitor may be planning an improvement. Our information is provided free of charge and is intended to be helpful to a large range of UK-based gov. Because of its general nature the information cannot be taken as comprehensive and should never be used as a substitute for legal or professional advice. We cannot guarantee that the information applies to the individual circumstances of your business.
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