You enter your project team meeting with Mike and Tiffany to hear them discussing the tools that they found to conduct an analysis of the industry and competitors. “Mike, there are so many more tools than I even realized to give us some good data,” Tiffany states.
“I know,” Mike says. “That’s why I wanted to take some time to look at our options and figure out what information we really need to support the board’s decision.”
Mike and Tiffany both found some great tools from their research on the subject. Complete the following:
- Based on your classmates’ discussion posts for Week 2, do you still believe the tools that you selected will work best for a global strategy? Why or why not?
- What evidence do you have to support your decision?
- How would you refute the people who chose an additional tool rather than one of the tools that you selected?
- Based on the tools that you selected, provide a brief analysis of your market, using those tools.
just for helping with this unit 2 IP
Below is one DB post because it asked Based on your classmates’ discussion posts for Week 2, do you still believe the tools that you selected will work best for a global strategy? Why or why not
What are the best tools to use in this situation?
When evaluating your competitors, it is critical to assess other firms that provide similar products or services within an industry to also consider those firms in industries that provide alternative or substitute products that a customer could opt to purchase (MUSE, 2019). The best tools to use in this situation would be a framework analysis. Four forces of Porter’s framework could be a tool to consider. However, to get a closer look at the competitor’s strategy that is leading the market producing similar quality products. I’d investigate the Competitor Analysis, Customer Analysis, and/or SWOT Analysis to decide which study best fit our forward-thinking strategy. This would provide a baseline on the competition to know if you need to improve our standards by choosing to be more innovative or environmentally friendly. If we choose to the latter, then the PESTEL Analysis would be a great tool to examine.
Provide a brief summary of at least 2 of these tools.
We decided to investigate the Four Forces of Porter’s framework and Competitor Analysis. Porter’s Framework dives into the analysis of four specific areas of the framework including Threat of Substitutes; the chances the customer is likely to switch, Industry Competitors; any existing rivalries, Supply Power; bargaining power of suppliers, and Buyer Power; the price buyers are willing to pay (MUSE, 2019). Our second tool to examine for this project is the Competitor Analysis. This analysis examines the technique and approach for using Best Practice Benchmarking; metric for evaluating the competing business’s performance (MUSE, 2019), Value Chain Analysis; the step of activities being used by a company, Competitive Profiling; how well the firm stands out in the competition, and Industry Analysis; knowing how many competitors you will be competing with and the health of their company (Wilson, n.d.).
Why do you think these are the best ways to analyze the market?
The tools mentioned above in my opinion are the best tools to analyze the market due to their overlapping analysis with other tools such as areas from the PESTEL, SWOT and Customer Analysis. By using the Porter’s framework and Competitor Analysis, the team would be able to have a bird’s eye view on the indirect competition as well as the direct competition to confirm assumptions using the tools and provide corrective action for identified discrepancies and inconsistencies as we try to create a competitive advantage.
How will you use these tools in your plan?
In this project we will utilize the free competitive analysis templates provided by smartsheet (“Free Competitive Analysis Templates | Smartsheet,” 2018). This template will have all the subjects we need to answer specific questions about the industry and business we are analyzing along with housing the collected data in one sheet to be used in creating reports, dashboards and presentations. For the Porter’s Framework, we will create and implement an excel template with the specific topics we need in analyzing the indirect competition to verify if there products are or could be used in support of our products or if customers are settling for substituted items due to pricing.
References
MUSE. (2019). Retrieved from https://class.ctuonline.edu/_layouts/MUSEViewer/Asset.aspx?MID=13897490&aid=13897494
Wilson, R. (n.d.). Competitor Analysis. Retrieved from http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.cecybrary.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=f2de5b49-9f09-4ff6-9f37-31c459402554@sessionmgr120&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=9412201300&db=bth
Free Competitive Analysis Templates | Smartsheet. (2018, April 23). Retrieved from https://www.smartsheet.com/free-competitor-analysis-template
