Strategic Planning Made Easy with Competitive Landscape Analysis

Competitive landscape analysis is the process of evaluating key players and their products to understand and estimate market trends, and accordingly, create long-term strategies. It is a critical practice that allows a business to benchmark itself against its closest competitors and learn from their best practices.

There are several advantages of carrying out competitive landscape analysis:

• Market gaps – Strategic planners can use competitive analysis to develop matrixes that can identify unserved gaps in the market. This can be performed by creating a competitor map that shows competitors in terms of their offerings and USPs. Their strengths such as affordable cost, high quality, or customization can be determined using the map. This allows the organization to spot the unmet needs of customers and fill the gap.

• Disruptive technology – Companies in rapidly developing industries, particularly tech-based, are constantly battling to achieve the first-mover advantage with innovative technologies. Competitive landscape analysis can be highly advantageous as it enables the business to learn about the research and development activities of competitors. The analysis helps the company to adopt any disruptive technology that is being developed and upgrade it to prevent their product from being obsolete.

• Market trends – Competitive landscape analysis can help the organization gain insights on market trends such as product positioning, marketing plans, and distribution strategies of competitors. Using these details, the organization can design its own marketing and distribution plans.

• Customer preference – Competitive landscape analysis enables the organization to understand customers’ preferences and their brand loyalty. This would help the organization to understand how the competitors are gaining loyalty; accordingly, it can alter its strategies to develop similar products, services, or brand positioning.

Competitive landscape analysis is a continuous process as competitors also evolve and develop as per the market demand. It involves collecting data related to competitors’ customers, distributors, marketing plans, and brand positioning; analyzing the data; and finally, from the results, assessing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

Companies do not exist in a vacuum; therefore, it is essential to understand how different players in the market are operating. Through competition profiling, a company can gain knowledge to make informed decisions about product planning, future strategies, pricing, and acquisition policies. Competitive landscape analysis requires expertise, and it is ideal to engage an experienced market research company to carry out this exercise. These research agencies have the necessary resources, experience, and understanding to collect relevant data and analyze it to present important facts. In today’s fiercely competitive market, competitive landscape analysis cannot be ignored.