Evaluating Your Competition

Name: Evaluating Your Competition
Author: Dr. Jason Lee Carter

Learn how evaluating your competition sets you up for success

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Course: On-Demand

(calm music) These lessons will walk you through using knowledge of your competitors to identify your strengths versus theirs. From there, you'll learn how to apply analytical tools to create business strategies that accomplish greater operational profits and meets the needs of the targeted business environment. From a business perspective, competition can be defined as a variety of economic entities competing with one another to secure a greater share of the market. Understanding your competitors can help you increase customer preference for your company over your competition. This can often be achieved through organizing your company for greater efficiency and effectiveness, compared to your competitors, creating a competitive advantage. A competitive advantage is something that sets apart an organization from other companies. Giving its target customers a perception of uniqueness or specialty that competitors don't offer or can't copy. The challenge lies in understanding who your competitors are and what they're doing. The process of competitor identification is a form of research, which is the collection of information that identifies a set of activities or ideas that affect strategic development to find a competitive advantage. This means a company can find information about key competitor's actions that attract customers, keep customers, and eventually pull customers away from their competition. Using a competitor array can be one of the quickest and easiest ways to understand your competition and to properly identify companies that are key to your operations. This is a matrix style grid that compares your company's performance against your competitors. First, you can clarify a few things. The market, what are you selling? Is it a tangible product, an intangible service or both? Key competitors. Examples include the top most profitable companies in the market. And the customers. Are the customers' purchase decisions based on convenience, price, availability, et cetera? Those customer purchase decisions comprise the key industry factors for success that categorize the targeted customers' preferences. You can prioritize those customer preferences by ranking them according to what percentage of customers' focus is centered on it. For example, customer shopping for a new car might value price most so price should receive a higher percentage ranking. So out of four qualities, it received a 0.4 ranking or 40% of the customer's preference. The goal is to have all rankings sum up to one which represents a hundred percent. Next, you can assign the ranking of any factor to each competitor and your own company by comparing it to the customer preference success factor. Ultimately asking who best provides customers with their preferred qualities. Once each competitor receives their preferences rank, you can multiply those rankings by the priority to achieve the percent weightage. The final step is to add the weightages of each firm in the row at the bottom. So a clear identification can be made as to which company has greater success and customer satisfaction. In the example, firm A seems to be top performing which would make them your key competitor. Identifying competitive influences such as the competitor array model in this lesson can help a company better understand what customers think of products or services. The results can help them generate a better strategy for attracting more of the markets' customers that builds on enhancing the company's competitive advantage. With a better understanding of a competitor's actions, the company can compare those actions with their own and design a strategy that gives them a competitive advantage. With awareness of the effectiveness of your own products and services, you can generate efficient analytical methods to compare to your competitors. Once you understand yourself better, particularly in relation to your competition, you'll be closer to devising strategies to gain increased customer preference. This leads to increased positioning in the market and that's the competitive advantage all companies seek.

Beginner Provider : Dr. Jason Lee Carter 6 Lessons · 26m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Urdu, Chinese

Course Description

The need for understanding the groups of people we’re competing against is one of the most important skills to have when managing a group of people for any purpose, business or otherwise. While this might be easy to say, how exactly can we come to understand who our competitors are and what we can do about them?

In KnowledgeCity’s Evaluating Your Competition course, you’ll learn the basics of how to pinpoint your main competitors and then analyze their offerings, market placement, customer base, and more. Then, you’ll learn how to take that knowledge and apply it to your own products and services in order to identify personal strengths and weaknesses in comparison to the competition. With that self-evaluation and data, you’ll have the skills to use analytical tools to logically design business strategies that accomplish greater business operational profits with plans that can meet the targeted business environment, customers, and eventual market share.

What You'll Learn

Identify your top competitors and pinpoint who you are competing against
Analyze competitors' offerings, market placement, and customer base
Gauge your own company's strengths and weaknesses
Determine the value of your products and services
Compare and analyze your competition against your own company
Use analytical tools to design business strategies for greater operational profits

Key Takeaways

Understanding the groups you compete against is one of the most important skills when managing a group of people for any purpose.
Evaluating competitors involves analyzing their offerings, market placement, and customer base.
Applying competitor knowledge to your own products and services helps identify your strengths and weaknesses in comparison.
Self-evaluation and competitive data support logically designed business strategies aimed at greater operational profits.
Effective strategies can be planned to meet the targeted business environment, customers, and eventual market share.

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I learn in the Evaluating Your Competition course?

You will learn the basics of how to pinpoint your main competitors and analyze their offerings, market placement, customer base, and more, then apply that knowledge to identify strengths and weaknesses in your own products and services.

Who is this course for?

It is designed for those managing a group of people for any purpose, business or otherwise, who need to understand the groups they are competing against.

What topics does the course cover?

The course covers research, evaluation, and competitor analysis; evaluating your own products and services; knowing your market and business environment; identifying your competitors; and analyzing your competition.

What skills will I gain from this course?

You will gain skills to gauge your company's strengths and weaknesses, identify market placement and top competitors, determine the value of your products and services, and use analytical tools to design business strategies for greater operational profits.

Is there a way to check my understanding?

Yes, the course includes a Test Your Knowledge lesson.

Professional Certifications and Continuing Education Units (CEUs)

Project Management Institute (PMI®)

Professional Development Units (PDUs): 0.5

Certification Program Categories:

Ways of WorkingPower SkillsBusiness Acumen

KnowledgeCity has been reviewed and approved by the PMI® Authorized Training Partner Program. Users can maintain your PMI credentials by earning PDUs from KnowledgeCity qualified courses in Project Management, Business Management, Leadership and many others.