Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

I have never had the luxury to find ready prepared competitive anayses and SWOT analyses. How you do it is with a combination of imagination and lots hard research work. Here are a couple of primters on SWOT to give you the basics:

https://www.netmba.com/strategy/swot/

https://www.quickmba.com/strategy/swot/

Don't forget that up front of SWOT, you have to do the market analysis: Who are your customers, what are their needs, and how best do you group them into segments. You need this before competitive SWOT because you want to make sure you gear it how well the competition is at meeting those customer needs and you want to address SWOT input to each segment - you may find a segment where the competition is weak, for instance. You also want to understand the market from a regulatory point (government inpact), market trends, and economic point of view, which are important to SWOT. Also, before I do competitve SWOT, I do a SWOT on my own company because the information is generally more readily available and sets the framework.

So now, competitive SWOT: I dig information for the SWOT from several sources. One is from the customer's website. On the website, you can read the press releases, look at the product portfolio, the sales channels, culture, management team, financial resources, partnerships, and so forth. This is plain old detective work where you put yourself in the place of a customer and picture how easy and attractive it is to buy a product from them. For the products, I will lay out information and specifications for competitive products versus my company products and compare one-one-one and also as a portfolio against the customer needs. Then, I will search the web on google and other engines to see what else I can find out about the competitors. This is all I can do from my cozy office and the next step is to go talk to people: my company's sales people, customers, competitive sales people (like call their customer service line). I ask open-ended questions like for a customer, "Tell me about your experience with XYZ company's products" or for a sales guy, "how do you sell our products against XYZ company."

With all this data, I can begin to see a company's strategies. Much of it at this point is educated guesses. So now, more imagination: I put myself in the place of the competitors and craft a strategy based on what I know, writing down assumptions and questions as I go. When I have a strategy, then with the questions and assumptions, I validate it - by researching their website and googling, talking to salesmen, customers, etc.

One last last point: This isn't a one time deal! You don't put away your analysis until next year. You have to continuously update this information as you get information through the year.

Another point: Yes, this is a lot of work and takes a long time. This is why the analysis isn't readily available. If you are in a hurry, don't have time, or the imagination, you can buy the information (if the market is well studied and mature) or you can hire a consultant to do this for you.

Hope this helps....

Wayde

SWOT template:

https://www.businessballs.com/swotanalysisfreetemplate.htm