Understanding The Competition Is A Crucial Business Strategy

Competition is prevalent in various aspects of life, including sports, school, and jobs. Everyone at some point in their lifetime will have to compete against others in order to achieve a goal or earn a prize. It’s how the world has worked for a long time; it’s survival of the fittest and this minor competition between everyone is how we have continuously gotten smarter, faster, and stronger. Competition is necessary to a certain degree, but how much is too much? It’s definitely not a bad thing, and as long as there’s a healthy amount, it can be beneficial because it fosters self-improvement, and it will push people to go all out and try their absolute best.

Competitive intelligence is a great tool to use in marketing research. It is “A systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing external information that can affect your company 's plans, decisions, and operations” (“Definition competitive intelligence“, 2011, para. 2). A company can use competitive intelligence to learn more about their competition and figure out ways to better market to their company against their competition.

Imagine you are part of a strategic planning group at a large corporation that is considering developing a new proposed product. The marketing director has asked your team to do a competitive market analysis to determine the product’s potential success. The analysis will focus on your primary competitor in the product’s market.

Our company is located in downtown Pittsburgh. Based off of location alone, we are the leading competitor in our region. I discuss below how we can use this as a competitive advantage with analytics. River’s Casino has multiple employees and departments within the organization who contribute to competing with analytics in various ways.

The importance of competitive intelligence and analysis in regards to the development of Kudler Fine Food’s tactics offers the consumer the opportunity to tell them what they do or don’t like, which store they have shopped in, how the learned about Kudler Fine Food’s, and why they shopped there and why they will shop there again. Any tactic a business can use in analyzing their own web-site through the eyes of their customer is a very strong use of competitive intelligence.

Visiting competitors websites can reveal information about new products or projects, potential alliances, trends in budgeting, advertising strategies used, financial strength, and more

The three generic strategies were identified by Porter (1985), who argues that in order to sustain

Companies often use a (CPM) – Competitive Profile Matrix to better understand their external environment as well as their competition within the industry they operate. The matrix identifies a company’s key competitors and draws a comparison using the industry’s critical success factors. The analysis also reveals a company’s strengths and weaknesses against its competition, making them aware of problematic areas needing improvement and also areas that are doing well and need to be protected (See Appendix F).

Competitive analysis is an important part of your business plan, there are a lot of different alternatives in the market, costumers usually look for different sets of values to focus on, benefit levels and what does the item include when they are choosing where to buy the product from. Even though costumers usually choose similar products to those alternatives, and that’s where competition is created.

With the development of economics, market power is a heated topic. Motta (2005) states that market power refers to the ability of firms to set prices above marginal costs in the book called Competition Policy: Theory and Practice. George A. Hay thinks “The modern concept of the market power focuses on the potential for consumers to suffer injury through the actions of a single firm or a group of firms acting in concert”(1991) in his essay about market power in antitrust. Market power is one of the standards that can measure whether a firm is a monopolist or a competitor. Generally, a monopolistic firm has high market share and possesses large market power in its industry.

-The costs which can be borne, and the investment required to compete in the industry.

“Competitive strategy involves positioning a business to maximize the value of the capabilities that distinguish it from its competitor’s” (Porter 1980:47). A successful business plan requires first and foremost the formation of an appropriate strategy. Through the implementation of a suitable strategy, the company is able to obtain its own industry niche and gain an understanding of its customers (Porter 1985). Whichever strategy is adopted it must be adequately integrated within the firms goals and missions to achieve a competitive advantage (Parker and Helms 1992).

Michael E. Porter, associate professor published the article titled “How Competitive Forces shape Strategy” in Harvard Business Review in 1979. This article is retitled as “The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy” and published in Harvard Business Review in 2008. Michael E. Porter developed the model of Five Competitive Forces which is defined as “Competitive Strategy – Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors”. It has become a main device for analyzing an organizations structure in strategic practices.

To identify an appropriate strategy for a given industry one must look into the external and internal factors influencing the company. This Schnell Air report has been conceived with a triple objective in mind: to provide the Schnell Air Board with (i) a brief and compelling synthesis of Schnell Air’s competitive market environment overview since it entered the Innsbruck – Turin route in January 1997 as compared to prior to its entry, (ii) analyse the available data to establish the extent of predatory pricing strategies being plotted by the two existing duopolies – Air Turin and Innsbruck Air and (iii) by using a Game Theoretic approach model and highlight the affect of a 4th daily service on the same route given the

Knowing who your competitors are, and what they are offering, can help you to make your products, services and marketing stand out. It will enable you to set your prices competitively and help you to respond to rival marketing campaigns with your own initiatives. You can use this knowledge to create marketing strategies that take advantage of your competitors ' weaknesses, and improve your own business performance. You can also assess any threats posed by both new entrants to your market and current competitors. This knowledge will help you to be realistic about how successful you can be.