Karen, Strategy Specialist at GBC, 2 min read, 6 min video
“The Best Technique For Revealing The Market Positions of Your Industry Competitors”
In any industry, companies commonly sell in different price/quality ranges. Their products and/or services would appeal to different types of buyers, and have different geographic coverage. We’d all love to be attractively positioned however not all can be, some are positioned more attractively than others. An integral part of a business owner, manager or CEO’s job is to analyse the company’s industry competitive structure by, understanding which of the company’s competitors are strongly positioned and, which are weakly positioned. The best technique for revealing the market positions of industry competitors are is strategic group mapping.
First and foremost, the strategic group map consists of those competitors that have similar approaches and positions in the market within which the organisation operates. The most important revelation of a strategic group map is identifying which key competitors are close rivals and which are distant rivals. A company’s closest rival will be positioned in the same quadrant as they are and generally have similar: product lines, compete the same on price/quality/image, and service the same geographic locations. The second thing to be gleaned from strategic group maps is that not all positions on the map are equally attractive. There are two main reasons why some positions are more attractive than others: 1) Competitive pressure from the industry five forces may cause profits to vary across different strategic groups. 2) In some strategic groups, the industry’s driving forces may favour certain positions and less so in others. So, in a nutshell, strategic group maps is a powerful analytical tool that entails drawing conclusions about which part of the map is the best place to be and why. It also entails which company’s are destined to prosper and why. On the flip side, it also entails which companies are destined to struggle and why?
With over two decades of strategic planning experience, we built StratPlan to enable the use of strategic group maps easily. It is a powerful tool and without question, deserved a spot in StratPlan. Here’s a short video to show you how to evaluate your industry rivals’ positions using strategic group maps in StratPlan.
I hope you find the video useful. Please leave me your comments. I would love to hear from you…
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