Competitive Position Evaluation

"Competitiveness entails concentrating resources on those activities where the company
can gain dominating expertise to serve its target customers"

A competitor analysis is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors:

* Reveals strength of firm’s competitive position
* Shows how firm stacks up against rivals
* Indicates whether firm is at a competitive advantage/disadvantage against each rival
* Provides insight into how firm can build its strategy on its competitive strengths
* Provides insight into how firm can make strategic moves to alleviate its competitive weaknesses


One common and useful technique is constructing a competitor array. The steps include:

* define your industry - scope and nature of the industry
* determine who your competitors are
* determine who your customers are and what benefits they expect
* determine what the key success factors are in your industry
* rank the key success factors by giving each one a weighting - The sum of all the weightings must add up to one.
* rate each competitor on each of the key success factors - this can best be displayed on a two dimensional matrix - competitors along the top and key success factors down the side.
* multiply each cell in the matrix by the factor weighting.
* sum columns for a weighted assessment of the overall strength of each competitor relative to each other.

An example of a competitor array follows:



Based on material presented in "Beat the Competition: How to Use Competitive Intelligence to Develop Winning Business Strategies", Ian Gordon, Basil Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK, 1989.

Some Key performance indicators would be:
- product innovation ability
- distribution networks
- customer focus

Competitive strengths and competitive advantages empower a company to improve its long-term market position!