Competitive analysis for your startup

December 5, 2011 Leave a comment

Businesses happen in highly complex and competitive environment. It’s important to understand strengths and weaknesses your current and potential competitors.  This makes it very important for startups to understand and analyze their competitors and frame their growth strategies [both offensive and defensive] accordingly. In order to understand your competitors thoroughly, it’s impertinent that you do a systematic analysis and assessment rather than relying on informal knowledge and chunks of data that you might ‘know’.

Things that you need to know about your competitors include,

  • List of direct and potential competitors [make a list of 5 each]
  • Their strengths and weaknesses
  • What are their products/services and their USP
  • How does their product differs from your offering
  • What are their key operations strategy and how do they advertise
  • What’s the state of their business? How has been their growth in past 3 years?

In order to answer these questions, you need to develop separate competitor profile for each one of them. This kind of in-depth information will give you competitive advantage over them. You can deploy strategies through product differentiation, price discrimination, focussed advertising and sales promotions to get successful with your product offering. The competitor’s profile should include information on the,

  • Company’s background and structure
  • Financial info on their growth
  • Complete product information comprising of array of products, rate of new products development, R & D, patents and IPs, brand strength, etc.
  • Marketing strategies and their market share, alliances and geographic coverage, distribution channels, and their pricing strategies
  • Production process and operational strategies
  • Key composition in terms of human capital

You will have to get such information from both within the company and outside. Some sources for gathering information could be,

  1. Look for their website on the internet and study all the information given carefully. Also look on internet if anyone else is talking about them. Google them extensively to find info about their offerings. Check web-logs for reviews.
  2. Talk to their customers. Conduct a small survey to understand their customer satisfaction and behavior.
  3. Analyze their advertisements in different media to learn about their target audience, product features, benefits, etc.
  4. Read their promotional materials and annual reports to understand their operational strategies and growth patterns.

Doing a competitive analysis can be a challenging and interesting piece of work. You’ll learn a lot about your industry, and your insights will help you position your product better and make your Startup successful.

Filed under Entrepreneurship Tagged with , , , , , ,

Marketing Plan for your startup

December 5, 2011 3 Comments

Even when you have brilliant product and/or service, your startup cannot succeed without effective marketing. And this begins with systematic research and careful planning. It is very dangerous to assume that you already know about your intended market. You need to do market research to make sure you’re on track. Use the market planning process as your opportunity to uncover data and to question your marketing efforts. Your time & efforts will be well spent.

There are two kinds of market research: primary and secondary. Secondary research means using published information such as industry profiles, trade journals, newspapers, magazines, census data, and demographic profiles. This type of information is available in  libraries, industry associations, chambers of commerce, from vendors who sell to your industry, and from government agencies. There are more online sources than you could possibly use. Trade associations and trade publications often have excellent industry-specific data.

Primary research means gathering your own data. For example, you could do your own young crowd count at a proposed café, use the yellow pages to identify competitors, and do surveys or focus-group interviews to learn about consumer preferences. Professional market research can be very costly, but there are many books that show small business owners how to do effective research themselves. In your marketing plan, be as specific as possible; give statistics, numbers, and sources. The marketing plan will be the basis, later on, of the all-important sales projection.

Filed under Entrepreneurship Tagged with , , , ,

Managing finances for your startup

December 5, 2011 Leave a comment

Unless your rich dad is bankrolling your entire startup without concern for what and how you spend, you need to keep your expenditures under control, and plan your finances well right from the day zero. This is one of the most important Mantra to make your startup successful, especially for the Bootstrappers. Read the full post HERE

Filed under Entrepreneurship Tagged with , , , ,