SWOT Your Competition

An analysis of your competitors' Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) from an outside perspective can give you a good idea as to how they're positioned, and so help you in determining your own market strategy.

First identify carefully who your closest competitors are. For instance, an upmarket restaurant in an exclusive part of town may not consider a neighbourhood drive-thru as direct competition.

Now look at how they compete. What do they do well and what do they do badly? Are they bigger? Smaller? Growing? Contracting? To what extent does each competitor represent a threat to your business?

Other things to look at in your competitor SWOT (this is by no means a comprehensive list):

How many people do they employ?
What are their main and secondary activities?
Where do they advertise?
What's their real benefit? Will customers believe them? Why?
What's their value proposition?

Once you've identified as much as you can, rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, then your primary competitors, on the following areas:

Product — quality, features, range, reliability

Customers — size of customer base, service standard before and after sale

Marketing — advertising volume and effectiveness, guarantees and warranties, payment terms, packaging, price.