Key strategies for conducting a successful competitive landscape analysis

What is the marketing landscape?

In a nutshell, marketing landscape analysis is the study of many aspects of businesses and industries including important markets, strategies, competitors, strengths, and characteristics. Analysis of the market landscape helps one to more effectively predict and understand their focused market and new opportunities. Using this analysis, one can predict the status of the target market by monitoring the marketing landscape to prepare strategies according to different demographics. Evaluating customers based on their buying behavior (Netscribes Data and Analytics) gives insights into their marketing landscape and how they compare to competitors. For example, if you are a company that is into software selling to corporations and one/few of your competitors start selling software to school/government organizations, you need to rethink your marketing or product offering strategies. Using this competitive landscape analysis, Netscribes help you to shape your strategies as well as impact analysis to serve niche markets.

Related reading: Market landscape analysis

Steps to conduct market landscape study and competitive landscape analysis

Identify objectives and scope of market and competitive landscape

The first step in conducting market mapping and competitive landscape analysis is to identify the objective of the analysis and determine the key areas of the analysis that will help to resolve problems. With a clear goal of study, one should determine the scope of analysis. This includes what type of organizations and entities should be included. Some of the key dimensions to consider while doing this step includes:

• What is their market positioning?
• What kind of pricing policies competitors follow?
• Who are all their ideal clients?
• How good are their product and service offerings?
• What kind of customer benefits do they provide?
• What are their internal functions (e.g. regulator, funders, or service providers)
• Geographical coverage (e.g. specific region or country, global presence)

Narrow it down all these characteristics within a few broad categories or a broad set of within a narrow category for easy understanding or representation. For example, organizations of all types serving are segregated based on high income individuals, middle income, or age of gender group. Also, companies can be segregated as direct or indirect competitors in different geographies.

Let’s take an example of this, company A is in the business of selling designer apparel, and companies B and C are their direct competitors. Company D is a company that sells shoes and jewelry, and they also target the same market as Company A. Thus, Company D would be an indirect competitor. Indirect competitors are not in the same industry as Company A but may offer a similar product or service to the target audience.

Outline dimensions and key factors for research

Decide the key data points to collect about each entity. Many of these will be the dimensions identified in the above stage in addition to some other parameters. Consider the following factors while conducting target competitive landscape analysis:

• Geographics focus
• Size of organization
• Type of organization
• Number of beneficiaries served
• Number of services and products

After collecting all this information and start analysis of this information stating what it means to your objective.

Collect information and complete research

Once you have your goals set and the scope of the research, next can conduct targeted research to map the selected field. Research methods may include primary research (consumer interviews, online surveys, holding in-person from a focused group, etc.), secondary research (examining competitors’ websites, reading company records, analysis of technological developments, assessing the current economic situation, etc.), and brainstorming a list of organizations with key stakeholders. The following questions can be taken under consideration while data collection:

• Where are competitors focusing their marketing efforts?
• How effective is their consumer engagement model?
• What is their technological incorporation?
• What are their future product/marketing strategies?
• How are they managing their webpage and social media accounts?

Be sure to consider several different research methods when you begin. Make sure you are collecting all the relevant information to assemble your market landscape.

Netscribes with its in-house primary and secondary research abilities, helps organizations to collect and analyze all relevant and momentary aspects for their need and future strategy developments.

Analysis of information and implication

After gathering all required data, you need to synthesize your findings. Identify where your organization is unique or what are the areas of improvement. Tools that help in analysis of information includes:

• SWOT analysis
• PEST analysis
• Porter’s five forces analysis
• Strategic group analysis
• Perceptual mapping

Final market landscape represents the story of your research, evaluates findings, and demonstrates learnings and opportunities. This will help organization leadership to guide marketing and communications strategy. 

Please note building a market landscape is a continuous process and one need to keep track of new development or innovation in the market to ensure your business stays ahead of the curve. 

Case study

Let’s understand market landscape with case study of Café Coffee Day and how they make out against the competition:

Café Coffee Day (CCD) is an Indian multinational chain of coffeehouses, far outpacing competitors like Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Costa, and McCafé. CCD’ rapid growth can partly be attributed to its unique techniques for attracting and retaining customers. They produce coffee on its very own land of 20,000 acres and the biggest maker of arabica beans in Asia, sent out to different nations including the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

CCD coffee and drinks have long been high-end products, and consumers are willing to pay extra for excellent quality. The equipment used to make coffee is of the highest quality. These coffee machines are also utilized by corporations and other commercial places like railway stations and airports.

Placement of CCD locations in high-traffic areas such as city centers, malls, and busy roadways is one of their key strategies. CCD has deployed new O-Zone Internet technology to communicate directly with customers. Rewards members can use their accounts to place orders ahead of time, reducing wait times in the store or drive-thru.

CCD’ competitive landscape analysis comprises several aspects. The company can establish a market for premium offerings and the entire CCD experience by employing a product strategy of differentiation. However, during Covid-19 companies faced high losses and closed its 67% stores in past three years. Changing consumer behavior and needs with rising local competition forces CCD to completely transform their business strategies in the current year for sustainable business.

Topmost market and competitive landscape analysis trends to look for in 2023:

• Incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in market landscape study
• Experiential marketing to engage customers through real-world events or interactions
• Automated marketing to eliminate costs
• Executive branding (Business leader marketing)
• Online unity to maintains a social media presence consistently across multiple platforms

Netscribes can help enterprises to study their market landscape in following manners:

• Determine product/business future direction: Strategy building, consumer analytics, e-commerce management, financial assets management, M&A activities and many more
•  Establish company’s unique value position: By analyzing competitive landscape, product or service engagement and many more
• Understanding market perception: Through market surveys
• To create competitive benchmarking: Through our inhouse research and innovation capabilities

Netscribes’ technology research and market research solutions allows organizations to stay on top of emerging trends for a competitive advantage.  For more on the latest trends, contact us.

Based on insights by Husen Limdiwala – Manager, Market Research team