Summary

Module 1: Fundamentals of Marketing

Session 5: Understanding competition and environment

Business decisions for an organisation are not only governed by internal factors, but also by external
factors such as competition and other environmental factors. Strategies related to pricing, product
technology, and at times even communication are based on how the competitive environment around a
firm is developing. Even though competitive and environmental analysis seem like herculean tasks, models
such as Porter’s Five Forces help in simplifying the process.

Porter’s five forces is a popular concept used by marketing and business managers to define the
attractiveness of a market. According to the model, the different powers in a market can be clustered into
five types of threats to a business:

Analysing a new product or service along these five forces helps businesses to understand the factors
affecting profitability in a specific industry and can help make more informed decisions: whether to enter a

© Copyright. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved

specific market; whether to increase capacity in a specific market and how to develop competitive
strategies. An example for understanding Porter’s five forces is the cell phone industry in India. Since the
entry of multiple players such as Micromax, Oppo, Gionee and others, competition for existing players such
as Apple, Samsung, Nokia has increased tremendously. This has led to an increase in the buyer’s power due
to the plethora of choices available, resulting in decreasing cell phone prices.

You should be able to:

© Copyright. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved

Disclaimer: All content and material on the UpGrad website is copyrighted material, either belonging to
UpGrad or its bonafide contributors and is purely for the dissemination of education. You are permitted
to access print and download extracts from this site purely for your own education only and on the
following basis:

1. You can download this document from the website for self-use only.
2. Any copies of this document, in part or full, saved to disc or to any other storage medium may
only be used for subsequent, self-viewing purposes or to print an individual extract or copy for non-
commercial personal use only.
3. Any further dissemination, distribution, reproduction, copying of the content of the document
herein or the uploading thereof on other websites or use of content for any other
commercial/unauthorized purposes in any way which could infringe the intellectual property rights of
UpGrad or its contributors, is strictly prohibited.
4. No graphics, images or photographs from any accompanying text in this document will be used
separately for unauthorised purposes.
5. No material in this document will be modified, adapted or altered in any way.
6. No part of this document or UpGrad content may be reproduced or stored in any other web site
or included
in any public or private electronic retrieval system or service without UpGrad’s prior written permission.
7. Any rights not expressly granted in these terms are reserved.

© Copyright. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved