CHAPTER 3

INDUSTRY AND ENVIRONMENTAL

ANALYSIS: BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES
IDENTIFICATION
PRINCIPLES, TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES
A. COMPETITION
 Principles of Competition

Competition is the quest for achieving

superior results, the best results in a specific field, in
business, in sports, or in social activities, the best
results compared to others. Competition is the fight
for a limited resource, for a prize or for an award.
The fighting around abilities and skills often takes
place as a somehow organized contest with rules
that are agreed upon to be followed in order to
accurately measure the results.
 Tools of Competition

Typically companies have relied on SWOT

(strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and
threats) methods for competitor analysis. It’s a
great way of pinpointing internal and external
factors that affect your company. You can find
threats, work on weaknesses and promote your
strengths, allowing you get your market share of
the business.
EXAMPLE OF TOOLS

 Positioning Comparisons
 Product Comparisons

 Websites

 SEO

 Social Media

 Blogging
 Positioning comparison - this is a matter of a
branding and general positioning. How does you
brand behave, act and present itself in the
market? And how does your competitors? By
comparing both, you can tell whereare the
strongest feature of your barand and have insight
on how to develop them further.

 Product comparison - advertising campaign,

discountsand special are common knowledge
easily found in websites, brochures, TV
advertising etc. What are you competitors
offering that you aren't? What discounts or prices
are working for them and how do yours compare?
 Websites - these days, customers google your
business or go directly to your website before you
even know they're customers. So, analyzing your
competitor's websites is a great place to start.

 SEO - there are numerous tools to help

determine how your website performs. There are
also ways of measuring keywords and key terms,
all of which drive site visits. If you can measure
something, you can prove it. To get a better view
of your market share you can analize your
competitor's site traffic too.
 Social Media - a key factor in this marketing
climate is analyzing the integration of social
media into their marketing strategy.

 Blogging - "is your competitor driving websites

traffic by blogging?", "How often do they blog",
"Does the content represent solely their product
or spread industry knowledge?". Subscribe to
your main competitors' blogs. Check out
customer engagement through shares and
comments. Are your competitors' blog full of
dynamic well-written pieces worth sharing, or
pictures and fun stories? Find out what makes
their blogs successful.
 Techniques of Competition

 Technique #1: Create Utility and Usefulness with

your Product

 Technique #2: Change your Pricing

 Technique #3: Emphasize Your Product’s Key Benefit

to the Customer

 Technique #4: Deliver True Value of Your Product to

your Customer
B. CUSTOMER
 Principles of Customer

 Speed
 Accuracy
 Transparency
 Accessibility
 Empowerment
 Friendliness
 Efficiency
 Speed - speed or responsiveness shows up in
almost all studies as a main determinant for
servicequality. According to a Warwick
University study, responsiveness has the highest
impact on both customer satisfaction (fast
response) and dissatisfaction (slow response).

 Accuracy - besides being fast, your service

answers should, obviously, be correct. Johnton's
study shows that customers regard accuracy as
the minimum. It won't raise customer
satisfacton, but inaccuracy definitely causes
dissatisfaction
 Transparency - "what the hell is taki ng so long!?
We all recognize this feeling. Not knowing what
is happening or what makes us feel uneasy.
Which is why transparency is just as critcal to
service as speed and accuracy.
 Accessibility - if your customer has a problem,
how easy is it for him or her to get in touch? For
along time, the entre customer service theory
focused on delighting the customer-- on eceeding
expectations. A research by CEB, however,
showed that it pays of more to focus on reducing
customer effort instead. While effort also depends
on factors like speed, accuracy, and accessibility
it is biggest hurdle.
 Empowerment - we all like to feel in control. A
good service offers this feeling to its customers.

 Friendliness - there's one major downside to

eCommerce. It has stripped away most of the
human interactions that used to be common
place in everyday transactions. Service
experiences are one of the few remaining moment
of humanity. Yet plenty companies manage to
ruin that as well by making their services
intirely inhumane. They speak in overly formal
language, use service cliches, withhold service
rep identity etc.
 Efficiency - you can have the World's best service,
but what's the use when it's eating up all of your
profits? Efficiency will always be a crucial factor
in customer service. What has changed is
technology; some tools let us bypass yesterday's
trade offs. Take speed and costs. Back when
phone has the only channel, you couldn't offer
fast service at low costs. To offer instant
service,you'd have to maintain an army of idle
phone reps to cover for peak times. Qeueing was
the only way to press cost.
 Tools of Customers

More and more organizations are providing customer

service tools to encourage consumers to have greater
interaction with their brand.

 Online Communities
 Discussion Forums
 Social Media
 Automatic callback
 Live chat
 Customer satisfaction surveys
 Online communities - statistics show that 25% of
people choose to engage with brands because they
"want to join the community of brand fans".
Online communities allow customers to engage
with other customers, give direct feedback on
products, and share their passion for your
product or brand. Maintaining online
communities is the company's opportunity to
monitor customer feedback and improve brand
experience.
 Discussion forums - a forum is a specific type of
online communities creates an opportunity for
crowdsourcing. Here, you can collect and respond
to cutomers feedback. Popular forum will quickly
grow in popularity and become a place where
product expert who many not even work for your
company can combine forces with your own
customer services agent, creating a community
that can chime in about a products or help to
resolve issues in a much more timely matter.
 Social Media - is an essential tool for business of
any size. Maintaining a static social page is not
enough. Nowadays an inactive social media
profile is the online version of having empty
store. Create a social media presence and use it
to engage with customers, connecting with them
and responding to their problems or issuis on a
timely basis.
 Automatic callback - we've all had the unpleasant
experience of being put on hold for an annoyingly
long period of time. By the time an operator is
able to assist you, you're already irritated at
having had to wait for X amount of time. If your
service system allows a user to enter their phone
number for an agent to call them back without
losing their place in the service queue, even
better.
 Live chat - as more people shopping online, there
are people are looking for online support.
Offering a live chat options is another way to
foster a good online experience for your
customers. Live chat option can be used for more
than just customer service questions, its also a
good way to provide information that might
encourage a purchase decision.
 Customers satisfaction survey - are importan at
various touch point, such as after a sale or after
an issue is resolved. Allowing your customers to
give feedback provides you with valuable
information on how tp build a better customer
journey, and it can help instill trust in your
brand. This trust is important to build, because it
can cost five to 15 times more to acquire a new
customer than gain repeat business from an
existing one.
 Customers Techniques
 Engage in active listening
 Highlight understanding
 Be Courteous
 Call the customer by his name
 Go the extra mile
 Ask, don’t demand
 Empower
 Be proactive
 Highlight pros and cons
 Explain
 Use plain language
C. SUPPLIERS
 Principles of Suppliers
 Relationship with applicable laws
 Human rights
 Labour rights and working conditions
 Health and Safety
 Environment
 Privacy, freedom of expression and data protection
 Prohibited Business Practices
 Competition
 Tools to the Suppliers
The following tips will help you to maintain
good relationships.
 Talk to your suppliers regularly.
 Pay your suppliers’ accounts promptly
 Communicate with a supplier before the due date for
payment.
 Build good relations with your current suppliers’
representatives
 Be fair but firm with industry sales representatives
 Avoid rush orders
 Monitor the financial position
 Adress any issue of concern in relationship with your
suppliers as they arise.
 Refer damaged or faulty goods to the supplier
promptly, with supporting documentation.
 Be prepared to review and renegotiate the terms of
trade with your supplier from time-to-time.
 Techniques to the Suppliers

 Regular communications - one important quality of

managing your suppliers is regular and constant
communication. Remember your suppliers aren't
mind readers. If there is some aspect of your business
relationship you feel they could be doing better, you
need to let them know.if your goals for the next
quarter have suddenly changed, you need to make
sure they're aware of that fact as soon as possible.
 Putting objectives in place - another important step
you can take to better manage your relationship with
your supplier has to do with putting objectives in
place at the beginning of the product process.
 Regular meeting - are another way to insure effective
communication between your business and your
supplier. By regularly having an in-person meeting
with a representative from your supplier, you'll be
able to more easily communicate certain goals and
objectives that can be difficult to get across in text.
 Putting things in writing - one of the most
important things you can do when it comes to
managing your relationship with your supplier
involves putting things in writing. For the business
that operates in multiple location there are
professional document sharing solutions to help
manage your project and relationship effectively.
 Make sure your focused on your supplier's need
alongsides your
D. COMPETITORS
 Principles of Competitors

It can be hard to compete with the rest of

your field, and daunting to see the best
performing in it especially if you’re starting at
the bottom.

 Race Yourself And Set The Tone

 Don’t Sell To prospects
 Make a Plan to be No. 1 in your Segment
 Grow Faster than Everyone else
 Tools of Competitors
Getting to know your competitor’s strengths
and weaknesses is the foundation on which to
base good strategy. For brands, the growth of
online activity has seen competitor analysis
methods, metrics and tools blossom.
 Similar Web - widely used as a traffic estimation tool,
similar wed has loads of cools features that let you
peek behind the scenes at your competitor's strategy.
Find out which channels are driving traffic to your
competion--with stats for traffic distribution, top
organic & paid search keywords, top ad networks,
audience interests, and competing websites.
 Audience - this service will help you anlyze your
competitors' audience based on their Twitter
followers. See stats on location, gender, interest and
the languages of thise who follow your competitor.
 Builtwith - dig deep into your competitor's website
technologies and tools with this handy service.
Builtwith can uncover their web server, advertising
services they use, analytics technologies, and much
more. You can even find out which emails services a
given website is using.
 Simply Measured - a free tool from SimplyMeasured
called Facebook Competitive Analysis can easily
compare your Facebook fan page with tha of your
rival. It will show you general engagement stats for
post and a valuable metric of 'Engagement as % of
fans'.
 Rival IQ - will analize your social media performance
across all the major social networks and compare it to
your competition. Add your competitor's website to