It’s important to understand what is happening with your business. The first thing you should be doing is researching your competitors, studying your own brand’s strengths/weaknesses, so you can brainstorm and plan accordingly with your team. When you understand the entire business in and out, it makes it so much easier to work on what’s best for your brand.
There’s 2 ways I work on brand analysis: 1st is Research and Analysis of primary competitors and 2nd is creating a SWOT Analysis chart. You might get surprised how your entire vision for your brand could change after completing this analysis.
- Research and analyzing your competitors
– List your top 5 to 10 competitors in your market.
– Find out what their targeted customers are.
– Categorize all their products and services.
– Create a summary of their price points for every category.
– Determine the unique selling points (USP) of your competition.
– Identify their strategies that you think that they use effectively.
DIRECT COMPETITION is the competition among companies that offer products or services of the same categories. Researching about direct competition is important because it helps distinguish the USP and create differentiation. It also helps save time when building up a customer profile for your brand or business.
INDIRECT COMPETITION is the competition among companies that offer products and services that satisfy the same results such as reveal untapped opportunities, understand your audience better and create new marketing plans plus open up collaborations!
2. Create a SWOT Analysis – After studying your competitors, a SWOT analysis helps you create a specific plan of attack. A SWOT means Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Basically, you make 4 boxes with strengths on the upper left, weaknesses on the upper right, opportunities on the lower left and threats on the lower right. Here’s what you write in each box:
Strengths:
– What advantages does your brand have?
– What does your target market see your brand as a strength?
– What is the 1 thing that your brand does better than anyone else?
– What type of resources do you have that others don’t have?
– What’s your brand’s USP?
Weaknesses:
– What disadvantages does your brand have?
– What do people in the market see as your weakness?
– What can you improve on as a brand?
– What factors make you lose sales?
– What should you avoid doing as a brand?
Opportunities:
– What opportunities do you see?
– What specific trends are you aware that others are not seeing?
– What local or online events can you leverage on?
– What changes are happening in the following: technology, government policies related to your field, social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle factors and product specifics
Threats:
– What are the obstacles that you are facing now?
– What changing tech and trends might threaten your business?
– What are your competitors doing much better than you are?
– Does your company have bad debts or cash flow problems?
– Is any of your weaknesses a serious threat to your business growth?
A SWOT analysis can be timely and overwhelming for first timers, but it helps you have a better understanding of your own company which means making the right or better choices for your brand overall. It’s one of the most highly used types of analysis companies partake in, big or small. Getting used to doing those at least 1 to 2x a month as a whole makes a world of difference if you feel you are getting lost somewhere in between your business efforts.
Question of the day: How do you make an analysis for your brand?
December 20, 2020 Author Mike Ulep
Both techniques are quite effective in determining the life of the business. They both have their pros and cons. But for me, generating a SWOT Analysis would be better because you can create a grid analysis of the pros and cons of the business.
December 20, 2020 Author Khel Lawrence
Creating a business analysis would be effective as this could have a detailed report on the business itself as it discusses several aspects such as the management, marketing, technical, and financial analysis. In the academe, when students create a business analysis, I always check these four aspects. the SWOT Analysis is just a small part of the marketing analysis.
January 26, 2021 Author rhona
SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) is crucial to every business or organization making it an indispensable exercise before making any key business decision, whether it is overhauling the brand strategy or rolling out new products. Needless to say, it is a pat on the back for the strengths gained, a humble reminder of your weaknesses that need to be worked upon, a push to explore the opportunities for growth and meet the threats from current competitors.
January 26, 2021 Author jocelyn
SWOT Analysis is still effective, but NOT VERY effective, in my opinion. I’m going to be as straight to the point as possible:
SWOT analysis analyzes the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of your business or even yourself in a certain industry or environment you want to compete in. This will give you crucial data for your decision making.
But I want to make an assumption here. I assume that by saying effective here, you mean having to ensure survival in the industry or even becoming the leader. If that’s the case, there’s one more effective activity (compared to SWOT) that you will have to engage in, which I call “THE SEARCH”. (From my experience).
February 24, 2021 Author Genesis
MOST Analysis can be use.
The term MOST stands for its four elements
M-Mission
O-Objective
S-Strategy
T-Tactics
February 24, 2021 Author Genesis
PESTLE Analysis
There are always environmental factors which influence business in its strategic planning. These key factors are commonly known as PESTLE which stands for
P- Political
E – Economic
S – Social
T – Technological
L- Legal
E – Environmental
February 24, 2021 Author Genesis
I learned that CATWOE is a generic thinking way for business analysis to understand what a business is trying to achieve. CATWOE is an acronym for
Clients
Actors
Transformation
World View
Owner
Environmental Constraints
February 24, 2021 Author Nigel
Analyzing your business process. Discuss with key personnel about the process. Then create a business flowchart for each process. Conduct a brainstorming session to find improvements in the process. Improvements might reduce costs, diminish the cycle time, and simplify a process.
February 24, 2021 Author Edward
Real time monitoring, also called Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). It is useful to know how your processes are running right now. Detect process that are sleeping, seeing how many pending task has a business unit or a particular person, showing how long in average are your task waiting to be completed and so on. This is real time data, and it is useful to manage your business as it runs.
February 24, 2021 Author Edward
Historical monitoring, using Business Intelligence (BI). It is useful to know how your processes run in a time window, for example last year, last quarter, last month. See how long it took in average to complete a business process, slice down to see how long it took in each step of this process, slice down to see how long it took to each user. This is historical data, and it is useful to detect bottlenecks and improvement opportunities.