Big Research for Small Business

SBA Statistics

To prevent failure, it is important to understand why SBAs succeed. Businesses that succeed (and prosper) are well thought-out businesses, that are abundantly capitalized AND have a good understanding of their competitive landscapes.

We help businesses understand their competitive landscapes.

30% of businesses fail within their first two years

50% fail by 5th year

66% fail by 6th year

What the Experts Say About Understanding the Competitive Landscape

“Understanding the competitive forces, and their underlying causes, reveals the roots of an industry’s current profitability while providing a framework for anticipating and influencing competition (and profitability) over time,”

“A healthy industry structure should be as much a competitive concern to strategists as their company’s own position.”

Porter wrote in a Harvard Business Review article.

Understanding the competition is a crucial business activity for any entrepreneur or business executive. Conducting a competitive assessment should be an ongoing process, one in which you continue to deepen your understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.

Every business should gather information about the competition and most already do – even if they don’t formalize it into a competitive research process.

Inc Magazine

“Staying smart on the competitive landscape helps you make very practical decisions around product development, pricing, promotions, messaging, as well as where you fit in the brand landscape.”

“This is so a business can understand the external and internal environments they’re operating in”

Ken Garrison, chief executive officer of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals

“Keeping track of who your competitors are, what people are saying about them, and what they are saying themselves can help you differentiate your business and stay ahead of trends that could impact your business”

Michele Levy, an independent brand strategy consultant

The promise is that by gathering competitive research over time and in a systematic way you will be able to track trends and/or scenarios and be about to act on the research.

Inc Magazine

Here are potential business benefits from conducting market and competitive research:

Identifying Business Success

Measuring Customer Satisfaction
Identifying Market Needs and Customer Problems
Understanding the Customer Evaluation Process

Analyzing the Competition

Identify Top 10 competitors
Analyze competitors marketing “content” & “techniques”, blogs, SEO, PPC, Social Media, etc.
Learn how the competition is better/worse
Prioritize features and releases
Create or test messaging
Measure results of what you’ve done

Adopt Products and Services

Define where there are areas to improve
Test new concepts
Solidify pricing

What We Do

Listen to your goals and objectives
Send you a questionnaire to get to know more about your business and competitors
Set up a way for you to collect emails from customers if you don’t already have one
Work with you to create a survey around your customers
Interview/survey your customers to identify strengths, weaknesses, and unknowns
Interview/survey consumers of your products or services and identify:
- What they use to evaluate their options for your products or services
- What influences most of their decision-making
- Identify, on a scale of 1 to 10, the most and least important items in the decision-making process
Analyze the Competition
- What they are doing well and not well
- How they are going to market and strategies they are using, including online marketing
Provide a full research report with the findings
- Introspective: Your advantages, disadvantages
- Competitors: Advantages, disadvantages, customer profile, marketing techniques & methods, content overview
- Areas of improvement: Product/Service enhancements, marketing, content creation
- Conclusion

WE USE A TIME-TESTED MODEL TO FRAME OUR RESEARCH

“A healthy industry structure should be as much a competitive concern to strategists as their company’s own position.”

Porter wrote in a Harvard Business Review article

Porter's Strategies @ Work

Once your analysis is complete, it’s time to implement a strategy to expand your competitive advantage. To that end, Porter identified three generic strategies that can be implemented in any industry (and in companies of any size)

Your goal is to increase profits. By knowing what customers are willing to pay for an item and pricing products and services according to a full competitive analysis, you can optimize your profits.

Understanding what your competitors offer and how they offer it, along with understanding what your customers want, can give you a great differentiated product or service offering.

A successful implementation means the company selects niche markets in which to sell their goods. It requires an intense understanding of the marketplace, its sellers, buyers and competitors. This is a focal point of Tailor Research study.

There are several examples of how Porter’s model can be applied to various industries. Porter used the example of Jiffy Lube for successful variety-based positioning. A business that he cited had succeeded by solely producing automotive lubricants and with no ancillary products, or services offered. This resulted in faster service, cheaper cost, and a superior product.

Examples of needs-based positioning are Bessemer Trust and Citibank, which gained success by solely targeting clients with investible assets of $5 million and $250 thousand, respectively.

An example of access-based positioning is Carmike Cinemas (sold in 2016 to AMC Theatres), which targeted small town cinema-goers in rural areas. Operating a central corporate function allowed Carmike to gain economies of scale, yet it distributed the cinema experience through a tailored local service.

Variety-based Positioning
This is a strategy where a firm produces a subset of an entire industry’s products or services. It thus chooses to not segment itself by the customer, but instead through the choice of offering. This focused approach can allow a company to scale through specialization and, by allocating resources to specific areas that enables it to accelerate innovation, drive better service and achieve lower costs.
Needs-based Positioning
The converse of variety-based positioning is the option of just targeting segments of customers and fulfilling all their needs. This builds excellence through understanding a customer and capturing its full value-chain through tailored service and repeat business.
Access-based Positioning
The final strategy is targeting customers that have similar needs, but with disparate access routes to the product or service. Access can be defined by customer geography or customer scale, insomuch that a firm requires different delivery methods in order to serve them effectively.