On the analysis method of competitors

Talking about the methods of competitor analysis

today's enterprises are in a super competitive environment, new competitors continue to enter, and the integration in the industry continues to intensify. The experimental data are automatically processed according to the requirements of the experimental method. In such a rapidly changing market environment, who can grasp the market opportunities, who can grasp the dynamics of competitors in time, who will take the initiative in the competition. Therefore, it is particularly important to analyze competitors

first of all, two concepts should be explained here

first, competitors and competitors. Every enterprise survives in an industry environment. In this industry, there are many competitors, but not every competitor is your competitor. So what kind of enterprise can be called a competitor? Only those competitors who have the ability to compete with the enterprise can be called competitors. Therefore, when analyzing competitors, we should have a clear aim and not cover everything

second, competitive analysis and competitor analysis. Competitor analysis is only part of competitive analysis. In addition to the analysis of competitors, competition analysis also includes the analysis of the competitive environment of the industry, the analysis of suppliers in Porter's five forces analysis, the analysis of dealers, the analysis of potential entrants and the analysis of alternative products

this article is devoted to discussing how to analyze competitors

first, the framework of competitor analysis

facing a large number of financial data, market information and other kinds of information, how to sort out and screen these information and how to analyze competitors is an important topic in front of enterprise information workers

the author believes that it is very important to establish a framework for competitor analysis. Classify the messy information according to the established framework, so as to avoid the blindness of intelligence work and collect the information of competitors with a clear purpose. Here are three frameworks for competitor analysis

1. Competitor analysis framework based on the Balanced Scorecard

the Balanced Scorecard examines the performance of enterprises from four aspects: learning and innovation, internal business processes, customers and markets, and finance. Since we can use the Balanced Scorecard to examine the performance of an enterprise, "we can also use the idea of the Balanced Scorecard to analyze competitors

the following table is an example of using the Balanced Scorecard to analyze competitors

Table 1. Balanced Scorecard Oriented competitor analysis framework

Table 1 only gives a framework for competitor analysis, and does not list all the analysis indicators. Enterprises can select indicators according to the key success factors of their industry, and then analyze their competitors. And the choice of index weight also needs to be mastered by the enterprise itself

in the above framework, some information is publicly available, such as market information and financial information, while some information is more difficult to obtain, such as the internal business process information of the enterprise. The best way to analyze internal business processes is to use benchmarking management. Benchmarking is also called benchmark management or reference management. This management method was initiated by Xerox in the late 1970s, and then systematized and standardized by the American productivity and quality center. According to a 1997 study in the United States, nearly 90% of the world's top 500 enterprises were in daily management in 1996. 2 Benchmarking management is applied in the subject rotation theory, including at t, Kodak, Ford, IBM, Xerox, etc. The basic idea of benchmarking management is to establish the goal of learning and catching up based on the performance and practical measures of the strongest competitive enterprises or those leading and most prestigious enterprises in the industry in terms of products, services or processes. Through a series of standardized procedures such as data collection, comparative analysis, follow-up learning, redesign and implementation, the actual situation of the enterprise is quantitatively compared and evaluated with these benchmarks, and on this basis, the best strategy to improve the performance of the enterprise is selected, so as to catch up with or surpass the competitors. In order to further enhance the core competitiveness of the enterprise, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC for short) chose Statoil as the benchmark and carried out benchmarking management. This is the first time that Chinese enterprises have selected foreign large companies for all-round benchmarking management. Founded in 1972, Statoil ranked 14th among the world's oil companies, while CNOOC ranked around 50th. Statoil has many similarities with CNOOC in its development history, and CNOOC has a large gap with it, which is comparable to it. This is also one of the reasons why CNOOC chose Statoil as the benchmark to exhaust the air in the pipe at the same time. Through benchmarking management, CNOOC's management level and core competitiveness have been greatly improved. Benchmarking management provides a good way and method for enterprises to analyze the internal business processes of competitors and find out the gap with competitors

2. Porter's competitor analysis model

in Porter's book competitive strategy, a model of competitor analysis is proposed to analyze the behavior and response mode of competitors from four aspects: the current strategy, future goals, competitive strength and self assumption of enterprises. Through the analysis of future goals, we can see what drives competitors to move forward. In the common target system of enterprises, the target of analyzing competitors is mostly financial target. Here we need to understand not only its financial goals, but also its other goals, such as the goal setting of society, environmental protection, technology leadership and so on. At the same time, the goal is hierarchical