Competitive Landscape

Publication Date :

23 Jan, 2025

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Table Of Contents

Competitive Landscape Meaning

Competitive landscape is the level of competition that a company faces in a particular market or industry, representing its market share and standing. Firms gauge their competitors' strategies, strengths, weaknesses, market share, customer preferences, and other market dynamics to plan their business moves accordingly.

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In a competitive market scenario, companies cannot afford to make mistakes that would result in losing their customers to their competitors. Therefore, such an analysis helps firms devise strategies for establishing market leadership through enhanced customer experience. Also, when companies enter a new market or product line, such an analysis facilitates market research.

Key Takeaways

l The competitive landscape provides a complete overview of changing market dynamics, customer needs, and competitors' positions, enabling the formulation of strategies that help them achieve market leadership.
l Some of the factors that affect the competitive landscape are market size, trends, competition dynamics, competitors' positions, market conditions, and customer preferences.
l Such an analysis helps businesses to avoid risk, determine their future strategies, make business decisions, become more competent, expand their market share, and innovate new products and services.
l Businesses determine their competitors' strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and opportunities to understand their market standing and plan their future moves.

Competitive Landscape Explained

A competitive landscape is a complete picture of the market dynamics and its competitors' strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges, which facilitates their devising suitable business strategies both in the short and long run. Businesses use a competitive landscape map to have visual clarity on the number of competitors and their market positioning. The axis on the competitive landscape matrix demonstrates the position of a company when the overall market or industry is analyzed.

The various factors that shape the competitive landscape are as follows:

Dynamic Market Conditions: The volatility of the market in terms of consumer behavior, technology, and economic conditions encourages companies to push their boundaries.
Dynamics of Market Competition: A business's competitive analysis is influenced by its number of competitors and their market positioning.
Direct Competitors: The companies can differentiate themselves from their competitors only when they understand the strategies of the companies that provide similar offerings.
Competitor Analysis: Firms also need to understand their competitors' strengths and weaknesses before making their next move.
Market Size and Trend: One critical factor is the size of a market, its trends, and its growth potential.
Customer Analysis: It includes understanding customer needs and preferences, buying behavior, etc.

How To Do Competitive Landscape Analysis?

As the companies function in a dynamic environment, chalking down a competitive landscape chart on a constant basis becomes even more essential. Given below are the various steps involved in this process:

Organize Data: The foremost step is collecting ample raw data for analysis and organizing it.
Determine Competition: Next, find the total number of competitors and segregate them into primary, secondary, and tertiary competitors.
Figure Out Competitor's Content: The firms should review and determine the competitors' advertising, website, imagery, and multimedia content.
Monitor Competitor's Social Media Engagement: The next step is to determine the competitors' social media engagement, marketing strategies, and social media presence in terms of their reach and voice.
Review Competitor's Marketing Strategies: The company gauges its competitors' marketing efforts, sales incentive structure, and other tactics.
Assess Competitor Pricing and Offers: Another key parameter to consider is the pricing, promotion, and other offers provided by competitors.
Analyze Competitor's Position: After considering all the above factors, the company needs to determine its competitors' positioning in the market.
Apply Competitive Analysis Frameworks: Companies can implement various competitive analysis tools, such as PEST analysis, SWOT analysis, and BCG matrix, to determine competitors' positioning.

Examples

The competitive landscape slide is a common inclusion in business projections and future plans as it showcases a firm's market scenario and positioning. Let us understand its relevance through the following examples:

Example #1

Suppose XYZ Beverages Ltd. is a growing beverage company. It found Coca-Cola to be its primary competitor, followed by Pepsi and other beverage firms. Therefore, it has to discover the strengths and weaknesses of these competing businesses to determine a business strategy that makes it a market leader. The firm used the SWOT analysis method to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Coca-Cola. The competitive landscape analysis revealed the following conclusions:

Strengths	Weaknesses
Brand value	Carbonated drinks
Brand identity	Reliance upon third-party technology
Huge market share	Non eco-friendly packaging
Global presence	Lack of product diversification
Opportunities	Threats
Ready to drink coffee market expansion	Economic uncertainty
Launch of healthy products	Water use issues
Advantage from USD value depreciation	Competition from emerging firms
Penetration into emerging nations	Pollution litigation

Hence, as projected in its reports, XYZ Ltd. plans its future strategies to compete with Coca-Cola and emerge as the market leader in the next 10 years.

Example #2

The North American soju market is expected to experience significant growth from 2024 to 2031, driven by technological advancement, growing consumer demand, and evolving industry standards. The report offers an in-depth insight into market trends, growth drivers, challenges, and future opportunities, segmented by region, product type, and application. It further highlights a promising compound annual growth rate (CAGR) during the forecast period, with constant innovation and new product discoveries to meet the dynamic consumer needs.

The regional market analysis covers Latin America, Asia-Pacific, North America, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa, each with distinct opportunities and challenges. Segmentation based on product and application facilitates the identification of niche markets and growth opportunities, providing a better overview of market performance across various sectors.

Moreover, this analysis includes market dynamics, regional trends, competitive analysis, and emerging market developments. It also offers regional strategic details regarding stakeholders, growth prospects, competitive strategies, and performance. Some of the prominent questions answered in this research are framed around potential growth opportunities, competitive strategies, emerging trends, and the product and application segments expected to witness the highest growth.

Source - https://meramandsaur.in/news/north-america-soju-market-competitive-landscape-major-players-and-strategies/67469/

Importance

A competitive landscape map is essential for companies to ensure their extended-term survival and market share acquisition. Given below are the various reasons for adopting such practice:

l Market Penetration: Whenever companies enter a new market or expand their product or service line, they must perform a proper screening of their competitive landscape.
l Provide Better Customer Experience: By analyzing why their competitors are doing better and making changes accordingly to their product offerings, companies ensure an enhanced customer experience.
l Frame Business Strategies: Firms decide their business moves based on their competitors' strategies, market dynamics, and changing customer preferences.
l Promote Innovation: It further helps businesses to adopt more innovative and creative business ideas to stand out from their competitors.
l Facilitate Business Decision-Making: The companies can make sound risk management and sustainability decisions through such analysis.
l Discover Market Threats and Opportunities: Businesses can identify market risks, threats, challenges, and opportunities after reviewing their competitors' strategies.
l Avoid Financial Consequences: Companies can avoid making wrong business decisions without having an overview of the market or competitors, which could lead to substantial financial losses.