SMEs, ETIs, how to analyze your market and establish your competitive advantages to perform?

1. Understanding the Key Success Factors of Your Market

Identify the key success factors of your market: What decision criteria lead your customers to select a player to meet their needs?

Rank these criteria and ensure that your offer meets these different points perfectly, and better than your competitors.

A – Understanding Your Customers’ Needs: The Key to Your Differentiation and Competitive Supremacy

Define an offer that perfectly matches customers’ demands by implementing a system for gathering privileged information.

• Build a trusting and valuable relationship with your customers: Question your customers, involve them in the development of your products/services, and observe them when they use them.
• Integrate this privileged information gathering into your daily activities: Continuously adjust your information system to collect this information.
• Adapt your offers to meet the specific needs of your customers: Use this privileged information to redefine your offers and strengthen customer loyalty.

B – Dominate Your Market: The Key to Success Lies in Analyzing Your Competitors

Conduct a thorough analysis of your competitors to question their market positioning, strengths, weaknesses, and to identify opportunities and threats for your business.

• Identify industry leaders and high-growth players: Understand the underlying factors enabling (or that have enabled) them to build their performance.
• Identify their “secret sauce”: Explore the key success factors that distinguish these competitors, understand how they cultivate and preserve them, improve them, and then apply them.

C – A Different Perspective on Competitive Advantage: The Blue Ocean Strategy (W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne)

Stop worrying about defining your competitive advantage (initially) by opening uncontested markets (Blue Ocean):

• Identify strategic spaces without competition;
• Innovate by offering unique products or services that create value for your customers: Innovation should stimulate new demand, requiring “value innovation” where each novelty brings real value to the customer.

To adapt it to your value proposition, we offer three models:

• The strategic canvas: Map out the strategic space occupied by your competitors, then discover new strategic territories by graphically analyzing the current offers in the sector and the purchase criteria of customers;
• The four actions framework: An essential tool for differentiating your offer by exploring each criterion (eliminate, reduce, strengthen, or create);
• Establish competitive barriers: This will allow you to consolidate your position in this emerging market sustainably.

Exchange with our teams; we will give you Blue Ocean ideas for your sector.

2. Define Your Competitive Advantage(s): Valorize Your Portfolio of Resources and Competencies

A competitive advantage arises from creating a (unique in the market) portfolio of resources and competencies (R&C) that enables you to better respond than the competition to the KSFs of your sector. Developed through the VRIST method, this method allows you to identify the R&C that will differentiate you, as well as your ability to transform these capabilities and resources into true competencies:

Identify your core resources and capabilities;

• Establish the basis of your competitive advantage:
• Valorization & Relevance: Identify the R&C that enable you to exploit opportunities or neutralize threats specific to your industry;
• Rarity: Introduce new resources and capabilities that do not yet exist in the market;
• Ensure the sustainability of this advantage:

1. Difficulty of imitation: Develop resources and capabilities under historical conditions specific to your company and by integrating intangible human know-how and causal ambiguities, making it difficult to reproduce your performance;
2. Non-substitutability: Ensure that your resources and capabilities cannot be substituted by others;
3. Non-transferability: Opt for geographically immobile resources and those with difficult-to-access information;

• Ensure their durability and ownership of these resources and capabilities;
• Build your competencies:

1. Transform your organizational capabilities into routines:Develop mechanisms specific to your company, based on socialized, predictable, and natural behaviors for members of your organization, while being almost automatic;
2. Create multi-market utilization potential for your routines: Expose your routines to various situations to develop their potential for generalization;

• Amplify performance in using your competencies: Achieve learning economies, scale economies, and innovations in associated processes.

3. Build Your Competitive Advantage with Confidence!

By following these steps and adopting a rigorous strategic approach, you can build and maintain the competitive advantages that will foster the growth of your company.