What are the competitive risks to achieving the opportunity?
As investment advisor, better performance demands that Marketing clearly define the business and competitive proposition:
- In which market segments are you competing?
- With what products and services?
- Against what competitors?
Marketing must define and invest in specific information sweet spots to understand its customer-relevant differentiators against the competition, and the life span of those differentiators based on, for example, how difficult they are to copy.
It also needs to understand the pricing implications of this information.
- Are our price points below or above those of key competitors, and by how much?
- If below, is this sustainable given our cost profile, or is cost a future threat?
- What premium will customers pay for value-added propositions?
With the Competitive Positioning decision area, you can set planning goals and scorecarding metrics for these performance management elements:
- Competitor growth (%).
- Competitor price change (%).
- Competitor share (%).
- Competitor sales ($).
- Market growth (%).
- Market revenue and profit ($).
- Sales (# of units and $).
Most importantly, you can analyze these goals and metrics by a number of dimensions to find the hidden gems in the data:
- Competitor type and specific competitor.
- Industry.
- Geographic region.
- Market segment (macro & micro).
- Brand and product line.
- Sales territory.
Using the Competitive Positioning decision area
As a Marketing professional, you set targets and plan campaigns based on your targets for the goals and metrics in Competitive Positioning. You monitor your success by looking at how you measure up against your targets. Further, you dive into your results to find out more about these elements driving performance management.
- Company growth (%): Are there regions where a specific competitor or type is significantly less than average, giving us room to dominate?
- Competitor price change (%): Is a competitor cutting price more than average in sales territory meaning we must market value or cut prices to follow suit?
- Market growthand competitor share (% & $): Is a competitor growing less than the market for a product? Why? Is there an emerging differentiator for us to exploit?
