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What is the Business's Market Position?

To respond effectively to what the competition is doing, a business needs to ensure that it understands fully its own business and where it fits into the market. This may include:

  • A need to understand what its products, strengths and weaknesses are
  • How consumers feel about the quality of the product or service
  • What its image and reputation is in the market place
  • Whether it has any unique selling points (USPs)
  • Some attempt to understand what its competitors might be up to

This will involve the business in analysing its position - breaking down the market into manageable chunks to better understand what is going on in the market. One way of doing this is to conduct what is called a SWOT Analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

iPod

Apple's iPod - a very successful product, with sales of over 88 million. But the market for digital music is expanding and there are always other firms seeking to move in to get a cut of the action! Apple cannot afford to stand still therefore. Source: Katinka Kober, stock.xchng

It may be able to get some of the information to help its analysis from its market research but in other cases it might need to involve workers in the business giving their views about the company and its products. It is a case of being honest and forthright about what is good and what is not so good about the business so that it can seek to act on the weaknesses and the threats but seek to exploit its strengths and opportunities.

Task

  • Choose a company or a product - you can revert back to using one of the five mentioned earlier. Conduct your own SWOT analysis of the product. In conducting your research you might carry out a small survey of some of your friends to find out what they think about the product or service and you can also use other sources to find more information - the company's Web site might help (but you might have to be prepared to look) and there are often trade associations or marketing companies who offer reports about products that may give you some further help.
  • For example, if I was going to choose the iPod I might type 'iPod+review' into Google or your favourite search engine; I might look at the customer reviews that have been posted on retail sites like Amazon as a means of helping me get some other information.

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