In the previous part of this article on desk research, we explained how to get a first glimpse into a market you don’t know. Today we continue with the two last steps: structure the information and verify it.
Desk research step 3: analyze competitors’ offers
Once you’ve gotten an overview of the market, you’re ready to go into a more analytical task : define criteria and compare competitors’ offers.
The criteria will obviously depend on the subject of your market research. If your approach is global and not focused on the technological aspects only, we usually recommend to tackle the competition analysis along the following pillars :
- organization (size, structure, geographical scope)
- customers (B2B/B2C/B2G, who are they, where are they located, how many, what do customers say about the company, …)
- offering (does the company offer a mix of services and goods, what differentiate the different products of the company, how does the company position its products)
- technology (does the company has any proprietary technology, insourcing vs. outsourcing, maturity of the technology, has the company been able to adapt to technological evolutions)
- overall market conditions (is the market in decline or growing, can you find statistics on the market evolution over the last 10 years, is the number of firms on the market going up or down, are startups entering the market, are there barriers to entry or to exit, …).
Desk research step 4 : conclude and get expert’s feedback
You are now ready to conclude on the high-level orientations of the market based on the previous steps undertaken. Don’t let those conclusions go public without checking them with an expert. Believe it or not but you do have experts on all possible fields in your network. Use Linkedin to discover who they are (1st level connections) or who could introduce you (2nd level connection). It’s always better to get your own conclusions rather than asking directly an expert to draw you a portrait of a market. There are several reasons to that :
- An expert usually has little time left to dedicate to unpaid requests. Forget about an expert doing your work.
- If you want to learn something, you have to do it by yourself. We get dozens of requests each month from students asking information about some markets. They are lazy and prefer to ask someone to do their work. We never answer such requests positively.
- It’s more rewarding for an expert to be asked his/her feedback on a very precise question than on a very broad subject. In the latter case it just gives the impression you don’t want to do your work.
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Our other articles on market research techniques (part 1, part 2, part 3) are also available to help you, as well as our Speakerdeck presentations (PESTEL analysis, Porter’s 5 forces model).
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Posted in Marketing.
