The Competitor SWOT is a simple way to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses relative to a specified competitor and inform appropriate action you should take to close any performance gaps.
Competitor SWOT Analysis
10 Steps to Profitability: Improvement through Customer Service
Most industries in developed economies can be classified as mature. This means that market growth is slow, maybe even approaching that of the national GDP or population growth. Rivalry is intense, as many players compete for less and less business. Demand is led by customers, who are very discerning and knowledgeable. Trading conditions are more volatile than ever before, making it difficult to predict how the future will unfold. In this article, we explore 10 steps that you can easily implement to increase customer aquisition, retention and loyalty
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Developing Strategy – why bother?
Developing Strategy is like building a puzzle
Most businesses operate in highly volatile, turbulent and dynamically changing environments. Strategy is generally formulated on the assumption that the environment is predictable. Strategy under this assumption is reasonably static. So why bother formulating a static strategy for a rapidly changing operating environment? It seems a senseless waste of time to even think about developing strategy.
3 reasons why formulating strategy keeps you ahead of the game
- Strategy is an iterative process that is part of what we do every day – not an annual event. In a changing environment, strategy needs to be in the heads and the hearts of everyone do that it can be rapidly adapted, refined or changed to meet circumstances as they unfold.
- When engaging in a strategy development process, we go through a DISCOVERY – CHOICE – ACTION loop (the iterative process). In order to discover, we need to open our minds to all possibilities, eventualities and exigencies and not be constrained by conventional wisdom, the current status quo or the past. We can only choose from that which we discover. So, if we do not open our minds to other possibilities, we limit our choice. Finally, we act on that which we choose.
- Under conditions of uncertainty, we can think through a number of scenarios. Scenarios are not forecasts of the future. Rather, scenarios are vehicles for considering and imagining possible plausible futures and for managing unavoidable uncertainty.
I remember working with a global hotel group in Australia who relied substantively on inbound tourism from Asia. At one of the strategy workshops that I facilitated with the senior executive group, I posed the question “what if China goes to war with Taiwan?” They laughed! I said, “lets reframe the question. What if your Asian business dried up overnight? How would you react? What would you do?” That got their attention. We appliedour minds to that possibility. A few months later, the Asian crisis broke. The effect was the same although the cause was different. I met with the CEO who said “thank goodness we thought through all the possibilities. We have moved quickly and decisively. We have capitalised on first mover advantages relative to our competitors who were caught by surprise”.
ACT NOW!
To learn how to develop strategy in times of uncertainty, check out our Scenario Planning Program, and three Modules of the Strategic Fit Program – the Operating Environment Module (Dealing with Turbulence and Uncertainty); the Strategy Module (Winning in a Competitive Environment) and the Taking Action Module (From Vision to Reality)
Customer Segmentation Worksheet
To produce superior returns in terms of Strategic Fit, a company must be aligned with the needs of its customers. By placing customers into segments, we can deploy & focus our scarce resources more effectively.
This worksheet provides a 4 step approach to segmenting your customers (i.e. placing them into homogenous groups in accrdance with certain criteria).
Express Distribution Segmentation Case Study
Background
A global express distribution company was attempting to service up to 42 separate segments through the same infrastructure. The business had become so complex that:
- Market segments began competing with each other, cannibalising its own market and allowing some competitors to position in uncontested market spaces.
- The business became so complex because the executives assumed that each segment had specific and different needs from any other segment. Accordingly, the people, systems and processes were attempting to meet each segment’s specific needs. The company was trying ‘to be all things to all people’ and in the process became ‘nothing to anybody’.
- The result was that the company was rapidly losing market share as dissatisfied customers defected to competitors, and
- Profitability plummeted. (more…)
Global hotel group meets the challenge of managing growth
Background
The company operating in Asia Pacific is the largest hospitality management group in Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia, operating multiple brands across all star classifications. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of a French organisiation that owns or manages over 2,500 properties worldwide.
Following an unprecedented period of growth through acquisition, the Chief Executive embarked on an ambitious program to:
- Consolidate and integrate the operations, and simultaneously
- Maintain its strong acquisitive posture, whilst
- Develop the strategic architecture
The Process
We were retained to work with the Executive team to develop the strategic architecture for the business. The Strategic Fit framework was adopted as it “created a common language and provided a simple conceptual model to develop our strategic agenda”.
The Strategic development process resulted in us undertaking a benchmark study of customer needs and expectations. On a strategic level, the study provided market segmentation insights, which informed subtle differences between the business and leisure segments. The study also revealed key opportunities for enhancing customer satisfaction, loyalty and organisational performance. This knowledge helped the company to focus on things that really matter to customers and to more effectively allocate effort and resources. The revelation of such subtle mismatches between segments has assisted managers to more precisely meet customers’ expectations in an intensely competitive environment.
As the corporate strategy evolved, the organisation was restructured to reflect the strategic intent. Branding initiatives were established, which continue to generate large scale improvements in thinking and operations.
Finally, the Human Resource Department has put 13 managers through the Strategic Fit Accreditation Program. This program provides practitioners with the knowledge and skill of the Strategic Fit process so that it can create unity of purpose and effort throughout the whole organisation.
The Outcomes
The company has managed the challenge of simultaneous growth and consolidation through:
- developing a focused strategic agenda
- understanding customers needs and expectations more clearly than its competitors
- structuring the business to reflect its strategic approach
- building the position and equity of its brands without huge media spends
- undertaking initiatives that will create unity of purpose and effort
A South African Meat Company
Context
A German immigrant to South Africa established a butcher shop on the South Coast of Natal in the early 1940s. When he died in the early 1980s, his youngest son, then 18 was asked to take over the running of the family business as he had the most knowledge and was the most passionate about the business. (more…)