Marketing Situation Analysis and Resources

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If you've come once and decided to come back - I appreciate it. Marketing research and market analysis aren't always the most stimulating topics but they are key to success, and I believe even more so for smaller businesses where every dollar is very precious.

I've been studying more specifically on how to perform a strong market analysis, and have some basic outline information I'd like to share, that some of you may find valuable in your market analysis efforts. Also, at the very bottom are some links to basic, but good resources non the less for getting some data on your target market.

Situation Analysis

First off, lets get some purpose behind doing a situation analysis. I like the general one given in the text I've largely been reviewing (Author information below) called Marketing Research - A practical approach for the new millennium. Essentially, they argue that the point of a situation analysis is simply to determine whether or not a marketing strategy is proving effective or not. This analysis is broken into 3 main areas:

1. Market analysis
2. Market segmentation
3. Competition analysis

The Breakdown

Market Analysis

Market Analysis refers to studying a product market to possible gain information on how the market may change in the future. This includes studying such aspects as political trends, regulatory actions, economic trends, social trends and culture (this one is big), and changes in technology. On a side note - I like to watch for when these trends are combining and think of what opportunities or changes that might be creating (read social+technological).

Three great ways to work on a market analysis include:

1) Content Analysis through studying written works, stored data, various forms of media
2) Interviews - Strong, deep, interviews of experts in the industry with formal structure
3) Interviews - Formal questionnaires designed to pass to a variety of users to gain information on an environment.

Market Segmentation

The short and sweet of this is to figure out what makes people similar, and what makes them different, and then organize them into groups based upon this information. Market segmentation can include gathering information on brand preferences, product likes/dislikes, customer characteristics, as well as the normal social/economic studies.

I believe that this is an area where a business can gain an advantage through clever evaluation of the data gathered. Obviously gathering this information is helpful and obvious trends and groupings will probably appear, however the real competitive edge comes when a business is unique in interpreting and measuring the data. Learning to look across a set of data and spot unique trends or groupings can open up a deeper understanding of a market and how to reach them. The internet is great for this as there are thousands of attempts being made to combine different market segmentations into new products/venues for attracting consumers.

Competition Analysis

I'll try to make this breif. The goal is to understand your competition and predict their movements. Take your competition and rip them apart just as you would examine and rip apart your own company to spot flaws in your amour. Examine operations, strategies, marketing techniques, financial moves, branding, everything that you can think of. Then, go to the consumer and ask specific questions relating to a product market (brand preference, pricing, quality, shipping accuracy, etc). The goal is to identify a list of items that consumers can then rank by level of importance. This list can then be used to help evaluate how successful competiting companies are with hitting the consumers in the target market by measuring their success in each of the ranked areas. This competitive market analysis may show you areas to improve as well as help you predict what your comeptition may attempt to do next.

Quick resources for research data:
www.census.gov
market research firms (expensive, but good ones can give you a big leg up)
censtats.census.gov (provides some pattern information, by county, zip, etc.)
www.fedstats.gov (federal government stats)
www.businesslaw.gov (business law information
www.lexisnexis.com (gotta pay to play, but if you know how to do it you can gain some good info)