Add competitive analysis to your marketing plan. Marketing Plan Writing Add competitive analysis to your marketing plan written by Tim Berry of Palo Alto Software The competitive analysis process presents an opportunity to describe your major competitors in terms of the factors that most influence revenues. This may include your competitor’s: organization sizemarket sharecomparative product qualitygrowthavailable capital and resourcesimagemarketing strategytarget marketsand any attributes you consider important. Industry associations, industry publications, media coverage, information from the financial community, and their own marketing materials and websites may be good resources to identify these factors and “rate” the performance of each competitor.Your access to competitive information will vary.
Discuss how your service offering compares to the others. Discuss how you are positioned in the market. Why do people buy your services instead of the other services offered in the same general categories? For example: WHAT STARTUP FOUNDERS SHOULD KNOW BEFORE THEY APPLY TO A STARTUP INCUBATOR. Accelerators seem to be the golden ticket for many startup founders. Especially the best-known ones get massive numbers of applicants. Y Combinator is again accepting admissions for its twice-a-year program and is likely to break records again, at least judging by the popularity of the Startup School it ran at Stanford recently. But do startups really know what they’re in for when they join an accelerator?
Last month, I surveyed 151 accelerator applicants in order to answer that question for my just-released book Speed Up Your Startup. The folks I interviewed had applied to 22 different accelerator programs around the world, including Y Cominator, TechStars, 500 Startups, and Seedcamp. 108 of them had completed or were currently in an accelerator program; the others had not applied or had not yet been accepted to a program. Four findings from the survey were especially interesting. 1. Many also developed ways of dealing with this stress. 2. 3. 4. How to know if an accelerator is any good?
The Brand Report Card. The Idea in Brief It sounds simple: boost your brand equity, and watch profits soar. But many companies stumble in trying to manage their brands’ performance. Consider Levi-Strauss. In the mid-1990s, it launched a brand-equity measurement system that suggested the appeal of its flagship 501 jeans was slipping. But its response to that data was flawed: the company took too long, and spent too little, to mount a marketing campaign that would restore its brand equity. Worse, Levi-Strauss’s advertising messages to its target youth market missed their mark. To strengthen your brand, Keller suggests using a brand report card—a tool showing how your brand stacks up on the 10 traits shared by the world’s strongest brands. Use the brand report card, and you identify the actions needed to maximize your brand equity. The Idea in Practice Grade Your Brand Keller recommends assessing your brand on the following attributes: Your brand…#Which means…#Example1.
The Top Ten Traits 1. Consider Starbucks. Business Model Innovation Hub - ... where visionaries, game changers, and challengers discuss business models.