Understanding market dynamics and consumer behaviour is critical for sustained growth in an ever-evolving business landscape. Market analysis provides the insights you need to make informed decisions, whether you’re launching a new product, entering a new market, or fine-tuning your strategies.
Understanding your market and competitors is crucial to maintaining a competitive edge in 2024. Staying ahead requires continuous monitoring and adaptability as the economic environment and consumer behaviour shift. Market and competitor analysis helps businesses navigate these changes by providing actionable insights into market trends, competitor activities, and consumer preferences.
This guide will explain the essentials of market and competitor analysis and how you can effectively conduct research to drive your business forward.
What is market and competitor analysis?
Market analysis involves assessing a specific market’s size, dynamics, and trends. It helps businesses understand their product or service demand, identify potential customer segments, and recognise market opportunities and threats.
The depth and breadth of market analysis can vary significantly based on the specific objectives. Whether validating the feasibility of entering a new market or introducing a new product, research endeavours can range from comprehensive and time-intensive studies spanning weeks to more agile “pulse checks” conducted to capture emerging trends or market shifts swiftly.
Competitor analysis, on the other hand, focuses on identifying and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. It helps businesses understand their competitive landscape, differentiate their offerings, and develop strategies to gain a competitive advantage.
What market analysis can help businesses uncover
Size the prize
Gain comprehensive insights into the size and potential of your target market. Through thorough market analysis, you can assess market dynamics, identify key segments, and evaluate growth opportunities. Understanding the market landscape empowers you to make informed decisions and allocate resources effectively to maximise market share.
Conducting a market size analysis survey can help you answer questions about your market like:
- How much revenue potential does this market segment represent for our business?
- Are there any emerging trends that could impact the size of this market?
Spot opportunities others can't
Dive deep into consumer behaviour to unearth emerging trends and shifts in preferences. By analysing market data, you can stay ahead of the curve and anticipate changes in consumer demands, allowing your brand to adapt and innovate proactively.
See Gaps
Explore market shape to identify saturated segments / categories / channels you want to avoid as well as unearth unmet needs or underserved customer segments. By pinpointing gaps in the market, you can uncover opportunities for innovation and tailor your offerings to address specific consumer pain points. This proactive approach enables you to capitalise on untapped market potential and gain a competitive edge while avoiding markets or segments with limited potential.
Innovate smarter
Harness market analysis to uncover new products, services, or improvement opportunities. By analysing consumer behaviour and competitor offerings, you can identify areas for innovation and develop unique value propositions that resonate with your target audience. Embracing innovation allows your brand to stay relevant and meet evolving consumer demands, driving growth and differentiation.
Stay close to your customers
Regular market analysis offers another significant advantage: it provides an opportunity to deepen your understanding of your target audience. Engaging with customers and potential customers more frequently gives you invaluable insights into their preferences and behaviours.
Conducting a market analysis survey enables you to gather demographic data and delve into psychographic and ethnographic insights, encompassing your audience’s personality traits, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles.
This information supports audience segmentation and facilitates the development of comprehensive consumer profiles. Identifying different customer segments with unique motivations allows for targeted marketing campaigns tailored to resonate with each group.
Understanding market and consumer trends can help you answer questions like:
- What are consumers’ unmet needs or pain points in this market or segment?
- Are there any underserved customer segments that we could target with our products or services?
- What is the frequency of recent purchases from consumers within our industry?
- How do consumers allocate their budget for shopping, and how frequently do they make purchases?
- What are our target audience’s preferred shopping channels and payment methods?
- What factors influence changes in our customers’ buying behaviour?
- What factors do customers prioritise when choosing a brand?
Access to this level of detail empowers you to make informed business decisions, which is particularly invaluable during market turbulence.
Differentiate to get ahead
Market analysis is about more than keeping up with market and consumer trends shifts – staying informed about your competitors is equally critical. You need to monitor your rivals to avoid overlooking changes in market share, consumer perceptions, and brand recognition. This knowledge is essential for identifying opportunities and defending your market position.
Competitive analysis provides an opportunity to assess the brand landscape – which brands are dominant versus those emerging? Which brands do consumers prefer and why? What characteristics do they associate with your competitors? Understanding these perceptions empowers you to refine your communications, giving you a competitive advantage in the market.
Strategic Positioning
Robust competitor research provides a framework for evaluating your positioning and identifying your brand’s unique value proposition. Conducting a competitor analysis in conjunction with ongoing brand tracking can help you identify your offering’s strengths and weaknesses against your competitors and establish a baseline for success.
Conducting a competitor analysis survey can help you answer questions like:
- Which competitors are gaining or losing market share, and why?
- Are there any emerging competitors or new market entrants that threaten our business?
- What recent innovations or changes have our competitors introduced, and how have consumers received them?
- How do consumers perceive our brand’s value proposition compared to our competitors?
- What are the key differentiators between our brand and our competitors in the eyes of consumers?
- What marketing strategies are our competitors using, and how effective are they?
How Earth Animal used competitor analysis to create an advantage
Earth Animal utilized competitor analysis through a sustainability lens to assess its position relative to other pet brands. By assessing its and its competitors’ sustainability performance using Glow’s Social Responsibility Score™ system, Earth Animal identified how consumers perceive its brand versus competitors’ on sustainability metrics, uncovering opportunities to improve and communicate its sustainability initiatives more effectively.
How to use agile surveys for market analysis
Step 1: Define your objectives
Before conducting market analysis surveys, it is essential to define clear objectives. Determine what specific insights you aim to gain from the survey. Are you looking to evaluate market size, understand consumer preferences, or assess competitive positioning? Clearly outlining your objectives will guide the survey design process and ensure you collect relevant data for your analysis.
Step 2: Build your audience
Once your objectives are defined, the next step is to build your survey audience. Identify your target market’s demographic, geographic, and psychographic characteristics. Online research platforms like Glow offer audience targeting tools that allow you to define precise criteria and reach the right audience. By curating a representative sample of respondents, you can gather insights that accurately reflect your target market’s preferences and behaviours.
Step 3: Ask the right questions
With your audience in mind, design your survey to gather the necessary insights for your market analysis. Craft questions that address key aspects of your objectives, such as consumer preferences, purchasing behaviour, brand perception, and competitor awareness.
Here is a handy Market Analysis Template to help you get started with the right questions.
Pro tip: Use a mix of question types, including multiple-choice, Likert scales, and open-ended questions, to capture rich data and keep respondents engaged.
Step 4: Distribute your survey
Once your survey is designed, it’s time to distribute it to your target audience. Online research platforms like Glow integrate with global panels to provide an efficient and robust way to reach nearly any audience. Using Glow, you can access over 110 million consumers in 94 countries.
Step 5: Analyze the Data
After collecting survey responses, it’s crucial to analyse the data to extract meaningful insights. Data visualisation tools and statistical analysis techniques will help identify trends, patterns, and correlations in the data. Look for critical findings that align with your market analysis objectives and use them to inform strategic decision-making. Glow’s analytics dashboard makes it easy to find actionable insights and share findings with other stakeholders.
Step 6: Take action
Research is pointless if you don’t act on it. Once you’ve drawn conclusions from your analysis, you need to develop actionable recommendations to capitalise on the identified opportunities or threats.
Step 7: Implement continuous monitoring
Finally, implement a process for continuously monitoring your market and competitive landscape. Regularly track vital metrics, industry trends, and competitor activities to stay informed. Online research platforms make it easy to repeat studies quickly and affordably to track the speed and magnitude of market change.
How WSET leveraged market insights to enter the beer qualifications market
WSET, a global leader in drinks education, aimed to expand into the beer qualifications market. They partnered with Glow to conduct a comprehensive study capturing insights from trade and consumer audiences across the UK, US, Canada, and Australia. The surveys revealed key attitudes and behaviours towards beer education, helping WSET shape their strategic marketing plans for entering this new category. Read the full case study here.
Conduct your market analysis with Glow
Market and competitor analysis is crucial for understanding the competitive landscape and making strategic decisions. This can help you stay ahead of the competition and drive your business forward.
Are you ready to investigate your market? Glow’s market analysis survey tools can help you gather valuable insights and stay competitive.
Get started yourself for free or book a meeting with our expert team to learn more.
Further Reading
