19 June 2010

GOOGLE and THE ART of WAR STAYING on TOP

The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.

Sun Tzu

Competitor analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context through which to identify opportunities and threats. Competitor profiling coalesces all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment.

Given that competitor analysis is an essential component of corporate strategy, it is argued that most firms do not conduct this type of analysis systematically enough. Instead, many enterprises operate on what is called “informal impressions, conjectures, and intuition gained through the tidbits of information about competitors every manager continually receives.” As a result, traditional environmental scanning places many firms at risk of dangerous competitive blind spots due to a lack of robust competitor analysis.

Here are a few common and useful technique is constructing a competitor array. The steps include:

* Define your industry – scope and nature of the industry

* Determine who your competitors are

* Determine who your customers are and what benefits they expect

* Determine what the key success factors are in your industry

* Rank the key success factors by giving each one a weighting – The sum of all the weightings must add up to one.

* Rate each competitor on each of the key success factors

* Multiply each cell in the matrix by the factor weighting.

This can best be displayed on a two dimensional matrix – competitors along the top and key success factors down the side.

The strategic rationale of competitor profiling is powerfully simple. Superior knowledge of rivals offers a legitimate source of competitive advantage. The raw material of competitive advantage consists of offering superior customer value in the firm’s chosen market. The definitive characteristic of customer value is the adjective, superior. Customer value is defined relative to rival offerings making competitor knowledge an intrinsic component of corporate strategy. Profiling facilitates this strategic objective in three important ways. First, profiling can reveal strategic weaknesses in rivals that the firm may exploit. Second, the proactive stance of competitor profiling will allow the firm to anticipate the strategic response of their rivals to the firm’s planned strategies, the strategies of other competing firms, and changes in the environment. Third, this proactive knowledge will give the firms strategic agility. Offensive strategy can be implemented more quickly in order to exploit opportunities and capitalize on strengths. Similarly, defensive strategy can be employed more deftly in order to counter the threat of rival firms from exploiting the firm’s own weaknesses.

Clearly, those firms practicing systematic and advanced competitor profiling have a significant advantage. As such, a comprehensive profiling capability is rapidly becoming a core competence required for successful competition. An appropriate analogy is to consider this advantage as akin to having a good idea of the next move that your opponent in a chess match will make. By staying one move ahead, checkmate is one step closer. Indeed, as in chess, a good offense is the best defense in the game of business as well.

A common technique is to create detailed profiles on each of your major competitors. These profiles give an in-depth description of the competitor’s background, finances, products, markets, facilities, personnel, and strategies. Here at Nexonta Technologies Inc we encourage you to “Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.” Seo is competitive and expensive however the results are worth the investment but it costs to stay on top we build SEO ready websites but the fight to stay on top of Google is a whole other battle in itself.

Sun Tzu

Nexonta Technologies Inc