Competitors and substitutes
Review public offers, adjacent technologies, internal workarounds, and the choice to delay or do nothing.
Market & Competitive Insight
Understand the forces shaping a market decision
Examine alternatives, market pressures, and business capabilities to clarify the questions behind a product, positioning, or investment decision for B2B manufacturing and high-tech teams.
Competitive Analysis can inform Marketing Strategy, Business Process Engineering, or a separate Due Diligence review when the decision calls for those perspectives.
01Market landscape
Define the decision and the alternatives buyers weigh.
Set a practical market boundary around a specific decision, then compare the choices available to technical and commercial stakeholders.
Buyer criteria
Identify the needs, trade-offs, and proof points that shape how teams compare complex products.
02Strategic lenses
Separate industry pressure from internal capability.
Use established frameworks to organize evidence, assumptions, and questions. The frameworks guide analysis; they do not create company-specific facts.
Porter’s Five Forces
Assess rivalry, new entrants, substitutes, buyer power, and supplier power. Public evidence can show market structure and stated offers; it cannot establish a competitor’s economics, negotiating position, or plans.
VRIO
Test whether a resource or capability is valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and supported by the organization. Internal evidence is needed to substantiate capability, execution, and value capture.
Value Chain
Trace the activities and handoffs that create, deliver, and support customer value. Product and process evidence can reveal interfaces; it cannot prove cost, quality, or performance without relevant operational data.
03Decision focus
Connect the available information to the question.
Separate documented facts, informed judgments, and unanswered questions. State what the sources can support and what needs more verification.
What you can verify
Use documented sources to compare product claims, market messages, routes to market, and visible ecosystem signals.
What needs checking
Flag claims requiring authorized internal information, customer research, technical validation, or further investigation.
04A practical path
Make the next decision clearer.
Define the decision
Set the business question, market boundary, stakeholders, and decision context.
Examine the evidence
Review relevant public sources and information that you are authorized to share.
Interpret the findings
Use the relevant lenses to organize pressures, capabilities, assumptions, and open questions.
05Before the work begins
Questions worth asking.
01What can a competitive analysis establish?
It can compare documented offers, market messages, visible alternatives, and stated buyer criteria for a defined question. It cannot verify private revenue, costs, product performance, or future plans without supporting evidence.
02Do Porter’s Five Forces, VRIO, and Value Chain provide a completed company assessment?
No. They structure questions and evidence. A conclusion about a company depends on the information examined, including internal evidence where capability, execution, or value capture is at issue.
03How should confidential information be handled?
Share only information you are authorized to provide. Discuss how confidential material will be handled before sharing it.
Competitive Analysis
Discuss the decision at hand.
Begin with the market question and the information you are authorized to share.