Market analysis is a comprehensive study of a market to determine a firm’s and a product’s opportunities and threats, and also in understanding the evolving opportunities that developed and emerging markets present. David Aaker, Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley and a renowned brand strategist, formulated the following facets of a market analysis:

• Current and future market size
• Growth rate of the market
• Profitability quotient of the market
• Cost structure of the industry
• Channels of distribution
• Key market trends
• Factors that contribute to success

Whether you are a one-man show running your own start-up or you are a vital cog in a large global conglomerate, conducting a thorough market analysis is usually the first step to determine if your audience is ready to accept your concept or product. Gauging the specific needs of the market is critical to your marketing and product strategies. Without proper deployment of market analysis, you could be in danger of losing millions of dollars to the volatilities of the market.

Market analysis as a process can be segmented into six strategic steps:

• Problem definition and feasibility study
• Through analysis of the target solution
• Extracting the dataset and the analytics central to the problem
• Relevant interpretation of the data
• Developing a roadmap for a well-structured solution
• Designing a robust plan contingent to market forces

Market analysis is the backbone of every project. In today’s competitive landscape, market analysis creates the foundation of your projects, current and future, and determines their feasibility across a wide array of market forces. Whether its finding buyers, sourcing customers, analyzing the competition, creating the ‘zing’ factors to entice customers, or to design a contingency plan, market analysis is what you should undertake to formulate the long term objectives of your project.

Entering a virgin market always comes with a fair share of risks. Therefore, a market analysis should be your project’s first step in determining your project’s robustness and diversification strategies. 

It is the imperative of every company to know where exactly it fits in the market. It needs to answer questions like – Who is its target audience? How does their product perform in the same spectrum as its nearest competitors? What are the ways to position or repurpose its strategies against the bigger picture?

Your edge lies in how well you place your brand vis-a-vis a competitive landscape. We recommend using the following that would help you leverage the power of market analysis to the fullest:

• Use online searches for publicly available data and mining the essential points out of them.
• Use on-site observations of your competitor’s customer service strategies, marketing strategies, supply chain, vendor management, focus group interviews, and more to formulate a winning strategy.
• Use competitive benchmarking within a specific industry domain and gain valuable insights about your competitor in areas like marketing, sales and business development, technology deployment, product best-practices, production planning, workforce management, delivery cycles, etc.

Global-Ability adopts a professional, business-oriented approach in solving our clients’ unique challenges. We embed the best in-class market analysis methodologies, state-of-the-art analytics and an unmatched industry expertise to deliver tailor-made solutions to our clients. Whether its quantitative research, qualitative research or hybrid research, working with us is an endeavor in quality, high productivity, and a results-oriented approach.