Competitive analysis

We have already discussed competition when we spoke of the Porter Five forces model, but before embarking on a customer VoC, I would encourage you to dive deeper into your competitive landscape and truly understand who your competitors are, how they are positioned, and what their relative strengths and weaknesses are. Like all the tools presented in this chapter, understanding your competitors positioning, capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses will allow you to assimilate and process more information more rapidly from the VoC's you undertake.

Does this sound familiar? Hopefully it does, as the one of the first steps in performing a competitive analysis is to do a SWOT or each of your major competitors, but before we can do that, we need to understand who our competitors really are. It would seem a simple task for a company to identify its competitors. GM knows that Toyota is a major competitor, Apple knows that Samsung is its major competitor, and Coke executives go...