The last part in the How to win at Markstrat series, I will discuss competitor analysis and the various methods to speed up the analysis process.

In most cases Excel’s Conditional Formatting Colour Scales is all that is required. For the below examples blue is segment targeted. It is important to apply the conditional formatting over each market segment individually, not the entire market.

In other cases, a little bit of work is required, the square root of the sum of squared differences can be used to determine the distance between two points, in many cases this can be used to calculate how close a competitor is to ideal values. Excel makes this calculation easy with the SQRT(SUMXMY2()) formula.

Advertising

Advertising competitor analysis is the easiest, the Estimated Advertising Expenditures (in thousand dollars) gives a good indication to which company is targeting which segment.

Commercial Team

Using the Estimated Commercial Team Size (in full-time equivalent), the exact commercial team size per channel of the competitors’ products can be determined.

Converting the distribution between each channel to a percentage, it can then be compared against the Shopping Habits found in the Consumer Survey. Using Excel’s SQRT(SUMXMY2()) we can get the difference between the ideal distribution and the actual for a particular product and segment. A lower value means closer ideal and actual.

The results show which company is targeting their products to which segment. But more importantly, which product has a more ideal commercial team distribution to meet a particular segment.

Semantic Scales

Similar can be done to semantic scales, which provides an indication to which products are ideal for the market segment. The two tables to use in the calculation are Brand Perceptions and Ideal Values.

Multidimensional Scaling

Similar to Semantic Scales, the same can be done for Multidimensional Scaling. Ignoring the values, what is interesting is how similar the Multidimensional Scaling is to Semantic Scales seen through the similar shades of colours. Change Multidimensional Scaling Perceptions and you change Semantic Scales perceptions and vice versa.