We Study Competitors and Their Behaviours

At Decision City, we understand competition and how to tactically approach it. Competition exists over scarce resources, customers, and reputation. In competing over resources, organisations do all they can to acquire and retain the best talent, material inputs, financial assets, technology, and knowledge. Competition brings out the best in industry players, in terms of product innovation and customer benefits. Rivals vary in size, capacity and capability the same way their tactical approaches vary.

The race for the most profit and survival requires that all hands are on deck to achieve positive outcomes. The primary and secondary performance enablers are fine tuned. This means that the value chains of all organisations in marketplaces are positioned to aid competition and business sustainability.

Because customers drive revenues and profits, organisations fight head-on to acquire the largest population of buyers so as to be tagged market leaders, challengers, or mere followers. While market leaders with increased share of market engage themselves frontally, challengers adopt encirclement strategy to attack the weaknesses of leaders to increase their share of market and financial wellbeing. On the other hand are the followers, smaller organisations adopting the gorilla strategy to heap back and forth attacks to get a few oranges from the tree whilst building capacity as their share of market increase.

In all, the success or failure of competitive games hinges on product and service innovation, buyer experience, and keen following of how the competition move the puns to check the Queen. The study of competition helps our clients understand how to re-engineer their business processes by making it agile and responsive to change and competition as well as re-organise key assets in ways that support business sustainability, based on known strengths and weaknesses matched against opportunities and threats emanating from marketplaces.

How does Decision City provide help? At Decision City we take a consultative approach at all times. We work hard to speak with all concerned, review the micro and macro environments dynamics. We also understudy the changes in the market structure as it affects the immediate client project being undertaken by Decision City.

In our study of competition for our clients, we begin by understanding the problem. At Decision City we take the consultative approach by speaking with all concerned, including Directors, managers, heads of departments, supervisors, etc. We understudy the impact of competition on the client’s finances and assets. We then evaluate the competitive gap, the desire future positioning, expected results, and the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). We return to the office to discover tremendous value for the client.

We then design our research instrument – questionnaire – containing intelligence variables necessary for analysis. These intelligence variables include questions on installed production capacity, production cycles and time, quantity of products produced, advertising strategy, size of the sales team, channel and supply chain strategy, routes to market strategy, customer service strategy, etc. We then recruit, train, and deploy undercover researchers to obtain intelligence from all identified competitors, using the research instrument and methods specified in training, such as tipping the gatekeepers for every valuable insight provided, speaking with channel members such as distributors, retailers and consumers.

Other approaches include obtaining financial statements, confidential information with job security if things go wrong, anonymous application to competitors to attend interviews where data obtained are multiplied according to progress made in the faux interview attendance. We might also deploy faux job interviews extended to employees and managers of competitors for an anonymous recruiting company seeking to offer the best remuneration and working conditions not existing in current company. These approaches generate the biggest potential for gaming the competition to obtain critical competitive intelligence.

The data obtained, following competitive intelligence, is statistically analysed and visualised and the documented report sent to the relevant personnel and department that we are assigned to report to, based on the terms of contract.

Our recommendations for issues resolution are first of all strategic, helping decision makers to understand and take corrective actions to resolve problems arising from deafening competition, such as revenue, cost, and compliance issues.

We also typically make recommendation for learning and development programmes, as part of the report’s change management implementation programmes, for the implementation teams and heads of affected departments or units that has ownership of the problem being resolved, since we also have exceedingly strong competence in these directions.

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