Competitive Response System: Kumar's 5 Step Model

Its very important to understand that its an ongoing process and no matter how strong is your model every now and then it will be tested by some unknown forces.

1. Industry Analysis:

* understand your market, what segment you operate into, growth potentials, customer profiles, pricing etc. Then based on your current and future aspirations of firm, try to define your KSAs (key success attributes).
* Various models like Porter's 5 forces, Value Net, SCP(Structure-Conduct-Performance)can be useful.

2. Gather Data about competition:

Since amount of information available out there could be huge, try to categorize your data in major categories like Financial, Product & Services, Partners & Vendors, Patents, Legal, Media Coverage
* Its not only important to have all the information possible but also
how we maintain and analyze those data. We can get data from some easy sources
like sales team, customers, web sites, analysis reports to market and pricing data, to some other ways like hiring pattern, product reverse-engineering or mystery shopping
- Couple of things we added recently is media scaning & Patent Filings. Media strategy reveals our competitor's targeting
- Understand partners and vendors:
* I also maintain sheet with all the vendors and partners with their detailed analysis of product/services along with their brand awareness, customer's preference

* Some major sources of data are:

Financial Data:
• United States Securities and Exchange Commission
• Dun & Bradstreet
• Standard & Poor's
• Hoover's
Legal Data:
• LexisNexis
Copyright/Patents:
• Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR)
Media Coverage:
• LexisNexis
• Newsalert.com
• Industry Watch
• NewsPage
• PR Newswire
Partners & Vendors
• Media Scanning
Product & Services
• Sales
• customers
• website, pricing data
• Hiring Pattern
• Product Reverse Engineering
• Mystry Shopping


3. Create your competitor profiles:

* Create a detailed competitor profile for all your major competitors. This helps us in 2 significant ways. 1st it can reveal some strategic weakness which we can exploit. It also helps in anticipating some strategic responses. You look at their financials, products, market share, brand, partners etc


4. Draw your Ecosystem:

* Its important to draw your ecosystem based on above information and where you stand. I normally prefer what is called Competitor Array. So I define key success factors in the industry and then assign weightage to each of these factors. Then I weigh my competitors.

5. Finally
Once we have good understanding of our ecosystem and various forces in it, all thats left to be done is what we learned in business schools. Game Theory.. Look forward reason backwards. You anticipate your competitor's move and then design your campaigns and marketing programs accordingly.