As the global business environment looks forward to a post-COVID-19 era, sustaining growth and profitability will become more challenging than before. Technology has played a pivotal role in our day to day lives, however, technological and scientific advances shorten life cycles of products and services, business models change and new competitors appear from outside the industry.
This constant instability makes it necessary to seek new market opportunities for business growth. For every business, there is the need to revalidate our moat, unique selling proposition as well as hunting for new opportunities that can give us the edge in the market. Remember, the world is changing rapidly than ever before.
What needs to be done? First, defining a business framework then go on to analyse the market, assessing consumer needs and how they are being met by brands today.
- Consumer Segmentation: To understand your demand, you must identify consumer segments that share common characteristics. These characteristics can be “hard” variables such as age, gender, place of residence, educational level, occupation and level of income or “soft” variables such as lifestyle, attitude, values and purchasing motivations.
- Purchase Analysis: Purchase situations must also be examined to uncover expansion opportunities. Looking at distribution channels, payment methods and all other circumstances that involve purchasing decisions can teach you how consumers buy and how you can position your product appropriately.
- Direct & Indirect Competition Analysis: In addition to analysing demand and purchasing situations, it is important to analyse supply. Knowing the existing players in the market where you are competing or going to compete is important when evaluating opportunities. Opportunities can also be found by analysing substitute industries. This type of analysis helps establish competitive advantages against indirect competitors and provide insight on additional opportunities for growth.
- Foreign Markets Analysis: When a company operates in a mature or saturated market, exploring other countries may lead to additional opportunities. Markets in different countries grow at different paces for several reasons, including disparities in the level of economic development and local habits. Therefore, having information on the size of the market and competitors in other countries will help to estimate the business potential.
- Environment Analysis: Market opportunities can also be identified by analysing changes in the environment with technological and scientific developments generating new business opportunities. Other transformations in the environment such as climate change, geopolitical movements and changes in financial markets also influence market opportunities.
It is important to know that the world will never remain the same, so is our businesses and by extension, our brands. Constant questioning and research is a panacae and the readiness to adapt to change is perhaps the difference between failure and success.
To learn more on how you discover opportunities for your brand in a post-COVID-19 world, please send us a mail via: info@sbimedia.com.ng