Analyzing your Customers and Competitive Market Strategies

Analyzing your customer base is needed before you can create a strategic marketing plan. You need to determine which customer market your company will be operating in:

 

• Consumer market, that buys your goods for individual or family use.
• Industrial market, such as manufacturers, who buy your goods for use in the production of other goods that are then sold to others.
• Reseller market, that buys your goods, usually through a distributor, in order to resell or rent to their customers.
• Government market, that purchase your goods to carry out governmental functions.
• International market, who buys your goods globally.

 

Competitively marketing your product is important as it plays a big part on how you are going to target your market.  Four strategies marketers use as a competitive edge, is to best determine if they are:

 

1. Market leaders, who are looking to dominate the industry.  They look to protect their market share like developing new product ideas, and expand their market such as finding new users and uses for their product.  Companies like Microsoft would fall into this category. 

 

2. Market Challengers, who are looking to challenge the market leaders.  Pepsi challenging Coke would be a good example of a market challenger strategy.

 

3. Market Followers, who are happy to stay at their current position.  They wait to see what the market leaders are doing to gain market share, and follow the leader without having to worry about the risks and costs of any development research.

 

4. Market Nichers, who are looking at just a few target markets and not trying to compete with the overall market.  They just look to gain a large enough share of its specialty market in order to maintain its profit margin.  Many new businesses choose to be a market nicher.