Analyzing Your Strengths and Weaknesses to Achieve Growth

To operate successfully in a changing market, a company should plan its future objectives and strategies around its strengths and downplay its weaknesses.

To operate successfully in a changing market, companies should plan their objectives and strategies around their strengths and downplay their weaknesses. At FrogDog, we know that market analysis and strategy development are continual processes as today’s strengths could turn into tomorrow’s weaknesses.

Before evaluating your company against the market, you need to conduct qualitative and quantitative research and analyze your competitors (we can help you with that, too!). This research will help you accurately assess your company’s market and competitive positions.

When we discuss strengths, we’re referring to a company’s competitive advantages and distinctive competencies—that is, what the company does really well. Some examples of strengths include:

• Strong employee attitudes
• Excellent customer service
• Large market share
• Personal relationships with customers
• Leadership in product innovation
• Highly efficient, low-cost manufacturing
• High integrity

Weaknesses are the constraints that impede a company’s success in a certain strategic direction—in other words, what the company does not do well. Typical company weaknesses might be:

• Inadequate definition of customer for product/market development
• Confusing service policies
• Too many levels of reporting in the organizational structure
• Limited product availability
• Lack of involvement from top management in developing a new service
• Lack of quantitative goals

Strategic marketing firms like FrogDog consider a variety of factors when studying the strengths and weaknesses of their clients. We consider questions such as:

• What concerns the CEO or board the most?
• What attributes can or should be examined?
• What types of measurement can we assess?
• What criteria will allow us to accurately evaluate the company’s strengths and weaknesses?

Measurement of Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths and weaknesses of a product or service can be measured in four areas: the current strategic position, past performance, marketing effectiveness, and marketing environment.

Current strategic position provides an important variable for future strategies. Marketers work with the CEO to determine why the company has succeeded given their competitors’ activities. This allows marketers to evaluate what factors might change and to what extent.

Evaluation of past performance provides historical insights into a company’s marketing strategy and success. Some of the types of information that marketers study are market share history, profitability history, competitive history, consumer history, and product or service history.

Appraising marketing excellence is where markers evaluate how to develop activities toward managing demand. Factors considered include:

• Manufacturing
• Sales
• Technology
• Marketing

For example, a typical strategy that manufacturing would have is to lower costs. Sales, on the other hand, could have a strategy focused on increasing sales. Technology could push for increased research, and marketing could aim to build market share. By assessing company focus and direction, one can better measure strengths and weaknesses.

Monitoring the external environment from the viewpoint of your products, services, and markets is an assessment that should be carried out by those involved in making marketing decisions. Marketers are often well placed to read between the lines and make meaningful recommendations based on shifts within the market.

Analyzing your strengths and weaknesses

Strengths should be examined further to complete an opportunity analysis. This allows you to match your company’s strengths or competencies to opportunities in the market. Specifically, you should evaluate the opportunities your company can capitalize on to benefit from competitors’ weaknesses. Opportunities emerge continuously as the market landscape changes.

For example, say one of your company’s strengths is customer loyalty. This strength could have one or more of the following effects:

• Incremental sales volume increases
• Price increase for premium quality and service
• New product introduction.

An opportunity could be created based on the environment, such as:

• Trends in changing taste that make your product/service more desirable
• New geographic shift in the target market, creating new prospects
• A market segment neglected by the industry that your company could target

Objectives that a business might make based on this strength and these opportunities could be:

• Developing a premium product
• Bringing an existing product to a new market
• Developing a new channel for a product

Measuring and analyzing company strengths and weaknesses helps CEOs set and achieve their business goals. Does your business need help developing a marketing strategy? Contact us—FrogDog can help.