Use market assessment frameworks to inform strategic thinking

Understanding the competitive landscape is crucial when you’re planning to launch a new product, increase market share, or grow into a new market. Market assessment frameworks scaffold this research and your evaluation of the competition. These structured methodologies ensure you avoid a scattergun approach to market opportunity assessment, effectively removing any guesswork or assumptions about your market position. Instead, you create successful growth strategies built entirely on data-based insights.  

A range of different market assessment frameworks are available, each giving you a unique angle on your competitive landscape, market dynamics, and target audiences. The common factor linking them all is that they present a mass of complex information in a clear visual, with easily understood, shareable metrics. At the outset, identifying the right combination of market assessment frameworks will give your business the most valuable insights for your strategic thinking.  

Ultimately, leveraging proven frameworks enables a holistic view of your operating environment, ensuring every decision is backed by comprehensive market intelligence.

Table of Contents

• Importance of Market Assessments
• Key Market Assessment Frameworks
  • The 3Cs Model
  • Porter’s Five Forces Model
  • SWOT Analysis
  • PESTEL Analysis
  • Strategic Group Analysis
  • Perceptual Mapping
• How to Conduct a Market Assessment Analysis
• Best Practices for Effective Market Assessment
• Conclusion
• Conduct market assessment and analysis with a research partner

The importance of market assessments

Santiago Sanchez, DoorDash General Manager, worked with NewtonX using our Hypergrowth Strategy Framework to build research insights into their decision making process. He explains the broad benefits and their considerable impact: “With quickly changing competitive landscapes, we need to grow in a more disciplined way. We’re no longer a scrappy startup; we’re a publicly traded company. Research enables a much tighter focus to our strategy conversations, which ultimately gives us greater advantage. Because when we go too fast – we miss things if we don’t dig into research and surface new insights. Research helps us increase the upside by helping uncover new growth ops and minimizes the risk by providing the ‘right’ certainty in our decisions.” Market assessments provide a strategic advantage by offering a clear, data-driven picture of the market you operate in or plan to enter. For B2B companies, these assessments are foundational to understanding your potential for growth and profitability. They help you:

• Identify Market Opportunities: Spot underserved niches, emerging trends, or unmet customer needs that align with your capabilities.
• Evaluate Competitive Landscape: Understand who your competitors are, their strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning.
• Assess Internal Capabilities: Determine your company’s strengths and weaknesses relative to market demands and competitive forces.
• Mitigate Risks: Anticipate potential challenges, shifts in regulations, or technological disruptions.
• Inform Product/Service Development: Ensure new offerings meet genuine market demand.
• Optimize Market Entry/Expansion Strategies: Make informed decisions about where and how to invest resources for the highest return.

Ultimately, a well-executed market assessment reduces uncertainty and equips leaders with the foresight needed to make confident, impactful strategic choices.

Key market assessment frameworks

You need to start by carefully choosing the right combination of market assessment frameworks to give you a holistic overview of your competitive landscape. Below is a quick definition of the most commonly used market assessments and their individual ‘star quality’ – the key insight you’ll be empowered with. These frameworks provide structured methodologies for evaluating various aspects of your market, helping to organize complex data into understandable insights.

The 3Cs model

The 3Cs Model focuses on three critical elements: Company, Customers, and Competitors. This framework encourages businesses to analyze these interconnected factors to develop a balanced and effective strategy.

• Company: This involves an internal assessment of your own organization’s strengths, weaknesses, capabilities, and resources. Key questions include: What are our core competencies? What unique value do we offer? Where do we need to improve?
• Customers: Understanding your target customers is paramount. This includes analyzing their needs, behaviors, preferences, and audience segmentation. Key questions include: Who are our ideal customers? What problems do they face? How do they make purchasing decisions?
• Competitors: A thorough analysis of your competitors involves identifying direct and indirect rivals, understanding their strategies, market share, and competitive advantages. Key questions include: Who are our main competitors? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How do they position themselves in the market?

By synthesizing insights from these three areas, businesses can identify unique market positioning and develop strategies that leverage internal strengths while addressing customer needs and outmaneuvering competitors.

Porter’s five forces model

Michael Porter, a Harvard business school professor, created this framework that scaffolds understanding of the 5 key market forces that influence your industry.

• The Threat of New Entrants (Beware the newbies): Any new entrants into a market pose a significant threat to your existing position. How well fortified is your industry against newcomers? High barriers to entry (e.g., high capital costs, strong brand loyalty) can protect existing businesses.
• Bargaining Power of Buyers (Client power): What kind of customer base do you have? How much power do they have to negotiate with you? Many buyers with access to information can increase buyer power, driving down prices or demanding higher quality/service.
• Bargaining Power of Suppliers (Supplier strength): How easy is it for suppliers to raise input costs? Few suppliers or unique inputs can increase supplier power, impacting your cost structure.
• Threat of Substitute Products or Services (Substitution threat): Does anyone else have a similar product or service that can easily be a substitute for yours? The existence of such substitutes poses a direct threat to your power within the market. This can limit your pricing power and overall profitability.
• Rivalry Among Existing Competitors (The competition): How many competitors do you have? Is their offering the same as yours? How much power does that leave you with? Intense rivalry often leads to price wars, impacting profitability.

Star quality: You can use Porter five forces model to zoom into a specific element and zoom out to get a broad overview of the most relevant industry influences. You can plan long-term profitability into your business strategy by using this framework because this panoramic view of your industry helps you bolster positions of strength, repair weaknesses and navigate your competitive landscape without inadvertently giving way to any competitors.

SWOT analysis

SWOT analysis has become embedded in people’s thinking that it’s easy to forget you ever learned its definition as a framework. Its visual representation is a square divided into four sections. Each quadrant has its own label: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats – thus, the acronym. A SWOT analysis is a useful scaffold to thinking through any number of decisions. In this specific instance, considering the competitive landscape, the specifics would look something like:

• Strengths (Internal): What benefits are there inside an organization? These are internal capabilities and resources that give your company an advantage (e.g., proprietary technology, strong brand reputation, highly skilled workforce).
• Weaknesses (Internal): What disadvantages exist within a company? These are internal limitations or disadvantages that hinder performance (e.g., lack of capital, outdated processes, limited market reach).
• Opportunities (External): What opportunities are there outside the organization? These are external factors that the company could exploit for growth (e.g., emerging markets, new technologies, favorable regulatory changes).
• Threats (External): What are the external threats that create challenges? These are external factors that could negatively impact the business (e.g., new competitors, economic downturns, changing consumer preferences, supply chain disruptions).

Star quality: Not only can you use a SWOT analysis to evaluate your own company, but also to assess these elements in your main competitors. These insights are particularly useful in highlighting your comparative advantages.

PESTEL analysis

A PESTEL analysis is a strategic planning tool that organizes the myriad of outside influences on your market into 6 key areas.

• Political: Wherever you operate in the world, government legislation and policy impact how you operate. Political stability, trade agreements and employment laws all impact your ability to do business.
• Economic: Economic factors include exchange rates, recessions, inflation and GDP growth rate.
• Social/Cultural: Social factors include all the many strands of culture and lifestyle that influence your buyer personas.
• Technology: The fast-paced changes in new technology and how it’s used in different industries.
• Legal: Any and all of the laws that affect the running of your business, like Health and Safety, IP regulations, Advertising Standards and Consumer Rights laws.
• Environmental: Rules around environmental protection, pollution and carbon footprint targets, and climate change.

Star quality: A PESTEL analysis helps you identify external factors that affect your standing and competitive opportunities. As importantly, it also measures the strength of their impact on your organization. So you can spot trends early, swerving risks and making the most of any opportunities.

Strategic group analysis

Strategic group analysis framework groups companies by the similarity of their strategy. The grouping focuses on a few elements from a range of characteristics like: pricing, range of services or products, geographic area, marketing channels, quality, branding. Once you’ve identified your 2 key aspects for a group analysis, this can be turned into a strategic group map. This is a two axis graph, one characteristic on each axis, on which you can plot your competitors – and yourself. You can analyze your insights to reveal the intensity of competition in your strategic group and between different groups in your industry. This data also starkly highlights any gaps in the market and potential threats.

Star quality: Strategic group analysis illuminates your marketplace with data that directly compares you and your competitors. You can use the details of these insights to develop a strategy that strengthens your position, by taking advantage of any gaps in the market and becoming a more formidable foe to market leaders.

Perceptual mapping

Get into the minds of your target market and find out what they really think about you and your competition. A perceptual, or positioning, map is a graph that shows a comparison of 2 factors. For example, price on one axis and quality on the other. You can plot your competitive landscape in one visual and easily compare perceptions on your core characteristics.

Star quality: Perceptions can be changed. Once you know how you and your competitors are perceived, you can adapt your strategy to strengthen your position accordingly. Perceptual mapping makes data insights easy to understand, making your strategy discussions more efficient.

While frameworks like the Growth Share Matrix, Business Model Canvas, and Customer Journey Map are valuable strategic tools often used in conjunction with market assessment, they are typically focused on product portfolio management, overarching business strategy, or customer experience mapping, rather than being core market assessment frameworks in the same vein as those detailed above.

How to conduct a market assessment analysis

Conducting an effective market assessment involves a structured approach to data collection, analysis, and strategic application. Follow these key steps:

1. Define objectives and scope

   • Clearly articulate why you are conducting the market assessment. Are you evaluating a new product launch, market entry, competitive threat, or growth opportunity? Define the specific market, industry, or segment you will analyze.
   • Clear objectives guide your data collection and ensure the assessment yields relevant insights.
     
     

2. Gather data (primary & secondary)

   • Collect both primary data (e.g., surveys, interviews with industry experts, customers, competitors) and secondary data (e.g., industry reports, market research databases, government statistics, news articles, academic research).
   • A mix of data sources provides a comprehensive and balanced perspective.
     
     

3. Apply market assessment frameworks

   • Systematically use frameworks like the 3Cs, Porter’s Five Forces, SWOT, PESTEL, Strategic Group Analysis, and Perceptual Mapping to organize and analyze your gathered data. Each framework will illuminate different aspects of the market.
   • Frameworks provide structure, prevent overlooking key factors, and facilitate clear interpretation of complex information.
     
     

4. Analyze findings and synthesize insights

   • Don’t just list data; interpret it. What do the trends, competitive dynamics, customer needs, and external factors tell you? Synthesize the information across frameworks to identify overarching themes, critical success factors, and potential challenges.
   • Analysis turns raw data into actionable intelligence.
     
     

5. Develop strategic recommendations

   • Based on your insights, formulate clear, actionable strategic recommendations. These should directly address your initial objectives and leverage your understanding of the market.
   • The ultimate purpose of a market assessment is to inform and guide strategic decision-making.
     
     

Best practices for effective market assessment

To ensure your market assessment provides the most value, consider these best practices:

• Stay Objective: Base findings on data, not assumptions or biases.
• Be Specific: Broad conclusions are less actionable. Drill down into specific segments, trends, and competitive actions.
• Involve Key Stakeholders: Collaborate with sales, product, marketing, and leadership to ensure the assessment addresses diverse perspectives and gains internal buy-in.
• Regularly Update: Markets are dynamic. Conduct periodic assessments to stay ahead of changes and maintain relevance.
• Focus on Actionability: The assessment’s value lies in its ability to drive concrete strategic actions.
  
  

Conclusion

Market assessment frameworks are invaluable tools for any B2B company seeking to make informed strategic decisions and achieve sustainable growth. By systematically analyzing internal and external factors through frameworks like the 3Cs, Porter’s Five Forces, SWOT, PESTEL, Strategic Group Analysis, and Perceptual Mapping, you can gain a panoramic view of your market. This deep understanding empowers you to identify opportunities, mitigate risks, and position your business for success. In today’s competitive and AI-influenced landscape, leveraging such robust insights is not just advantageous – it’s essential for foresight and strategic excellence.

Conduct market assessment and analysis with a research partner

You can work together with an expert research partner to create the best research strategy for you. It ensures you get all the actionable insights you need by constructing the right combination of methodologies and frameworks. After an initial snapshot of your competitive landscape, you can embed market assessment analysis into your overall research strategy to continually monitor the dynamic competitive landscape. Identifying the most valuable star qualities delivers all the insights you need to guide your long-term strategic thinking.

Looking for a research partner? Get a quote today.