How to Conduct a Comprehensive Competitive Landscape Analysis

There’s a perception that competition is increasing now, more than ever. However, it’s well-documented that the volume of new businesses entering the market has been steadily shrinking since the 1980s. So why are business leaders feeling the pressure?

The answer is quite simple. Industries are becoming more concentrated, with giants commanding large shares of the market and minor players experiencing shorter life cycles, with the lifespan of a company moving twice as quickly as it did 30 years ago. These forces are leading to more market volatility and unpredictability and highlight the importance of a deep understanding of the market you operate in.

Critical to the life and death of a company is data. Whether you’re a long-standing multinational incumbent or a fast-growing startup entrant, a deep understanding of market dynamics is essential to build strategy. And because everything moves faster in today’s markets, speed can help make or break your success.

Mapping your market

If you’re entering a market for the first time or keeping tabs on new market entrants and themes, completing a landscape analysis is critical to help power your strategy. Done well, these analyses can help you save time and money, identify unique opportunities and make data-driven decisions.

Mapping a market involves gaining an understanding of the key organizations operating in a sector, classifying those organizations, and evaluating their performance. This can involve putting together lists of competitors, partners, and suppliers, forecasting market share and growth potential, and monitoring key activities happening within the market – from M&A to new product developments.

Traditionally, sourcing all of this information requires researching across multiple, difficult-to-search platforms to aggregate findings. With a need for speed in today’s volatile markets, searching across disparate platforms not only wastes time, but could also equate to missed opportunities.

Landscape analysis powered by AI

Much like today’s markets, the way research is conducted and consumed is ever-changing. Once disparate sources – broker research, company earnings documents, and news – are now available all within the same platform, saving both time and money. Moreover, enhanced search capabilities powered by AI algorithms are changing the way landscape analyses are run. In combining best-in-class NLP technology with millions of curated business research sources, you can speed up the pace of analyses and gain deeper context to power better decisions.

Related Reading: An Innovator’s Guide to Competitive Intelligence

Gain unique insights from the experts

The best place to start for landscape analysis is broker research, available through AlphaSense’s Wall Street Insights collection. Often, these expert analysts do much of the heavy lifting for you through their industry reports and market overviews that cover opportunities, threats, and the latest movements within a sector or topic. A new markets product manager at a Fortune 500 medical devices company told us he uses initiation reports to gain a perspective on a market he’s not familiar with and admits that he’s gained more confidence in his work because it’s become more comprehensive with the unique insights he draws from these experts. 

Drawing from these reports and performing a thematic search across multiple content sets on key topics will allow you to get ever more granular with your analysis. Particularly helpful in your quest to define the companies impacted by a trend will be the Search Summary, which allows you to see all of the companies talking about or mentioned in commentary around the theme you’d like to explore. To reduce friction in your workflow, you can easily export this list of companies into an Excel table. When COVID-19 first started to appear, one quant analyst shared that they exported these search analytics to view and compare how Coronavirus was starting to be discussed in different industries so that he could align his investment recommendations and understand which companies he needed to be worried about first.

AlphaSense also allows you to easily find and manipulate quantitative data like current and forecasted market share or market size. Table tools allow you to export or snip tables and charts you find within both company documents and broker research. From here, you can easily manipulate this data for your own research purposes, both mitigating the risk of data entry errors and speeding up this once-manual process.

To keep ongoing tabs on your landscape, Alerts can be leveraged to proactively notify you of market activities such as new product launches or M&A rumors. In the quickly changing healthcare landscape, one Market Intelligence leader shared that he set daily alerts to stay abreast of the major themes and companies his team keeps constant tabs on, aiding in their goal to provide insights into the biggest risks and opportunities within healthcare.

Check out this video of best practices in leveraging AI to map a market and perform a thorough landscape analysis or unlock a free trial of AlphaSense here.

Here are a few scenarios and how AlphaSense’s smart AI can tackle the new product development workflow:

 

What info you’re seeking	Scenario	How to do it in AlphaSense
Peer market share	Find the eCommerce market share of players within the Consumer Staples market	Run a thematic search across broker research to identify mentions of market share within reports Search link for AlphaSense users.
Competitor mentions	Uncover the ESG scores of competitors within the Energy industry	Run a thematic search across broker research and ESG report to uncover ESG scores of energy companies. Then, export the applicable exhibits to Excel. Search link for AlphaSense users.
Market overview	Identify companies within the hair products space	Perform a thematic search, then leverage Search Summary to identify the companies with the most mentions related to this topic. Search link for AlphaSense users.
Segment CAPEX	Keep tabs on changes in CAPEX in the radiology market	Run a thematic search, then set an Alert to be informed in real-time of changes within the market. Search link for AlphaSense users.

 

See how AlphaSense compares:

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