From the course: Creating a Business Plan

Describe why you can win in the market

From the course: Creating a Business Plan

Describe why you can win in the market

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- Once you've described the market you're going to compete in and the way your product solves that problem, you need to do a SWOT analysis and describe why you're going to win in that market. It's not good enough to just have a product. You need to understand how you stack up versus your competitors, and what your competitive advantage is going to be. You'll conduct a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Those are going to highlight implications for how you're going to approach the market and compete there. For example, let's look at a business where you may have a strength in terms of your intellectual property, and a key market segment is showing high demand for that product. A weakness that you have is you lack distribution capabilities, and your competitors have much better distribution than you do. Now, that's going to identify an opportunity for you in terms of how you're going to take your product to market. Because you have that strong intellectual property and no distribution, perhaps your business pursues a strategy where you partner for distribution, and you find a channel partner who has strength in terms of distribution, and perhaps they have a weakness in terms of intellectual property. And that's a good combination for you to take it to market. So when you conduct your SWOT analysis, don't just leave it at doing the analysis. Think through the implications of those strengths and weaknesses and the threats and opportunities you face, and turn those into a plan for how you're going to compete effectively.

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