Explore competitor analysis and enhance your decision-making skills

What is competitor analysis, and how can it help businesses outperform their rivals? Understanding your competition is vital to surpassing them. This two-week, 360-degree course will explain how.

Competitive analysis can be defined as identifying a businesses major rivals and researching their products, sales, and marketing strategies. The right competitive analysis framework and tools can play a major part in planning your future business strategies and decision-making.

Explore the different types of organisational structures

In this course, you’ll have the opportunity to get to grips with understanding organisational goals and values, and why it’s important to think of your competitors as stakeholders. You’ll also explore the different types of organisational structures, such as the ‘lean pyramid’.

Use competitor analysis tools such as stakeholder mapping

Find out how you can easily perform competitive analysis by using the right tools. Although many tools target a particular niche, more generic tools can be used to analyse multiple areas of a competitor and their strategies to give you an overview of their efforts, allowing you to see potential avenues for growth.

Understand business-level strategy and strategic management

Business level strategies provide a way to add value to customers by exploiting a firm’s core competencies. In this course, you’ll examine how such strategies can help a company gain the competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Syllabus

Week 1
Organisation Goals and Values
- Welcome to the course
  Learn about how we define the success or failure of a business. Does having a good strategy in place play an important influence on whether a company succeeds or not?
- Organisational value and stakeholders
  Let's start by asking the question: who are we working for? You will begin by looking at two approaches, the stakeholder approach and the shareholder approach. You will then explore the concept behind stakeholder mapping.
- Organisational vision and mission
  Understand an organisations ethos by unpicking their mission and vision statements. Explore the importance of the differences between the vision and mission of a company to which it aspires towards.
- Summary activities
  Bring all your learning together to conclude this week's activities, and take time to reflect. What key aspects of this week interested you most? Are there any further areas to explore in building up your understanding?
Week 2
Strategic Actions – Business-level Strategy
- Welcome to the course
  Welcome to Week 2 of this short course on Competitive Analysis in which you will learn how we define and understand the aims of business-level strategy. You will then compare and evaluate two different business models.
- Lean organisational pyramid
  Decision-making in traditional organisations is top-down and very hierarchical.
- Generic strategy
  Understand generic strategy and how this is demonstrated within a business-level strategy. You will then learn about how the different types of business level strategy appear as examples of real business models.
- Bowman's Clock
  By illustrating a variety of strategic options, Bowman’s Clock helps a firm to position itself in the target market.
- Summary activities
  Time to reflect on your learning so far. Check your understanding and capture your thinking on aspects you have learned with new areas to further research. Search the Coventry University Library Locate area for useful resources.

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Learning on this course

On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

Discuss the nature and importance of competitive analysis
Evaluate different strategies for identifying competitors’ strengths and weaknesses

Who is the course for?

This ExpertTrack is designed for intermediate-level business managers and students to gain more knowledge about strategy and globalisation. This course aims to equip you with the concepts, framework and techniques needed for better environmental scanning.

Who developed the course?

Coventry University

Coventry secured 5 QS Stars for Teaching and Online Learning in the QS World University Ranking 2020 and has received No. 1 in the world for Massive Open Online Courses in MoocLab’s World University Ranking 2021.

Established
1992
Location
Coventry

About this ExpertTrack

Discover the fundamentals of business strategy, business models and strategic management, and work on your decision-making skills.

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