1. You enter your project team meeting with Mike and Tiffany to
hear them discussing the tools that they found to conduct an
analysis of the industry and competitors. “Mike, there are so
many more tools than I even realized to give us some good
data,” Tiffany states.
“I know,” Mike says. “That’s why I wanted to take some time to
look at our options and figure out what information we really
need to support the board’s decision.”
Mike and Tiffany both found some great tools from their
research on the subject. Complete the following:
Based on your classmates’ discussion posts for Week 2, do you
still believe the tools that you selected will work best for a
global strategy? Why or why not?
What evidence do you have to support your decision?
How would you refute the people who chose an additional tool
rather than one of the tools that you selected?
Based on the tools that you selected, provide a brief analysis of
your market, using those tools.
just for helping with this unit 2 IP

2. Below is one DB post because it asked Based on your
classmates’ discussion posts for Week 2, do you still believe
the tools that you selected will work best for a global strategy?
Why or why not
What are the best tools to use in this situation?
When evaluating your competitors, it is critical to
assess other firms that provide similar products or services
within an industry to also consider those firms in industries
that provide alternative or substitute products that a customer
could opt to purchase (MUSE, 2019). The best tools to use in
this situation would be a framework analysis. Four forces of
Porter’s framework could be a tool to consider. However, to
get a closer look at the competitor’s strategy that is leading
the market producing similar quality products. I’d investigate
the Competitor Analysis, Customer Analysis, and/or SWOT
Analysis to decide which study best fit our forward-thinking
strategy. This would provide a baseline on the competition to
know if you need to improve our standards by choosing to be
more innovative or environmentally friendly. If we choose to
the latter, then the PESTEL Analysis would be a great tool to
examine.
Provide a brief summary of at least 2 of these tools.
We decided to investigate the Four Forces of Porter’s
framework and Competitor Analysis. Porter’s Framework
dives into the analysis of four specific areas of the

3. framework including Threat of Substitutes; the chances the
customer is likely to switch, Industry Competitors; any
existing rivalries, Supply Power; bargaining power of
suppliers, and Buyer Power; the price buyers are willing to
pay (MUSE, 2019). Our second tool to examine for this
project is the Competitor Analysis. This analysis examines
the technique and approach for using Best Practice
Benchmarking; metric for evaluating the competing
business’s performance (MUSE, 2019), Value Chain
Analysis; the step of activities being used by a company,
Competitive Profiling; how well the firm stands out in the
competition, and Industry Analysis; knowing how many
competitors you will be competing with and the health of
their company (Wilson, n.d.).
Why do you think these are the best ways to analyze the
market?
The tools mentioned above in my opinion are the best
tools to analyze the market due to their overlapping analysis
with other tools such as areas from the PESTEL, SWOT and
Customer Analysis. By using the Porter’s framework and
Competitor Analysis, the team would be able to have a bird’s
eye view on the indirect competition as well as the direct
competition to confirm assumptions using the tools and
provide corrective action for identified discrepancies and
inconsistencies as we try to create a competitive advantage.
How will you use these tools in your plan?
In this project we will utilize the free competitive
analysis templates provided by smartsheet ("Free
Competitive Analysis Templates | Smartsheet," 2018). This
template will have all the subjects we need to answer specific

4. questions about the industry and business we are analyzing
along with housing the collected data in one sheet to be used
in creating reports, dashboards and presentations. For the
Porter’s Framework, we will create and implement an excel
template with the specific topics we need in analyzing the
indirect competition to verify if there products are or could
be used in support of our products or if customers are settling
for substituted items due to pricing.
References
MUSE. (2019). Retrieved from
https://class.ctuonline.edu/_layouts/MUSEViewer/Asset.aspx?M
ID=13897490&aid=13897494
Wilson, R. (n.d.). Competitor Analysis. Retrieved from
http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.cecybrary.com/ehost/detail/de
tail?vid=0&
[email protected]
&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=9
412201300&db=bth
Free Competitive Analysis Templates | Smartsheet. (2018,
April 23). Retrieved from
https://www.smartsheet.com/free-competitor-analysis-template