In a business world driven by technology and digitalization, competition is much more fluid as innovation becomes a bottom-up approach that can come from anywhere. Thus, making it much harder to define the boundaries of existing markets. Therefore, a proper business competition analysis looks at customer, technology, distribution, and financial model overlaps. While at the same time looking at future potential intersections among industries that, in the short-term, seem unrelated.
Why traditional comparable analysis frameworks might fail in a tech-driven business world
A comparable company analysis is a process that enables the identification of similar organizations to be used as a comparison to understand the business and financial performance of the target company. To find comparables you can look at two key profiles: the business and financial profile. From the comparable company analysis, it is possible to understand the competitive landscape of the target organization.
Among the most common and perhaps simple and effective frameworks to look at competition is given by Joshua Rosenbaum and Joshua Pearl, authors of “Investment Banking,” offer us two main criteria to select our comparable companies:
Under the business profile, we have things like sector, product & services, customers & end markets, distribution channel, and geography. In the financial profile, we can look at more specific aspects like size, profitability, growth profile, return on investment, and credit profile
So far, so good, but let’s integrate into this analysis also the VTDF Framework developed on FourWeekMBA.
Competitor Analysis Framework
It’s possible to identify the key players that overlap with a company’s business model with a competitor analysis. This overlapping can be analyzed in terms of key customers, technologies, distribution, and financial models. When all those elements are analyzed, it is possible to map all the facets of competition for a tech business model to understand better where a business stands in the marketplace and its possible future developments.
We do want to overlap customer profile, technology, distribution, and financial model used by companies. While at the same time looking at how the technological model will affect an entire industry in the future.
Technological modeling is a discipline to provide the basis for companies to sustain innovation, thus developing incremental products. While also looking at breakthrough innovative products that can pave the way for long-term success. In a sort of Barbell Strategy, technological modeling suggests having a two-sided approach, on the one hand, to keep sustaining continuous innovation as a core part of the business model. On the other hand, it places bets on future developments that have the potential to break through and take a leap forward.
We do believe that tech companies often operate at two intersections.
On the one hand, a first intersection is about applying existing technology to an existing market, thus creating more competition.
On the other hand, and this is the tricky part, there is usually a gradual, then sudden swift investment in new technologies that not only intersect current markets, they have the potential to create new ones, that not only might eat up an existing market, they might also end up creating a much bigger market.
From here the technological potential needs to be assessed early on to evaluate how much that technology can interpolate with an existing market but also eat that up.
Thus creating overlapping in the future, which might be hard to imagine today.
The great market reshuffling
To analyze how future technologies might reorganize markets, thus reshuffling and redefining entire industries it is critical to keep an open mind on what competition entails. Thus, in this kind of market cooperation and competition become very fluid (see the concept of coopetition).
There are fewer boundaries.
Key Highlights
Fluid Competition in Technology-Driven Business: The rise of technology and digitalization has made competition more dynamic, as innovation can come from various sources. This bottom-up innovation approach challenges the traditional definition of market boundaries and requires a comprehensive analysis.
Traditional Comparable Analysis Frameworks: Comparable company analysis is a method to understand the financial performance of a target company by comparing it to similar organizations. The framework involves business and financial profiles, considering factors like sector, products, customers, profitability, growth, and more.
Integration of VTDF Framework: The VTDF (Value, Technology, Distribution, Financial) Framework, developed by FourWeekMBA, offers a holistic approach to competitor analysis. It involves overlapping aspects like customer profile, technology, distribution, and financial models. This analysis helps map competition facets for a tech business model, allowing a better understanding of a business’s position and future potential.
Technological Modeling: Technological modeling supports sustained innovation and the development of both incremental and breakthrough products. The Barbell Strategy suggests a dual approach, combining continuous innovation with investments in technologies that can create significant leaps forward.
Two Intersections of Tech Companies: Tech companies often operate at two intersections: applying existing technology to current markets to increase competition and investing in new technologies that can reshape existing markets or create entirely new ones.
Assessing Technological Potential: Evaluating the potential impact of new technologies on markets is crucial. Assessing how a technology can interpolate with existing markets and potentially reshape or expand them is essential for effective competition analysis.
Market Reshuffling: Future technologies can reorganize markets, reshuffling and redefining entire industries. In this context, competition and cooperation become fluid, leading to fewer defined boundaries. The concept of “coopetition” (cooperation + competition) plays a role in this dynamic market landscape.
Starbucks is a multinational coffee chain headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It was founded by Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker in 1971. From a single and very humble bean roasting store in Pike Place Market, the company is now a global giant operating almost 33,000 stores around the world. This large global footprint obviously increases the competition for Starbucks in many different markets. The coffee industry itself is also highly competitive, with established players including McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts.
Carvana is an online used car retailer with vending machines located around the United States. The company was founded in 2012 by Ryan Keeton, Ben Huston, and Ernest Garcia III. The company is the fastest growing online used car retailer in North America and was recently one of the youngest companies to be added to the Fortune 500 list. While Carvana is currently the only American company selling cars in vending machines, its growth and success have not gone unnoticed by other players. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the company’s major competitors.
GoodRx is an American healthcare company known for its telemedicine platform and a website and mobile app that track prescription drug prices. As part of this service, the company makes drug coupons available for free to consumers. GoodRx was created by Trevor Bezdek, Doug Hirsch, and Scott Marlette. Hirsch, an early employee at both Yahoo and Facebook, got the idea for the company after picking up a prescription with private health insurance and still having to pay $450. Given the high variability in prices between different pharmacies, Hirsh went on a mission to make prescription drug prices more transparent and affordable for ordinary Americans. Revenue in the second quarter of 2021 amounted to $177 million with over 7.5 million app customers using the GoodRx app. While the company was the first to provide a comprehensive list of pharmacy drug prices, new players have entered the market. The rest of this article will be devoted to looking at the main GoodRx competitors.
The Coca-Cola Company has 21 different billion-dollar brands or brands that generate more than $1 billion or more in revenue each year. The company also sells its products in nearly every country in the world, with Cuba and North Korea the only two countries where it is not sold officially. What’s more, the Coca-Cola brand is worth $87.6 billion, making it one of the most valuable among all companies. Though these figures allow Coca-Cola to enjoy market dominance in many countries, the company is nevertheless subject to intense competition.
In 1965, PepsiCo acquired Frito-Lay in what the chairmen of both companies called a “marriage made in heaven”. The resultant company transformed PepsiCo from a soft drink organization and set it on a path to becoming one of the world’s leading food and beverage companies. Today, PepsiCo claims to operate in more than 200 countries and territories around the world with seven distinct divisions and many successful brands.
Headquartered in Burbank, California, Disney has global reach and influence with its universally popular resorts, movies, streaming services, video games, and merchandise. But as one of the largest media conglomerates in the world with a diverse range of products in multiple marketplaces, Disney is no stranger to competition.
Peloton is a media and exercise equipment company primarily making money making money via its fitness products. The idea for the company came from John Foley, who argued that technology could help time-poor individuals get a full workout at home. The company competes with other players like Bowflex, NordicTrack, Life Fitness, MYX Fitness.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology company. It was founded in New York as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911 by Charles Ranlett Flint. IBM is a diverse company with a similarly diverse portfolio of products and services. It produces and sells hardware, middleware, and software. It also offers hosting and consultancy services in nanotechnology and mainframe computers. What’s more, IBM has a strong culture in research and development, filing the most U.S. patents of any business for the past 28 years.
While Google (now Alphabet) has been born as a search engine, it is now a diversified company, even though its core business remains search, as most of its revenues still come from Google, the search engine, and YouTube, the “video engine.” However, as a tech giant, which business is primarily based on advertising, the company does compete with Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft (with Bing), and Amazon (with e-commerce search and its advertising machine).
The Airbnb story began in 2008 when two friends shared their accommodation with three travelers looking for a place to stay. Just over a decade later, it is estimated that the company now accounts for over 20% of the vacation rental industry. As a travel platform, Airbnb competes with other brands like Booking.com, VRBO, FlipKey, and given its massive amount of traffic from Google. Also, platforms like Google Travel can be considered potential competitors able to cannibalize part of Airbnb’s market.
Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) provider, allowing businesses to build meaningful and sustained relationships with their customers. With robust, customizable software that integrates with social media, Gmail, and Microsoft Outlook, the Salesforce CRM platform is rated highly among businesses of all shapes and sizes. Recent data has shown that the company has captured 19.5% of the global CRM market.
YouTube is the most popular online video platform, a hybrid between a video search engine and a social media platform with a continuous feed prompted by social interactions and engagement. In fact, the platform is so popular that YouTube.com is the second most visited website on the internet. After being acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, the platform now boasts over 2 billion registered users. Collectively, these users upload 500 hours of video every minute. The platform competes with other video engines like Vimeo, Dailymotion, and social platforms like IGTV, TikTok, and Twitch.
Zoom is a video platform, which enabled remote working. As such it competes with other large tech players like Google and Microsoft for the productivity space, and other startups like Slack and Go-To-Meetings.
As an electric automaker and builder of sports cars and now trucks, Tesla’s competitors comprise companies like Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, Rivian Lucid Motors, Toyota, and more. At the same time, Tesla is an electric energy production and storage company (SolarCity); it competes with Sunrun, SunPower, and Vivint Solar. And as an autonomous driving company, it competes with companies like Zoox, Waymo, and Baidu with the self-driving software.
Amazon is a consumer e-commerce platform with a diversified business model spanning across e-commerce, cloud, advertising, streaming, and more. Over the years, Amazon acquired several companies. As it operates across several industries, Amazon has a wide range of competitors across each of those industries. For instance, Amazon E-commerce competes with Shopify, Wix, Google, Etsy, eBay, BigCommerce.
Non-Linear/Indirect Competition
In a business world, which is tech-driven, in the long run, competition becomes non-linear.
In short, niches that seemed completely disjoined from a market, end up creating whole new industries which might absorb existing marketplaces.
Let’s look at two examples.
Netflix vs. TikTok
As explained in the Netflix business model, there are two ways to look at its competitors.
One way is to guess the current customer base is overlapping.
In the Netflix-specific case, it means assessing the behaviors of paying members across the globe and whether they are switching to other streaming services or perhaps keeping various streaming services accounts.
This is fine to assess what content other streaming platforms are producing, and it helps steer the content development efforts for the company.
Source Nielsen
However, there is another way to look at it.
If instead of looking into customers, and members, what’s Netflix’s core asset?
Meaning what’s the thing that makes the company keep a long-term competitive advantage?
Based on that, we can reassess competition and perhaps looks into where attention is going, especially for younger generations, and we get this:
Source thenetworkec.com
In short, the competitors’ map changes suddenly, and you start reassessing the company’s long-term strategy by looking at where attention is currently moving.
Why is this important?
Well, because you ask different questions. Rather than thinking about content, based on the previous thinking framework that Netflix had successfully rolled out in the prior decade.
You now look at it with a different eye and understand that Netflix, to thrive in this decade, has to change its content development framework or at least redefine it.
Non-Linear Competition: Tesla vs. Insurance Companies
Another interesting case is Tesla and its insurance business.
A real-time insurance business model enables Tesla to build its own insurance arm, by dynamically adjusting the premiums, based on real-time driving behavior. Reduced insurance premiums hooked with the leasing arm, enable Tesla to scale its demand side of the business.
Now, if you look at Tesla as just a car company, you think those are Tesla’s competitors:
As an electric automaker and builder of sports cars and now trucks, Tesla’s competitors comprise companies like Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, Rivian Lucid Motors, Toyota, and more. At the same time, Tesla is an electric energy production and storage company (SolarCity); it competes with Sunrun, SunPower, and Vivint Solar. And as an autonomous driving company, it competes with companies like Zoox, Waymo, and Baidu with self-driving software.
Thus, if you were a legacy company like Geico, this is your competitors’ map:
Yet, if you understand non-linear competition, you also know that Tesla is coming for the insurance business, as it can be a segment to ramp up its car operations.
And if you take into account that Tesla’s target is to sell millions of cars across the world, then, if you are Geico, you might want to change your way of looking at the competition.
Direct competition is a linear way to look at the business world, and compare a company with other similar companies, in the same industry. An example is comparing Netflix with other streaming services. On the opposite hand, the indirect competition looks at the core asset, and potential long-term overlaps. For instance, Netflix’s main asset is attention, and if you look at attention you might compare Netlfix with other services, beyond streaming, like perhaps TikTok.
Coopetition describes a recently modern phenomenon where organizations both compete and cooperate, which is also known as cooperative competition. A recent example is how the Netflix streaming platform has been among the major customers of Amazon AWS cloud infrastructure, while Amazon Prime has been among the competitors of the Netflix Prime content platform.
A comparable company analysis is a process that enables the identification of similar organizations to be used as a comparison to understand the business and financial performance of the target company. To find comparables you can look at two key profiles: the business and financial profile. From the comparable company analysis it is possible to understand the competitive landscape of the target organization.
In a tech-driven business world, companies can move toward market expansion by creating options to scale via niches. Thus leveraging transitional business models to scale further and take advantage of non-linear competition, where today’s niches become tomorrow’s legacy players.
Business scaling is the process of transformation of a business as the product is validated by wider and wider market segments. Business scaling is about creating traction for a product that fits a small market segment. As the product is validated it becomes critical to build a viable business model. And as the product is offered at wider and wider market segments, it’s important to align product, business model, and organizational design, to enable wider and wider scale.
A Blockchain Business Model according to the FourWeekMBA framework is made of four main components: Value Model (Core Philosophy, Core Values and Value Propositions for the key stakeholders), Blockchain Model (Protocol Rules, Network Shape and Applications Layer/Ecosystem), Distribution Model (the key channels amplifying the protocol and its communities), and the Economic Model (the dynamics/incentives through which protocol players make money). Those elements coming together can serve as the basis to build and analyze a solid Blockchain Business Model.
In an asymmetric business model, the organization doesn’t monetize the user directly, but it leverages the data users provide coupled with technology, thus have a key customer pay to sustain the core asset. For example, Google makes money by leveraging users’ data, combined with its algorithms sold to advertisers for visibility.
In a business world driven by technology and digitalization, competition is much more fluid, as innovation becomes a bottom-up approach that can come from anywhere. Thus, making it much harder to define the boundaries of existing markets. Therefore, a proper business competition analysis looks at customer, technology, distribution, and financial model overlaps. While at the same time looking at future potential intersections among industries that in the short-term seem unrelated.
Technological modeling is a discipline to provide the basis for companies to sustain innovation, thus developing incremental products. While also looking at breakthrough innovative products that can pave the way for long-term success. In a sort of Barbell Strategy, technological modeling suggests having a two-sided approach, on the one hand, to keep sustaining continuous innovation as a core part of the business model. On the other hand, it places bets on future developments that have the potential to break through and take a leap forward.
A transitional business model is used by companies to enter a market (usually a niche) to gain initial traction and prove the idea is sound. The transitional business model helps the company secure the needed capital while having a reality check. It helps shape the long-term vision and a scalable business model.
The minimum viable audience (MVA) represents the smallest possible audience that can sustain your business as you get it started from a microniche (the smallest subset of a market). The main aspect of the MVA is to zoom into existing markets to find those people which needs are unmet by existing players.
Business scaling is the process of transformation of a business as the product is validated by wider and wider market segments. Business scaling is about creating traction for a product that fits a small market segment. As the product is validated it becomes critical to build a viable business model. And as the product is offered at wider and wider market segments, it’s important to align product, business model, and organizational design, to enable wider and wider scale.
The market expansion consists in providing a product or service to a broader portion of an existing market or perhaps expanding that market. Or yet, market expansions can be about creating a whole new market. At each step, as a result, a company scales together with the market covered.
In the FourWeekMBA growth matrix, you can apply growth for existing customers by tackling the same problems (gain mode). Or by tackling existing problems, for new customers (expand mode). Or by tackling new problems for existing customers (extend mode). Or perhaps by tackling whole new problems for new customers (reinvent mode).
In the FourWeekMBA Revenue Streams Matrix, revenue streams are classified according to the kind of interactions the business has with its key customers. The first dimension is the “Frequency” of interaction with the key customer. As the second dimension, there is the “Ownership” of the interaction with the key customer.
Revenue model patterns are a way for companies to monetize their business models. A revenue model pattern is a crucial building block of a business model because it informs how the company will generate short-term financial resources to invest back into the business. Thus, the way a company makes money will also influence its overall business model.
A pricing strategy or model helps companies find the pricing formula in fit with their business models. Thus aligning the customer needs with the product type while trying to enable profitability for the company. A good pricing strategy aligns the customer with the company’s long term financial sustainability to build a solid business model.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
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