How can a SWOT analysis identify emerging competitors?

If you want to grow your brand and stay ahead of the market, you need to know your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). A SWOT analysis is a strategic tool that helps you evaluate your brand's internal and external factors that affect your performance and positioning. One of the key benefits of a SWOT analysis is that it can help you identify emerging competitors, or potential rivals that are not yet well-known or established, but have the potential to disrupt your industry or niche. Here are some steps to conduct a SWOT analysis and spot emerging competitors.

1 Identify your strengths

Your strengths are the attributes and resources that give you an advantage over competitors. They are what make your brand special, valuable, and attractive to your target audience. To identify your strengths, ask yourself questions such as: What are your core competencies and skills? What makes you stand out from other brands? What do your loyal customers say about you? What awards or achievements have you earned? Write down your answers and rank them in order of importance and relevance to your brand objectives.

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Ricardo Heinze

Marketing Director @ MLG | LinkedIn Top Voice | Marketing & Leadership Content Creator | Top 200 LATAM LinkedIn Content Creator by Favikon
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Las fortalezas incluyen habilidades, recursos y atributos únicos que hacen a tu marca especial y atractiva para tu audiencia. Reflexiona sobre tus competencias centrales y lo que te diferencia de otros, escucha lo que tus clientes leales dicen de ti y valora los reconocimientos obtenidos. Anota y prioriza tus fortalezas para alinearlas con los objetivos de tu marca y asegurar que estas sean relevantes y significativas en tu estrategia.

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2 Identify your weaknesses

Identifying your weaknesses is essential for understanding what makes your brand vulnerable, inferior, or unattractive to your target audience. To do this, ask yourself questions such as what you are bad at, what gaps and shortcomings you have in terms of resources, skills, or capabilities, and what threats and risks you face. Additionally, consider your customers' pain points and complaints as well as what your competitors are doing better than you. Once you have your answers, rank them according to their urgency and impact on your brand goals.

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3 Identify your opportunities

When identifying opportunities for your brand's development and success, consider external factors and trends that make your brand relevant, timely, and in-demand. Ask yourself questions such as: what are the current or emerging needs of your target audience? What changes or developments in your industry or niche can you leverage? What gaps or problems can you solve for your target audience or industry? What new or untapped markets or segments can you enter or expand to? What partnerships or collaborations can you form or pursue? Once you have written down your answers, rank them according to their feasibility and profitability for your brand goals.

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4 Identify your threats

When identifying your threats, ask yourself questions such as which competitors are targeting your audience or industry, what changes or developments in your niche you can't keep up with, what regulations or policies affect your operations, which economic or social factors influence your brand's demand, and what negative perceptions exist about your brand or industry. Take the time to write down your answers and rank them according to their severity and likelihood for achieving your brand goals. Doing this can help you understand the external factors and trends that pose challenges or obstacles for your brand's performance and growth.

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5 Spot emerging competitors

Once you have completed your SWOT analysis, you can use it to spot emerging competitors by comparing and contrasting your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Look for patterns, gaps, overlaps, or correlations that could suggest the presence of new or unknown rivals that could challenge or threaten your brand's position or value proposition. Some signs of emerging competitors are having similar or complementary strengths to yours, more or better opportunities than you, fewer or different threats than you, a clear and compelling vision that resonates with your target audience or industry, a strong and distinctive brand identity, a loyal and engaged fan base, community, or network that supports and advocates for them, and an innovative and agile approach. By spotting emerging competitors, you can gain insights and intelligence that can help you improve your brand's performance and growth. Moreover, a SWOT analysis can be used to identify competitive advantages and disadvantages as well as formulate or revise goals, strategies, and actions. It is important to remember that this is not a one-time exercise; it should be conducted regularly in order to stay up-to-date with the ever-changing market.

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Ashley Whittaker

Partner, The Sports Facilities Companies // Editor In Chief, Community Playmaker
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Using SWOT is a good way to review your unique value proposition and differentiators. If you understand the key considerations for your target market, you can use your SWOT data to plot your company position on the X/Y axis of a perceptual map along with your competitors to visualize the competitive landscape.

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6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Shaziya Khan

Insight Chaser l Brand Communication Strategist l Author
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SWOT analysis helps in unpacking what we know. Yet, disruptive competitive factors can arise from the unknown. So, it is useful to overlay the analysis of the known with the unknown. The unknown can be summarised simply as TUDU. T for Trends: they give a glimpse of what is shifting culturally, can make our offerings future ready. U for Unmet needs: the unmet consumer needs tell us what innovations or solutions consumers will welcome. D for Drivers: category purchase drivers matter and a close eye on these helps us to fit offerings to preference drivers, competitive advantages. U for Under Served segments: these are sources of new growth: be they geographic, income based, lifestage based etc. Repeat, add TUDU to SWOT!

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How can a SWOT analysis identify emerging competitors?

1

2

3

4

5

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1 Identify your strengths

2 Identify your weaknesses

3 Identify your opportunities

4 Identify your threats

5 Spot emerging competitors

6 Here’s what else to consider

Brand Development

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How can a SWOT analysis identify emerging competitors?

1

2

3

4

5

6

1 Identify your strengths

2 Identify your weaknesses

3 Identify your opportunities

4 Identify your threats

5 Spot emerging competitors

6 Here’s what else to consider

Brand Development

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