Market Analysis (Document)

Definition

The market analysis is the business (re)engineering requirements work product that documents the market(s) in which the customer organization’s applications must compete.

The typical objectives of a market analysis are to:

Document the results of the customer analysis task.
Document the marketplace(s) in which the customer organization currently competes and plans to compete.
For each marketplace, document the customer organization’s competitors and their competing applications.

The typical benefits of a market analysis are:

One cannot successfully reengineer a business without understanding the marketplaces in which it competes.

The typical contents of a market analysis are:

Market Overview:
- Market Description
- Market Needs and Desires
- Market Size
- Market Saturation
- Market Segmentation
  For each market segment:
  - Profile
  - Demographics
  - Market Channels
  - Market Expectations
  - Market Trends
  - Major Competitors
Competitor Analysis
For each major competitor:
- Business Analysis:
  - Description
  - Lines of Business
  - Target Market Segments
  - Products and Services
- Organizational Analysis:
  - Business Units
  - Partners
  - Suppliers
- Application Analysis:
  For each competing application:
  - Description
  - Feature Set
  - Target User Groups
  - Strengths
  - Future Enhancements
  - Weakness
  - Envisioned Differentiation
- Website Analysis:
  For each competing website:
  - Functionality
  - Content
  - Usability
  - Site Architecture
  - Page Design
  - Site Navigation (ease, search facility)
  - Look and Feel
  - Personalization
  - Technology Used
- Brand Analysis
- Technology Analysis:
  - Current Technologies Used
  - Technology Usage Trends
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Summary
Conclusion
Appendices:
- Major Issues
- TBDs
- Assumptions

The typical stakeholders of a market analysis are:

Producers:
- Business Strategy Team
Evaluators:
- Strategy Inspection Team
- Customer Organization, which inspects the content for correctness.
Approvers:
Maintainer:
- Business Strategy Team
Users:
- Business Strategy Team, uses the market analysis to:
  - Develop the business vision statement.
  - Architect the business.

A market analysis is typically produced during the following phases:

A market analysis can be started if the following preconditions hold:

The typical inputs to a market analysis include:

Documentation:
- Competitor marketing documents
- Industry analyst reports
- Customer Analysis
- Technology Analysis
- Competitor Profile
Stakeholders:
- Marketplace domain experts
- Competitor domain experts

This is a living document that is developed incrementally and iteratively in parallel with other documents (e.g., customer analysis).
This document should typically produced during the business strategy phase of a business reengineering project However, it may also be either created or updated during the initiation phase of an application development project.

A market analysis is typically constrained by the following conventions: