Unless a company pays attention to the strategies and situations of competitors and has some inkling of what moves they will be making, it ends up flying blind into competitive battle.

Competitor analysis is about Identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to those of your own product or service.

Michael Porter’s Framework for Competitor Analysis points to four indicators of a rival’s likely strategic moves. A strategic profile of a rival that provides good clues to their behavioral tendencies can be constructed by characterizing the rival along these four dimensions: Current Strategy, Objectives, Capabilities, and Assumptions.

Studying competitors’ past behavior and preferences provides a valuable assist in anticipating what moves rivals are likely to make next and outmaneuvering them in the marketplace.