Table of Contents

• What is market opportunity analysis?
• How to do market opportunity analysis?

Foreword

Entrepreneurial marketer is a marketer who can plan, develop, and execute the business strategy with ability to take a risk.

One of the entrepreneurial process is identifying, analyzing, and formulating a business and market opportunity. Once he found this opportunity, he run a validation and see the result. Afterward, he will develop a marketing strategy then execute it to pursue the opportunity.

You can see that there are several steps to scale up your business, but in this article I will focus on market opportunity analysis.

In this article you will get understanding about what does market opportunity analysis mean, and how to conduct a market opportunity analysis for growing your business.

What is market opportunity analysis?

Market opportunity analysis is a instrument to recognize and measure the appeal of business chance.

When is market opportunity analysis performed? Commonly, opportunity analysis is carried out when your staff found some new ways to improve a current product or service, you have idea to develop new product or service, you found in the market that a lot of people have problem or needs and you have technology and resources to provide a solution for them ( you can satisfy their need ), and so forth.

How to do market opportunity analysis?

To conduct market opportunity analysis, you can utilize market opportunity analysis framework that are concerned with these components:

1. Customer

Analyze unmet or undeserved customer needs.

You can identify the customer needs by:

Do an information gathering. One of the method of gathering an information is by asking some market opportunity questions like I will show below.

a. Once you do this activity, you can get problem recognition and you are able to make an evaluation to this, especially in pre-purchase phase.

You can do some evaluation such as: what things encourage customer to buy the product, what are they exactly looking for, what are they fundamental needs and wants, etc.

b. When consumer buy the product, you must also gather the information like: is there any difficult in buying process or transaction process, is there any barrier in customer buying process, etc.

c. In order to get comprehensive understanding, you have to collect the information in post-purchase phase, such as: what is complete customer experience, is there any gap between actual customer experience and company’s delivering promise,are they satisfied, are their need delivered completely, and so on.


2. Technology

Analyze whether the particular technology is ready to utilize or not.

Identify such technology that must be utilized for growing your company by answering the question such as: what is technology trend, can I utilize the technology with my current budget with good ROI ( return on investment ), Do I must upgrade my current technology, what is the fundamental impact if I utilize this technology, etc.

3. Company

Analyze the current condition of company’s resources.

Sample of company’s resources: brand reputation, skillful marketer and sales person, company’s distribution channels, research and development staff, supplier relationship, financial thing, technology / IT , product and service, market knowledge, customer database, and so on.

4. Competition

Analyze the competition environment and key competitors in the marketplace.

There are two types of competitor, first one is direct competitors who provide the relatively same product or services as you. The second one is indirect competitors who provide substitute product or service ( product or service that deliver the same function as yours ).

Do some benchmarks with these competitors and perform comparison analysis.

You can identify and collect the information, such as: what is your competitor’s strength, what is your competitor’s weakness, what area that your competitor does not provide ( unmet customer needs ), etc.


The thing you must remember is you have to concern only appealing opportunity. How do you know that the opportunity is appealing or not?

The answer is by doing valuation, such as:

a. How many the customer market’s growth?

b. Is the market segmentation big enough?

c. How is the market size?

d. How about profitability? Profit which can be gained by selling the product to the target market.

e. How much the size and sales potential?

f. Will be profitable for years or just short time ( the opportunity has sustainable value proposition or not)

I will recap the step with simple words: You find unmet or undeserved customer’s need, you see your key competitor does not provide the need exactly, you are confident that you have particular technology and certain resources to deliver the customer need, finally you decide that this is a good opportunity for you to enhance customer experience and focus on delivering your product or service to target customer.

Example of market opportunity analysis questions

- What type of opportunity which you concern, opportunity discovery or opportunity creation?

- Is this opportunity can be turned into a sustainable business?

- What solution can you provide to this opportunity?

- Why you are confident that your solution is appealing?

- What technology and other resources are needed to pursue this opportunity?

- Has any company performed the similar solution?

- Is the target market attractive and large?

- What data are needed to decide this is attractive opportunity or not.

- What does the customer really need?

- Why they need that? How to provide the solution to satisfy their need.

- Will your target customer willing to pay and use your product or service?

- What are entry barrier to pursue this opportunity?

- Is the relationship with others needed to pursue this opportunity?

- How do reach your target customer regarding this opportunity?

- How many competitors who have deliver the product or service to target market?

- Are their sales declining, growing, or stable?

- What are the risks that are taken for pursuing this opportunity?

- What is the revenue stream for the new business model?

- How much I will invest to this new opportunity?

- How is the return on investment ( ROI )?

- How do I perform market validation?

Summary

As a final point, let me restate how to construct the opportunity that you have found by performing market opportunity analysis:

1. First of all, you do a market segmenting to target your customer.

2. Identify unmet their needs and wants.

3. Formulate your unique value proposition.

4. Align your value proposition with your technology and resource.

5. Market your product or service to grab the opportunity.

There is one source from udemy blog that you can read for more complete ideas about market opportunity analysis.