SWOT Analysis Explained
In today’s business environment where competition is very fierce, you have to constantly disrupt your business model in order to survive or else some kids in some dorm room are going to create a startup to dominate your market. Business managers are constantly searching for techniques that they can apply in their businesses in order to have an upper hand over their competitors and improve efficiency within their business through all the different sections.
You have a lot of strategies out there that business owners use on a daily basis and they have seen amazing results especially when it comes on to their revenues. One of the most popular strategies that have been circulated throughout the business community over the years and bring managers amazing results within their business is the S.W.O.T analysis framework.
S.W.O.T analysis is a strategy that was created by Albert S Humphrey in the 1960s when the business environment was going through a period of radical change. It is a strategy which you can use to understand the strengths and weaknesses within your business and both the opportunities and threats your business is facing.
This useful tool have helped a lot of business owners all over the world for them to analyze the different areas of strengths within their businesses such as a superior customer service, great product, unique brand etc. It has also helped them to identify the different areas of weaknesses within their business to see how they can improve on it. It has also helped them to spot different opportunities within their market to see if they can create strategies to capitalize on them. Lastly it has helped them to identify the different threats coming from competitors in their market, so they can develop unique strategies to help fend them off.
To give you more insights into how you can use this framework here is a more detailed analysis of how you can use the different areas of the S.W.O.T analysis framework to your advantage.
Strengths
When thinking about the different areas of strengths within your business you have to take into account your competitors as well. A lot of times what may seem superior in your internal organization may seem inferior when compared to your competitor’s.
For example it may seem to you that you already have a great customer service system in place but when you take a look at your competitor’s own their service is way more valuable and it can cause your customers to gravitate towards that which leaves you in a very sticky situation. You got to look at questions such as what can you do better than your competitors? What do outsiders see as your strengths that you probably never knew? Questions along these lines will help you discover your strengths and don’t rest on your laurels, you must always seek ways to improve on your strengths and stay competitive or else those strengths can become weaknesses.
Weaknesses
When thinking about the different areas of weaknesses within your organization, just like the strengths you got to take your competitors into account as well. You have to compare how weak are your internal areas of weaknesses to your competitors and find ways to improve upon that.
The business world is constantly changing and managers must ensure that they have the right system in place to always stay on the lookout for areas of weaknesses. You of to think about what can you improve on within your business and what are the different areas of your company that your customers view as a weaknesses where you can possibly change. All these information can help you out when developing strategies to tackle those issues.
Opportunities
Most companies of to always be on the lookout for opportunities within or outside their market. When you are not innovating as an organization your company becomes vulnerable to competitors. This part of the framework encourages you to always be innovating and disrupting your business model.
You should always spot trends and see where the next wave of innovation is coming from within your market and try to ride for as long as possible. To get insights on where the next wave of innovation is coming from you can read up to date blogs about your industry, you can go to events in your industry and look at what the younger companies are doing in your industry because those are the ones usually with the fresh brains flowing with crazy ideas.
Sometime opportunities can even come from within your organization, so what you can do is look at the different areas within your organization to see where you can spot any possible opportunities.
Threats
This is the last pillar of the framework and what it allows you to do is spot the different threats you face both from within and outside your organization. This leads back to the weaknesses section because sometimes when you look at the different areas of weakness your organization is facing; those weaknesses can threaten your business on a lot of levels and just let your competitors run away with most of the market share while you are struggling to keep up.
When you think about outside threats it’s not just about competitors because regulators can also be looked upon as a threat as well because there have been many cases where regulators just shuts down a company because they were accused of breaking a certain law. So you got always be on the lookout for threats from all angles. Even a new technological innovation can be looked upon as a threat because if you don’t capitalize on it properly it will disrupt your market and bring in new some new boys to run the show.
The S.W.O.T analysis framework is a very useful tool most companies are using up to today. As you can see by looking at the information above it can help you to look at the different areas of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats within your organization. It’s a very old tool considering that it was create back in the 1960s but it still holds a lot of value today in many corporations.