An essential part of market research is understanding your current market position. One effective means of assessing this position is to conduct a SWOT analysis. SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. The purpose of conducting a SWOT analysis of your business is to determine your business venture’s strengths and weaknesses and identify and evaluate opportunities and threats in the market place.
Strengths and weaknesses are what we call ‘internal factors’ and these as the owner of the business have control over, whereas opportunities and threats are ‘external factors’ and therefore you have no control over.
You need to assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats within your business.
Strengths
Strengths are what your business is naturally good at compared to the competition. Maybe you have a large customer base, an excellent distribution network or a very solid financial backing.
Weaknesses
What do you do badly compared to competitors? Maybe your business is still too small to take advantage of efficiency measures, maybe your location is poor compared to competitors, maybe you’re terrible at marketing and sales.
Opportunities
Maybe you’ve heard a whisper about a new government policy that’s going to affect your industry, Maybe you’ve identified a group of customers that your competitors aren’t serving.
Threats
Food businesses may be affected by the prevailing economic climate, government legislation or a decline in a particular market. Threats may also occur to a food business by the emergence of increased local competition and the loss of skilled staff. You need to identify what will threaten your food business both in the short and long term, forecasting how such threats will affect business performance.
Your success in business depends on knowing your food business inside out. Use the SWOT analysis above to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Food Business Marketing
Food businesses can survive for some time with poor record-keeping, insufficient finance or a lack of management skills, but they cannot survive without a market.
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