No matter the venue, understanding a marketplace is foreign to our nature and generally not part of our audiology educational programs. As audiology private practices become more prevalent in various markets across the Canadian landscape, competition is inevitable. This increase in competition mandates that an audiology practice owner know their competition intimately.
This involves a process known as Competitive intelligence (Giad, 2004). Competitive intelligence is a process of using all available information to learn as much about those that compete in your market as possible. This includes their education, business strategy, procedures, products, customer service, and other business operations.
Once the competitive intelligence is gathered, the competitive analysis of the practice may proceed. Three methods that are useful in the process of practice comparisons within a market are the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis, Porters Five Forces (Porter, 2008), and when reviewing competitive issues between a practice and their largest competitor, the Three Circle Analysis (Urbany & Davis, 2010).
Armed with these data the practice manager can either continue with their established business strategy or develop and institute a more suitable competitive strategy to changing market conditions.
A discussion of the methods, procedures and tangible benefits of competitive intelligence, SWOT analysis, Porter’s Five forces, and the Three Circle analysis is offered.
Learning Objectives:
- Upon completion, participants will be able to describe generic competitive strategies for audiology practices competing in both urban and rural environments.
- Upon completion, participants will be able to describe the specific procedures for conducting competitive intelligence of similar business within their market area.
- Upon completion, participants will be able to describe and conduct three procedures to analyze and compare their practice to others within the market place based upon a SWOT analysis, Porter’s Five Forces, and the Three Circle Analysis.
