Staying Competitive

Staying Competitive

Introduction

Competitive advantage is the basis on which to build a successful business. Competitive advantage is a long-term benefit of a unique, creating customer value, a strategy based on a unique combination of in-house resources and capabilities that cannot be copied thy competitors. It enables your business to maintain and improve their competitive position in the market and survive in anti-competitive for a long time (Adrian, 2002). The creation of an invention is a good start for a company, but it is not sufficient. Indeed, every inventor should first seek to perfect it, and then create other products. The term competitiveness is widely used in the media business, political and socio-economic in general.

The competitiveness has implications for how to approach and develop any initiative of business, which is obviously causing changes in the model of enterprise and entrepreneur. The comparative advantage of a company would be in his ability, resources, knowledge and attributes at the disposal of the company, the same as those without competitors or that they have less than that makes it possible to obtain yields superior to those. In this paper, we are going find best practices of conducting market research for American Coach then we will discuss identifying different steps in order to make American coach more competitive in the future (Kotler, 2000). In the end, we will formulate a long term competitive strategy for American Coach so that it can stay competitive in federal acquisition market.

Best Practices for Conducting Market Research

Market research is a set of technical marketing for measuring, analyzing and understanding the behaviors, opinions, needs and expectations of a population defined. Identifying the objective or problem is the first step that should be taken because it is the key to effective market search (Lamb, 2009). For example, what competitive advantages do we have? what is our target market? What is our position in the federal market? How can we improve our process? What new process and procedures should we develop? What is the optimal price for our services? Questions like help a firm in establishing their objective of the research.

Second important practice in conducting market research is setting research project timeline because time is money, and it is the most valuable thing to any firm. On the basis of objective or problem of the research, firm develops a project charter to set timeliness and schedule resources for execution.

After setting the timeline selection of research design is the step that should be taken for conducting a Markey research. Ordinary there are three main types or research design: casual, descriptive, and exploratory. It depends upon the firm what type of research design to choose. In exploratory research information is gathered in informal and unstructured way like reviewing the websites of the competitors to have an understating about their offerings. In Descriptive research market variables are analyzed like consumer's intentions, behaviors and attitudes. Examples of descriptive studies are Brand perception surveys and customer satisfaction. In casual research, several factors are controlled in order to identify ...