The need to understand your Customers as well as Competitors for a successful foray in India :

The Indian market offers great opportunities to international businesses to set up locally and to expand at a fast rate in a Government supported environment. The success highly depends upon how well you understand your potential Indian customers and competitors. The strategies to deliver 100% satisfaction to the target audience and to achieve sustainable growth rate in a competitive environment are formulated on the basis of collective information through intensive researches. The top strategy consulting firms invest their best skills and efforts for collected data analysis that drives them to know – ‘what your business needs to taste the success in India, faster than in any other country’.  

Importance of Understanding Your Customer:

Knowing your customer is the 1^st principle of marketing- ‘To whom you want to cater your services; so, know your target customer base’. The knowledge of their expectations drives you to strategize and design the products or services accordingly so your business brand could stand out in the market. Understanding of customers helps you build and strengthen the long-term relationship that makes them loyal to your brand. If businesses don’t value the client’s relationships, they run at high the risk of underperforming. Knowing the customers is a consistent process because preferences and behaviors keep on changing; and, if you don’t follow the track, how you will be able to deliver 100% satisfaction.

Four Hacks To Know and Understand Your Customers:

1. Profile your customers: Customer profiling includes preparing a description of target customers segment reflecting their location, buying behavior, using behavior, gender, age, work, family size, spending power etc.
2. Get a 360-degree view through customized research: Walk in your customers’ shoes and interact to understand them. Spending time talking with end-user gives you dependable insights into the areas where you can excel to have a competitive edge.
3. Conduct intensive market research: Top management consulting firms in India, like Tecnova, have dedicated teams to conduct objective oriented surveys by structuring focused groups discussion, feedback forms, monitoring of online reviews etc. accordingly. These also help in getting a clear picture in terms of Market size and target areas.
4. Use the feedback of existing customers: The business owners should always honor the feedbacks of existing product users. Feedbacks from both satisfied and unsatisfied customers drive you towards improvement with certain tweaks.    

Importance of Understanding Competitors:

Online reviews and ratings influence the majority of buying decisions; therefore, your product or service has to be extraordinary to stand out in a competitive marketplace like India. Knowledge of your competitors can help you with:

• Understanding your own USPs
• Knowing your competitive advantages
• Understanding the specific marketplace segments that you can tap with a competitive advantage
• Planning your efforts for particular objectives
• Getting clarity about close competitors
• Offer uniqueness in values of utility, quality, price, support, branding etc.   

Four Hacks To Know and Understand Your Competitors:

1. Check social media portals: Having an active presence at social media platforms has become imperative for any size of business; it also creates the scope to know your competitors. Explore social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram etc. to know what your competitors are doing and how the end-users are reacting. 
2. Conducting intensive Competition analysis: With the right Market Research and Strategy consulting firm, you can assess and understand the marketing, distribution, manufacturing strategies of your competition which will also help in understanding the Dos and Don’ts for the Indian market.
3. Conducting online research: It is the most used way to understand basics such as which player is offering similar products in your area. However, with strategy consulting firms you can get in-depth insights by scaling the products range, prices, support model, brand value, turnover etc by leveraging their dedicated teams.
4. Speaking to channel partners: Channel partners are a great information source to know the latest information about your competitors because these people move into the market and experience the positives and negatives of competitors as well as emerging demands and trends. 
5. Attending expos, exhibitions and conferences: Being there gives you an overview of the industry. It is the place where participants talk about new launching, schemes, policies, market changes, future expectations etc.    

You will find two types of competitors –

Direct competitors – Who offer almost the same products / services at almost the similar price; their products / services are also shortlisted along with yours when potential buyers tend to make a purchase.

Indirect competitors – Who offer an alternative to your products / services; although indirect competitors don’t get much share of total market volume; still, their activities need to be monitored.

The simplest approach to identify your competitors is – Who would have supplied the potential customers to meet out their demand and what would the customers buy if your products / services were not around?  Knowing your right target customer segment is as important as knowing the competitors; here an active involvement of business consultants is required, who can provide deep insights leveraging their experience and networks.