Market analysis

What Is a Market Analysis?

• A market analysis is a detailed assessment of a business’s target market and the competitive landscape within a specific industry. It gives insights into a market’s dynamics, trends, opportunities, and challenges.
• A market analysis typically includes quantitative data such as the size of the market, number of target firms, number of potential customers, and profitability of the industry, as well as qualitative data such as consumers’ preferences, values, and desires.
• By conducting a comprehensive market analysis, entrepreneurs can gain a deeper understanding of the market dynamics and identify opportunities for growth and differentiation.

How Can a Market Analysis Benefit Your Business?

A market analysis can be used at any stage of your business. For startups, it can be useful in establishing the market size for their product, allowing them to understand if they can succeed in the industry. It is often a fundamental part of the business plan since it gives them a greater understanding of the audience and competition in your industry. 

A well-established company can benefit from a market analysis when researching whether it should expand into a new vertical or into a foreign country.  

Benefits

By being the first to recognize emerging trends and market opportunities, your business would be able to introduce new products and services targeted at your consumers’ needs and differentiate it from its competitors.

Having a clear understanding of the market conditions in which you operate, such as market size, concentration, and level of differentiation, can help reduce the risks and cost of production by avoiding unnecessary investments. Moreover, it gives you the chance to monitor your business’s performance, provide context for past mistakes, and set benchmarks to evaluate your company’s future achievements.

How Is a Market Analysis Structured?

Demand Side

A demand-side analysis is crucial for businesses to tailor their products, marketing strategies, and services to meet the needs and preferences of their target audience.

The demand side of a market analysis aims to help businesses understand the types of clients in a specific market. It involves analysing customer preferences, trends, buying patterns, and price sensitivity. More importantly, it includes market size and growth estimation which can help with making investment and strategic decisions, as well as with managing risks.

Our research (both for the demand and supply analysis) is carried out by two main approaches:

• Firstly, we do studies by primary sources, where we offer distributing questioners to relevant target customers as well as doing interviews and focus groups with people within the industry, experts, professors and other relevant stakeholders within your business. This allows you to gain direct insights from your customers, allowing your business to design relevant and actionable strategies to address them.
• Secondly, we do research of secondary sources through reports, articles and other materials on reputable databases, which gives us a comprehensive overview of the state of your industry, as well as information about the general preferences of your consumers.

Supply Side

The supply-side analysis is crucial for businesses seeking to optimize their production capabilities and efficiency, as well as to gain competitive advantages. It helps the client in understanding the current and future competition in the market.

JEME uses case studies to compare and analyze the strategies of direct and indirect competitors. Using a positioning matrix, JEME visually compares your company’s offering with that of the competitors. We utilize both quantitative (key performance metrics such as revenue growth, market share and customer satisfaction) and qualitative (brand awareness, product variety, strategies they use to increase their profits, etc.) data.

Various different strategies and methods of evaluation are used to make a comprehensive analysis of the industry, including:

• Porter’s Five Forces, which focuses on identifying factors that affect the profitability of the market.
• PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal) is a strategic business tool used to highlight the external macro-environmental factors that could impact the operations and performance of a business.
• VRIO (Value, Rarity, Imitability, Organization) evaluates the company’s resources and capabilities to discover competitive advantages.

Our Success Stories

Deloitte Luxembourg

About the client

Deloitte Luxembourg is part of the global Deloitte network, one of the “Big Four” accounting firms. They frequently publish research papers and industry insights regarding recent economic and regulatory trends, emphasizing their expertise in the financial sector.

JEME’s impact

Over the past years, JEME has developed a strong relationship with Deloitte that started back in 2017 with our first shared project. In 2019 JEME wrote and published a market analysis paper together with Deloitte called “The Italian asset management industry and the trends impacting its future”.

The analysis conducted by JEME enabled Deloitte to publish research that enriches the existing literature with data-driven insights. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the industry by integrating demand and supply characteristics with potential future trends that could significantly alter the market.

Our team presented this study at a conference in Luxembourg, and the project’s success led to a lasting collaboration with Deloitte, resulting in a second commissioned project.