Market analysis

The marketing analysis process can be broken down into these parts:

• Market position;
• Market objectives;
• Market segments;
• Which segment?
• Market structure.

Market position

-A niche market is a focused, targetable portion (subset) of a market sector.
By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.
A distinct niche market usually evolves out of a market niche, where potential demand is not met by any supply.

-Market dominance is a measure of the strength of a brand, product, service, or firm, relative to competitive offerings. There is often a geographic element to the competitive landscape. In defining market dominance, you must see to what extent a product, brand, or firm controls a product category in a given geographic area.

-Market Follower is Follow the lead of the market leader – pricing, product development, etc.

Market objectives

Market object is any business element that enables or helps to enable an overall business objective. An example of a market object is an e-commerce web site. A market object can also be a smaller object within the larger parent - for instance, your shipping rules can be a market object within the larger market object, e-commerce web site.
Market objects are usually referred to by companies that are experts in both marketing and technology. This is a new breed of consultancy which attempts to take full advantage of the newer marketing technologies and deploy them for their clients.

There are a lot of parts of market objectives like: national growth, international growth, etical objectives, market share, consumer focus, product focus, igame, shareholder value, etc.

Market segments

Market segmentation is the process in marketing of dividing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in the same way or have similar needs. Because each segment is fairly homogeneous in their needs and attitudes, they are likely to respond similarly to a given marketing strategy. That is, they are likely to have similar feelings and ideas about a marketing mix comprised of a given product or service, sold at a given price, distributed in a certain way, and promoted in a certain way.
Broadly, markets can be divided according to a number of general criteria, such as by industry or public versus private sector. Small segments are often termed niche markets or specialty markets. However, all segments fall into either consumer or industrial markets. Although it has similar objectives and it overlaps with consumer markets in many ways, the process of Industrial market segmentation is quite different.

Which segment?

-Mass Markets – high volume, low margin goods – confectionary, cars, clothing, food stuffs.
-Multiple Segments – appealing to wider range of groups – e.g. 4x4 vehicles – town, country, gender, lifestyle, social class?
-Single Segment – often a specialised product, e.g. machinery, exclusive goods.

Market structure

In economics, market structure (also known as market form) describes the state of a market with respect to competition.
The major market forms are:

• Perfect competition, in which the market consists of a very large number of firms producing a homogeneous product.
• Monopolistic competition, also called competitive market, where there are a large number of independent firms which have a very small proportion of the market share.
• Oligopoly, in which a market is dominated by a small number of firms which own more than 40% of the market share.
• Oligopsony, a market dominated by many sellers and a few buyers.
• Monopoly, where there is only one provider of a product or service.
• Natural monopoly, a monopoly in which economies of scale cause efficiency to increase continuously with the size of the firm.
• Monopsony, when there is only one buyer in a market.

The imperfectly competitive structure is quite identical to the realistic market conditions where some monopolistic competitors, monopolists, oligopolists, and duopolists exist and dominate the market conditions.