Return to flip book view

OKVetWorks May 2024 Newsletter

As the fresh breezes of spring usher us into May, we are presented with a poignant opportunity to honor two significant causes: National Military Appreciation Month and Mental Health Awareness Month. This unique convergence encourages us to celebrate the valor and sacrifice of our military personnel while also shining a spotlight on the critical importance of mental health for everyone, including those in uniform.

Our service members stand at the forefront of protecting our nation, often at great personal cost. Their physical endeavors and strategic acumen are visibly commendable, yet it's crucial to remember that their mental and emotional wellbeing is equally essential to their effectiveness and resilience. This May, our coverage is dedicated to exploring both these vital aspects, emphasizing how intertwined they are.

In this special issue, we aim to provide a comprehensive look at both the heroic endeavors of our military community and the supportive frameworks that promote mental health. Here’s what we have lined up:

Veteran Affairs and Mental Health Innovations: Updates on new policies and programs that support the mental health of our veterans and active-duty members. This includes advancements in PTSD treatments, accessibility to mental health services, and the integration of mental health education within the military training regimen.

Profiles in Courage and Resilience: Stories of individual service members who exemplify extraordinary bravery in their line of duty and their journeys in confronting and managing mental health challenges. These narratives aim to destigmatize mental health discussions within military circles and inspire openness and support.

Military Families' Strength: An in-depth look at the challenges faced by military families, focusing on how they manage the stresses related to deployment, separation, and reintegration. We will feature expert advice on maintaining family bonds and mental health during these trying times.

Comprehensive Support Networks: An exploration of the role that community and military support networks play in enhancing the wellbeing of service members and their families. This includes spotlighting nonprofit organizations, peer support groups, and government programs that are making a difference.

Educational Features on Mental Health: Articles and resources aimed at educating our readers about common mental health conditions, preventive strategies, and ways to seek help. We believe that informed communities are empowered communities, and this is particularly vital in military contexts.

How You Can Help: Practical advice on how you can support military members and mental health initiatives through advocacy, participation in events, and personal outreach. Whether you’re a civilian looking to give back or a veteran seeking to support peers, there are numerous ways to contribute meaningfully.

Reflections from the Frontlines: First-hand accounts from service members about the mental health challenges they face and the strategies that have helped them cope. These personal stories provide insight into the realities of military life and the critical importance of mental health care.

This May, let us all take a moment to appreciate the tremendous sacrifices made by our military personnel and recognize the essential role that mental health plays in their lives and ours. By integrating these themes, we not only honor our service members but also contribute to a broader conversation about health and wellness in our society.

We are proud to dedicate this issue to the heroes of our armed forces and the advocates for mental health. Your stories inspire us, your sacrifices are never forgotten, and your health is of utmost importance.

In a rapidly evolving business landscape, understanding your market position is paramount for crafting effective strategies and securing a competitive edge. This comprehensive insight not only influences your strategic and operational decisions but also shapes your interactions with customers, competitors, and investors. Here, we explore the multifaceted concept of market position, offering a detailed guide on identifying, evaluating, and enhancing your standing in the industry.

Defining Market Position

Market position is the space a company occupies in the minds of consumers and its relative competitiveness within the industry. It's determined by a variety of factors including brand recognition, customer loyalty, product quality, pricing strategies, and market share. Essentially, it encapsulates how well-positioned you are to compete in your market and serve your target customers.

What is Your Market Position?

Why Market Position Matters

Understanding your market position is critical for several reasons:

Strategic Planning: It informs your business strategy, helping you to identify opportunities for growth and areas needing improvement.Brand Development: It influences how you develop and position your brand in the marketplace to attract and retain customers.Competitive Advantage: Knowing your position allows you to capitalize on your strengths and shore up your weaknesses to outmaneuver competitors.Market Influence: A strong market position often grants the power to shape industry trends and consumer preferences.How to Determine Your Market Position

The process of determining your market position involves several strategic steps:

In-depth Competitive Analysis: This involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors and evaluating their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. Tools like Porter’s Five Forces can be invaluable for understanding the competitive dynamics within your industry.

Clarify Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Determine what unique benefits your products or services offer that distinguish you from your competitors. This could relate to anything from product design, technological innovation, customer service, or cost-effectiveness.

Customer Perception and Feedback: Use surveys, customer reviews, and focus groups to gather insights about how customers view your brand versus competitors. This can reveal strengths to build upon and weaknesses to address.

Market Trend Analysis: Regularly analyze broader market trends, including economic, social, and technological changes that could impact your industry and adjust your strategies accordingly.

Segmentation and Targeting: Understand the specific segments of the market that you serve best and tailor your marketing efforts to meet the needs of these groups more effectively.

Strategies to Improve Your Market Position

To improve your market position, consider the following strategies:

Enhance Product and Service Offerings: Regular innovation based on customer feedback and market trends can help you stay relevant and competitive. This might mean expanding your product line, improving service quality, or incorporating new technologies.

Strengthen Brand Equity: Invest in building a strong brand through consistent and effective marketing communications that reinforce your USP and brand values. Strong brand equity can make you the preferred choice over competitors.

Expand into New Markets: Look for opportunities to grow your market presence by entering new geographical areas or targeting new customer segments. This can help reduce dependence on your current markets and increase your overall market share.

Optimize Customer Experience: Enhance the customer journey at every touch point, from the initial contact through post-purchase support. Superior customer experience can translate into higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Leverage Strategic Alliances: Form partnerships and alliances that complement your strengths, extend your reach, and provide access to new resources and markets.

Focus on Sustainability: Align your business practices with the growing demand for sustainability. This can attract a new customer base and differentiate your brand in the marketplace.

What is Your Market Position?

(cont.)

What is Your Market Position?

(cont.)

Case Study: XYZ Corp's Strategic Repositioning

XYZ Corp, initially a player in the crowded electronics market, carved out a niche by focusing on Eco-friendly products. They revamped their product line to include items made from recycled materials, utilized green technology, and promoted their efforts through a strategic marketing campaign that highlighted their commitment to the environment. This repositioning not only enhanced their brand reputation but also increased their market share, resonating with a growing demographic of environmentally conscious consumers.

Conclusion

A robust understanding of your market position is foundational to navigating the complexities of today’s business environment. By actively assessing and strategically enhancing your market position, you can not only adapt to current market dynamics but also proactively shape future trends. This ongoing process involves careful analysis, innovative thinking, and consistent execution, aiming to achieve sustained competitive advantage and long-term success.

Filling up FAST REGISTER TODAY!!

41Focus Area: Market PositionVersion 1.8.5Startup in the Blue Ocean—Stand out from the competitionAs entrepreneurs we might  nd ourselves in a “red ocean” full of competitors and cut-throat competition. This can mean spending a lot of time on sales without getting the orders, or our prices getting squeezed. How can we make ourselves stand out from our competitors?When you start a business, it is often because you want to do something that has not been done in quite the same way before. Perhaps you hope to develop a product or a service that has not been seen before, or maybe design a brand with a new expression and distinct values. Perhaps you are even aiming to be unique.In reality, very few ideas and products are actually unique. More often, new products and services solve the same prob-lems or ful ll the same needs as others, but in a slightly dif-ferent way or with a twist.The good news is that an idea does not have to be unique or completely new to be a good business idea. It is enough for a start-up to be distinctive or just be better than the competition at what it does. So how do you accomplish that?Take a look at the competitionThe  rst step toward being better than the competition is to  nd out what your competitors are doing, by keeping in-formed and doing some simple research. What you basically want to know is what products your competitors are selling, to which client groups and how they have priced their prod-ucts and services. You must also familiarize yourself with the competitor’s products and their special characteristics, if any and  nally, your research should include a look at how others in the market communicate and market themselves.Google knows the competitionThere are many di erent ways of getting information about your competition, but the best way is - without comparison – via the omnipresent Google. The internet has revolutionized many aspects of having a business, and the way that you as an entrepreneur can gather information about competitors. Formerly, it took greater e ort to identify the other players in your  eld, or simply to get a sales brochure from a competitor. Today, this information is available to us the minute we look for it. With Google Alerts, for example, we do not even have to look for the information, but will receive an email when there is news about a product or a competi-tor. However, the internet is not the only place for us to get more knowledge about the market. Other places may include magazines and professional papers where the advertise-ments themselves hold a lot of information. You can often also collect information from your branch association, and get the opportunity to meet and talk to your competitors. The same applies if your branch holds a congress or an annual conference. “There is an alternative to constantly trying to be better andcheaper than the competitors: Being di erent.”Licensed to Daron Hoggatt, Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs. Downloaded April 30, 2024.

ADDITIONAL LOCATION

42MARKET POSITIONFinally, it is also possible to get information about the market from your own clients. To get an insight into the pric-es in the market, you might ask your clients what they usually pay for orders such as yours.Better than the competitionOnce you have acquired some knowledge about the mar-ket and the customers, you can take the next step towards becoming better than your competitors. This entails mak-ing a systematic comparison of your own company and the competitors, where you look at all the vari-ous characteristics of your product and your company and make a comparison. For this comparison you can use the Posi-tion Map (see the illustration) that shows  ve examples of areas where you might do better or worse than the competitors. These  ve ar-eas are: 1) Product design, 2) Buyer’s expe-rience, 3) Customer relations, 4) Brand value and 5) Price level. In all these areas you can give yourself and your com-petitors a score representing where you stand in the market and the lines between the dots will provide an image of your market position. Let us have a closer look at the  ve compe-tition factors:First and foremost we can beat the competition and stand out from them by having a superior product design (or ser-vice design), in the form of higher quality, better functional-ity, superior technology , a better shape or something else. MARKET POSITION GoodAveragePoorProductdesignBuyer’sexperienceCustomerrelationsBrandvaluePricelevelCOMPETITIVE FACTORS??????Very goodVery poorOur companyA competitor© GrowthWheel International Inc. and David MadiéYour company can also show its superiority by creating a better buying experience for the customer throughout the entire purchasing process. This can be done at several points during the buying process; from the decision to buy, through delivery, use of the product and on to the follow-up service or maintenance, disposal or re-purchase. You can do so by giving a personal service and just making it, simple, easy and comfortable to deal with company. As a third factor, some companies gain ground by be-ing better at creating good and long-lasting customer relationships. This is done by having a continuous dialogue with the customers, by listening to their requests or by some other means gaining their trust to such an extent that they might not even consider changing to other products, even if they are both better and cheaper.The same applies to the fourth way of being better than the competition, namely to create a brand that is so attractive that it will keep the customers for life, because it has the right aesthetics or represents values that the customer can identify with. The Position Map: Deciding how to be better or di erent than the competition“As an entrepreneur with a new company, the problem is not always being su ciently diff erent from the competitors, but rather that you don’t look enough like them.” Licensed to Daron Hoggatt, Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs. Downloaded April 30, 2024.

LIMITED SPACEREGISTER TODAY!!!

43MARKET POSITIONFinally, the fth and last way to stand out from the com-petition is to oer a better price. Many businesses are focused on keeping costs down and being more ecient than others in the market. By continually striving to keep costs down, you can stand out and make more money by being the cheapest in the market.In the checklist on the next page, there are more examples of how you can be more competitive within these ve areas. It is not necessarily about being better in all the areas but about choosing where to concentrate your eorts and resources into being better. That is why some of the ve competition factors should be given greater priority while others should be given less or completely ignored if they are not relevant.Setting yourself apart from the competition All the ideas on how to beat the competition presented above appear to be good, but there is a certain danger to this whole way of thinking. It takes a lot of resources to be the best at all times, and the attempt to be the cheapest one might end up with you being the one who makes the least money.There is, however, an alternative to constantly trying to be better and cheaper than the competitors: Being dierent and moving to a spot without competition: The blue ocean.To be in the blue ocean means that you are trying to make your competitors irrelevant by designing your products and your company in a way that positions you outside the com-mon notions of how a company acts in the industry.In relation to the Position Map, you might say that you are adding new factors to compete for. The trick is to identify these new competitive factors. There are several ways to identify them. One way is to consider whether you can create a whole new market by go-ing beyond the traditional limits of your industry, and maybe become part of several industries at the same time, like the restaurant that becomes a school for chefs, or the bank that becomes a store or the computer manufacturer that is also a music business.Another way to create a blue ocean is to look for customer groups that others have overlooked. Maybe the situation in the industry is that all the big and well-established players are focusing on the same part of the market and are not in-terested in a smaller niche. If you are able to nd an uncul-tivated niche, you will also be alone in the ocean, or rather the little pond, where you will be a big sh. In the Position Map, this corresponds to adding a new area (blue stick) to compete in.A third and nal way of creating a blue ocean is to nd new and unprecedented ways of compiling products, perhaps by creating total solutions that meet all the client’s needs in a specic situation. You can meet a wider range of needs by nding other products that the clients are going to purchase before, after or at the same time as they purchase from you. Examples include airline companies that oer insurances, tness centers that oers dietary advice, or book shops that COMPETITIVE APPROACHCOMPETITIVE FACTORSCHECKLIST:INITIATIVES TO STRENGTHEN THE COMPETITIVE POSITIONBETTER THAN THE COMPETITORS IN THE RED OCEANProduct design• Improvement of efciency, quality and accuracy• Improvement of technology, compatibility and functionality • Improvement of user-friendliness, design and aestheticsBuyer’s experience• Easiness and comfortability in relation to ordering, delivery, use, maintenance, disposal and re-buy • Better service experience Customer relations• Continuous customer dialogue and frequent information• Continuous mapping of customer needs• Continuous evaluation and co-operation on problem solvingBrand value • Strong visual identity and consistent tone-of-voice• Clear communication of the value and appeal of the brand• Anchoring of ethical and social values in the brandPrice level• Lower or higher price that matches the quality offering• Appropriate price models and invoicing practice• Good and transparent rebate systemsDIFFERENT THAN THE COMPETITORS IN THE BLUE OCEAN Broader industry denition• Expand your business to cross several trades• Create new markets in new industries• Monitor trends and become co-creator of trendsFocus on special niche• Identify overlooked client groups• Find subsegments with special individual needs• Create offers that target both buyers and usersBroader product denition• Focus on total solutions• Combine deliveries of products and services• Create product combinations with partnersLicensed to Daron Hoggatt, Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs. Downloaded April 30, 2024.

44MARKET POSITIONoer coee shop facilities when buying a book. If it is possi-ble for your company to meet more needs with just one, total solution, you might sometimes be able to set yourself apart from your competitors.There are more examples of ways to get to the blue ocean in the checklist below.Emotional barriersAlthough the blue ocean might seem attractive, there are also some emotional barriers that keep entrepreneurs from mov-ing into it: The fear that the water is too deep, so to speak. The feeling of being in deep waters is not so much about questioning whether your idea is good enough, as entrepre-neurs seldom lack this condence. It is more likely to be the fear that competitors will steal your idea, follow in your foot steps and turn the blue ocean red.The fear of competitor intrusion is not always unfound-ed. If you as an entrepreneur cultivate a new market, the big sh might follow you and take over the market. On the other hand it might be a great advantage for pioneering entrepre-neurs that other players enter the new market. A competi-tor may help the market mature and prepare the customers more quickly to buy. It might take some time if you have to “educate” the clients to buy a new concept all by yourself, and you will appear much more trustworthy if you are not the only one in the world selling the new product or service.Competitors might also be good for you as they can show up the dierences and bring out your strengths. Even though two companies are competitors, they might have entirely dif-ferent proles - and market positions - and may not even be interested in each others’ customers. In such a situation, it is an advantage to have a competitor as your customers get a clear image of what the alternative is and become more aware of why they have chosen your product.Instead of fearing the competitors, you should choose the mind-set that competitors are an advantage for your compa-ny. That also goes for the type of competitors you might call rivals. These are the ones that you are competing against di-rectly on price when you are making oers. They might even be the ones that you can learn the most from.Get better at everythingPart of the joy of starting your own company is to put your own mark on it That is why we keep trying to be both better and dierent from the competitors. But as an entrepreneur with a new company, the problem is not always being su-ciently dierent from the competitors, but rather that you are not enough like them. The biggest challenge in the early phases of your compa-ny’s life cycle is to be just as professional and competent as the competitors in your line of business, who may have many more years experience. Therefore, you may want to start by trying to imitate the best in your industry. The best compa-nies are not always the ones that are dierent but simply the ones that do everything really well. To do so is always the best way to get a good market position and to stand out from your competition.Suggestions for the next step• Make a list of your competition or competitive products• Do some research on the competitor’s products and compare them to your own• Decide in which areas you want to be like the competitors and in which you want to stand out.The Blue OceanThe notions ‘the red’ and ‘the blue ocean’ come from the book “Blue Ocean Strategy” (by W. Chan Kim and Renée Maubor-gne) that was published a few years ago. It is widely con-sidered a new classic within the area of business strategy. The key message of the book is that companies, instead of strengthening their position in existing market, should create new markets where the competitors are irrelevant and non-ex-istent. The idea of differentiating oneself from the competition is not new, but in “Blue Ocean Strategy” it gets a new lan-guage as well as new tools. One of these tools is the “Strategy Canvas” that has inspired the Position Map in this article. © GrowthWheel International Inc. and David MadiéLicensed to Daron Hoggatt, Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs. Downloaded April 30, 2024.

2nd Annual Wellness for Womens Veterans & Their Families Conference

REGISTRATION Opening SOON!

2132 NE 36th St.

Oklahoma City, OK 73111

(405) 523-4000

OKVetWorks@odva.ok.gov