[MUSIC] Hi, we are again moving in this process of understanding the marketing plan, and getting now to the first stage of the marketing plan, which is the analysis. Remember the analysis is basically going to help us understand the situation of the brand and the market. So we split the analysis into two sides, the external analysis and the internal analysis. In this video we're going to focus on the external analysis of the marketing plan. So what is going to be relevant when looking at the external side of the analysis? Well basically, let's go for the basic ideas that we need to know. And I will say these are the three, the market, the competition, and the customers. And what is it exactly we want to know? Well, concerning the market, I would say let's look at the market, and I'm defining the market as the place where we compare. And try and identify size of the market. Okay, it could be the size in units, in value, in number of individuals. Trend in the market. Is the market, for example, growing or declining? Try and identify competitive rivalry. How many competitors are in the market? How are they competing in terms of what, okay? And also, another thing that we always try and include in the analysis side, in the external analysis is the attractiveness of the market. How attractive is the market? Okay, let me try and explain this with the example of the Nissan Leaf case. We launch the Nissan Leaf in Germany. We want to know, for example, the market. We want to know about the market. Can we know the size of the market? Yes, we can. We know the total size of the German car market, which is Is around 4 million cars, a huge market. We also can know exactly the size of the electric car market, for example, including also hybrids in that market. We want to know the trend. Is this market going up or down? It seemed to be stable at the time of the case. We want to know about the company rivalry. How competitive is the market? In general terms, I would say it's very competitive, but in the electric car market, maybe not so much, okay? So that will be pretty much some ideas about how to analyze a market, basically, for the analysis that we need in our marketing plan. What will be the second part of the external analysis? Analyzing the competition, always relevant and always very important to try to identify competitors. Who is my competitor? Who am I competing with? And especially for a marketing plan, the relevant question is what is the marketing strategy of my competitor? What are they doing? Okay, try and identify what is the marketing mix, also. This is a tricky question because you need to know what type of product they're using, what prices they have, what channel they use to sell the product or service, or what is the communication campaign that they're doing? Okay, so you need to analyze carefully who is your competitor and what are they doing in terms of marketing strategy? The next state. Well, in the Nissan Leaf case, you're going to be given quite a lot of information about the competition, for example. You will be given, in the chart that you have here, all the competitors in the market, okay? You should be able also to try and identify the marketing strategy of the different competitors. I have an example here with the Tesla, which is one of the best, probably, well-known electric cars in the industry. Okay, so now we're trying to figure what is the target segment that they're looking for, what is the positioning that they have, or even trying to find the marketing mix, okay? So you can know, for example, by looking at this example, what will be the marketing mix of the test, more or less, which is one of the costs in the portfolio. So that would be the idea of analyzing the competition, okay? One tool that we use many times in marketing plans is a positioning map, where basically we draw a map. Okay, we draw two axes, the vertical side and the horizontal side. Okay, and as you can see, for example, in this positioning map that I have here for the Nissan Leaf case, we can actually draw the position of Nissan and it's most direct competitors in two different axes, that is, affordable versus luxury, and small versus large. That's an example of using a positioning map. Next step, customers. Okay, we need to identify the customer needs and try and identify segments of customers. Okay, we always look at the market in terms of segments, groups of customers with a common need and a common buying behavior. Again, segmentation tends to be very industry-specific. But for example, in the case of Nissan Leaf, we are going to see quite a sophisticated segmentation, for example, by willingness to adopt an innovation, by attitude towards the car, by lifestyle, by gender. So with all these different ways of segmenting the market, we end up having, like I was saying, a very complete and sophisticated segmentation, okay? So in summary, this is external analysis. We analyze market, competition, and customers in order to get a good idea of what is the situation of the brand or the product from the external side. Thank you. [MUSIC]
