Intelligence about similar small businesses in your niche can help you come out ahead in a competitive rivalry. Porter’s Five Forces Template provides a framework to systematically analyze the landscape and make informed decisions about releasing a new product or entering a new market.
In this guide, we’ll define and provide an in-depth explanation of each of the five forces in Porter’s model. You’ll learn how to take advantage of this tool to gain unmatched insight into the other brands in your niche.
What is Porter’s Five Forces template?
The five forces model assesses the competitive advantages and weak spots of market rivals by evaluating five key areas, or forces:
- Supplier power: This factor analyzes the bargaining power of suppliers in your market. You can evaluate their ability to drive up prices by looking at the cost of changing to a different supplier, the availability of suppliers with similar products, and the distinct benefits offered by a specific supplier.
- Buyer power: This category of the forces framework looks at the bargaining power of buyers. What’s the power of customers to drive down prices in your sector? You’ll need to look at anything that creates customer leverage, as well as the cost of acquiring a new customer, the lifetime value of each customer, and your company’s total number of clients.
- Existing competitive rivalry: This aspect of the Five Forces Template looks at the relationship between competitive forces in your market. In addition to the number of competitors, you should review their capabilities and indicate whether any rivals have a market share that makes it difficult for customers to go elsewhere because of their sheer size.
- The threat of substitute products and services: This part of the forces analysis template reflects the risk of customers switching to a different product if you increase the price of your offerings.
- The threat of new entrants: Are there strong barriers for new businesses to enter your niche? Without these safeguards, your profitability could be at risk as others can easily replicate your products and services. Companies with unique offerings will be in a better position to retain market share in this situation.
In 1979, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter first published The Five Forces. Since then, the Five Forces Template has gained popularity among business owners who want to learn more about how customers and suppliers influence market share and potential profitability in real time. The benefits of using Porter’s model below explain why it’s been such a marketing mainstay over the past four decades.
Why use Porter’s Five Forces template?
You can use Porter’s Five Forces to analyze your industry’s direct and indirect competitors. First, you look at how each of these factors affects your business sector, then determine where your enterprise fits into the competitive landscape. With that information in hand, you can create a smart strategy to grow a sustainable business.
When your analysis reflects weakness among all five forces, you’re in an untapped market that has significant growth and profitability potential. Strong forces indicate a tight market where it could be difficult to expand your existing market share.
Part of the power of Porter’s model comes from its versatility. You can apply the tool to countless scenarios in small businesses and beyond.
What are some examples of Porter’s Five Forces template?
Let’s look at some of the scenarios in which Porter’s Five Forces Template could be a useful resource. In addition to gaining important insight into your market position relative to your competitors, consider performing an analysis with this model if you want to:
- Review current trends in your sector and make predictions about potential trends that may arise in the coming quarters
- Estimate the market share you can expect to command and determine its value
- Identify the risks and opportunities of entering a new industry or expanding your product and service offerings within your current industry
- See whether a specific business opportunity could drive a substantial return on your investment
If any of these examples provides inspiration, here’s how to get started with Porter’s Five Forces Template.
Porter’s Five Forces template on staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
With staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can personalize our Porter’s Five Forces Template and take advantage of related resources through our core Work OS platform. You can customize solutions that speak to the needs of your industry and help your company realize its organizational goals.
To use the staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud Five Forces Template, simply populate each spreadsheet row with details about the force in question. You can easily download and share the finished document for seamless presentation and collaboration with your team members. As you gain momentum, keep accelerating your productivity with associated templates and tools.
Related templates on staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
Expand your understanding of the market with these related resources for staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud users.
Automated workflows
Streamlining your systems can reduce your business expenses and improve your ability to seize market opportunities. With the Automated Workflows Template, you can aggregate details about all current work requests in one place and create automation for repetitive tasks to save your business both time and money. It also integrates with existing tools like Dropbox and Google Calendar for seamless integration into your team’s current platforms.
Product roadmap
When you’re ready to release a new product in response to the information you gained from your Five Forces analysis, keep the process organized with this Product Roadmap Template. You can create a timeline that includes all your project deliverables and assign team members to tasks so everyone can see responsibility, task dependencies, progress, and other key information on one attractive dashboard.
Frequently asked questions
What are Porter’s five forces?
Porter’s Five Forces is a framework for analyzing market competitors based on these five forces: the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitute products and services, supplier power, buyer power, and existing competitive rivalries.Porter’s Five Forces is a framework for analyzing market competitors based on these five forces: the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitute products and services, supplier power, buyer power, and existing competitive rivalries.
What is the difference between SWOT analysis and the Porter 5 model?
Porter’s Five Forces focuses solely on the external factors that affect a particular industry. SWOT, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, analyzes both internal and external factors of a business to determine whether a market move makes sense.
Find your way with the Porter’s five forces template
Exploring a new market niche requires a systematic approach that accounts for all available intelligence about the competitive landscape. Move forward with your plans to expand by starting with Porter’s Five Forces and other useful templates on staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud.