How to perform SWOT analysis of your Company (With Example)

Here, in this post, we’ll understand what is SWOT analysis and how you can prepare it. In this changing world where technology is improving day by day, if your business wants to compete with their competitors you have to carry the pace with you. If your business slowed a little bit, you might be solving yesterday’s problem. Today technology is helping business to analyze and improve their business strategies and allows them to make decisions which align with the mission and vision of the company.

In today’s world, everything is changing so fast that if want to be in the competition you have to take decisions quickly and businesses have to think on their feet. Things like SWOT analysis, Data Analysis and visualization, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence allowing businesses to learn from the data that is generated in-house or market data.

What is SWOT Analysis?

Basically, a SWOT analysis is a simple and powerful tool which can help you develop your business strategy, and for performing SWOT analysis it doesn’t matter whether its a startup or a big organisation. The term SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Here for a company, Strengths and Weaknesses are the parameters which are internal factors and a company have a full control over them whereas Opportunities and Threats are outside or external factors which but with a proper business strategy you can grab the opportunities and plan to control the threats and let them have minimal effect on your business.

This SWOT analysis tool is easy to create and for that, you just need a pen and a paper with a complete idea about the company or the sector for which you want to do the analysis.

Things you should consider and know about the company before preparing SWOT Analysis:

For Strength:

• What’s your Company’s strength i.e any popular brand or service
• Things that make you different from your competitors
• Your core business area
• Reach and Distribution

For Weakness:

• Things or areas in which your company is not performing well
• External factors which are affecting your company

For Opportunities:

• Tapping new markets to increase penetration
• Rising Level Incomes
• Market Size
• Focus on innovation
• Merger and Acquisitions

For Threats:

• Things or factors which you cannot control and are affecting your company’s business like Tax and regulatory structure, commodity prices etc.
• Rumours and bad media coverage

Your Competitors:

• Names of all the important competitors of your company

For example, we are here going to do a SWOT analysis for an FMCG sector and especially Colgate-Palmolive in India.

The strength of Colgate-Palmolive:

• Extremely popular brand with high brand awareness and strong customer base and loyalty.
• Focuses on 4 core businesses: Oral Care, Home Care, Personal Care and Pet Nutrition
• One of the market leader with the best Research and Development team
• Excellent reach and distribution, with its products available in more than 200 countries
• Sponsorship of events for the dental association, joining Pepsico for All in one Recycling challenge or spreading save water message with advertisements proved beneficial for the brand.

The weakness of Colgate-Palmolive:

• Market share is limited due to the presence of other FMCG band
• Fake brands supplied under their brand names
• Highly dependent on a single category – Oral care

Opportunities for Colgate-Palmolive:

• Tap rural and semi-urban markets to increase their brand presence
• A rise in income levels of an individual
• Large domestic market with 1.3 billion people
• Ranked as the most trusted brands in India
• launch new products and enter into the new business like food sector.
• Focus on innovation and deploy advanced technologies
• Merger and Acquisitions to strengthen the brand

Threats to Colgate-Palmolive: 

• Tax and regulatory structure
• Rumours and bad media coverage
• Competition with unbranded  products selling at a cheaper price
• FMCG companies like Patanjali, Dabur can have an upper hand due to the emotional connection of being Indian companies.
• Rumours and bad media coverage
• Increase in commodity prices for manufacturing products can affect
• FDI in retail allows other international companies to enter into the market
• Increasing competition with other FMCG companies

Competitors:

• Procter and Gamble
• Hindustan Unilever Limited
• Lóreal
• Patanjali
• Dabur

For learning about technologies that help business to take a better decision and building a better business strategy, check here.

For more information about the company you can either do a quick google search or get details from the company website for which you are preparing the SWOT analysis.