If you are thinking that SWOT is a newer business term, then it’s not..

A hundred years ago it was called, “taking stock of yourself,” and it entailed a list of assets and liabilities. Useful, yet it was vague to some people.

But actually, SWOT is clear and intuitive.
Apply SWOT to your “situation in life.” It always adds clarity, Opines Eminent Business Astro-Strategist, Hirav Shah.

SWOT Definition, Description & Analysis

Are You Doing The Right SWOT Analysis for Your Business ?

A SWOT analysis is a tool that business planners use to gauge an organization and its environment. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors. Opportunities and threats are external factors.

To perform a SWOT analysis, consider the following

Strengths

  • What advantages do you have?
  • What resources and contacts do you have access to? –What recognitions have you received?
  • What are your intangible assets?
  • What do you do well?

Weaknesses

  • What do you lack?
  • What can be improved?
  • What are some of the gaps that need to be addressed? -What should be avoided?

Opportunities

  • What specific opportunities are available to you to take advantage of?
  • What are the opportunities facing your industry that you could possibly pursue?
  • What are the trends that might open new opportunities?

Threats

  • What obstacles do you face?
  • What is your competition up to?
  • Are the requirements for your company changing?
  • Are you having any cash flow problems?
  • Can any of these weaknesses seriously threaten the vitality and longevity of your business?

Carrying out SWOT analysis can be a real eye opener. Not only will it highlight what needs to be “fixed” or immediately addressed, it will also show you what you’ve been doing right.

But are you doing the right SWOT analysis?
Are you at all doing it?

No and a Big No !

Many massive companies failed and how.
Nokia and Blackberry fell into the trap of overconfidence and lack of managerial foresight. The famous Ambassador car in India is another instance. Its makers, Hindustan Motors, refused to upgrade even when the fuel-efficient Maruti gave them enough notice.

Think of Bharti, Bajaj, BMW, Fiat, and Ford. They incorporated SWOT analysis and practiced it for ages. Today, they are successful companies for the world to see…

Hirav Shah’s tips below can help you compile a well-rounded SWOT analysis and do it in the correct way

1.Be precise & specific

SWOT analysis can get overwhelming when you start considering multiple perspectives. To overcome that, pick a target that matches up closely to the objective of your campaign. When listing strengths and weaknesses, be sure to find some that are considered as such in the eyes of your intended target audience.

2.Research with competitors in mind

A weakness isn’t necessarily a weakness if all the competitors in the market suffer from it. When performing research, marketers should do their best to zoom out and evaluate SWOT components from the entire market’s perspective.

The same applies to strengths. What is strong needs to also stand out from the competitors. For example, a 20-year-old computer is still a fascinating machine, but when comparing it to competitors in today’s market, it’s useless. For the purposes of your research, the only opinion that matters is the consumers’, and they have access to your competition.

Businesses must be cautious not to ignore this. Many marketers are so focused on what their companies have been doing that they lose sight of their competition. Because of this, marketers often forget to step back and challenge their products from their customers’ perspective. This is particularly a problem in high-velocity markets like the mobile app market.

3.Utilize Porter’s Five Forces While Analyzing The External Environment

Opportunities and threats seem to be a little harder for people to examine. Common factors that contribute to opportunities and threats may include the state of the economy, fluctuations in the market, or a significant shift in the target consumers’ behaviors. To paint a better picture of external factors, Michael Porter created a framework to help marketers and strategists accurately identify the competitive forces in an industry.

Porter’s lens explores the threat of substitute products or services in the market, the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, the threat of new entrants and the threat of rivalry among existing competitors.

Marketers who examine the threats and weaknesses through Porter’s lens may be better equipped to craft strategies that offer comprehensive support for a brand. If you’re a well-established company, and you learn that too many entrants are coming into the market, you may recognize a need to raise the barrier to entry in the market to make it harder for competitors to enter.

You might leverage your power and influence in the market to raise industry standards in ways that new entrants wouldn’t be able to afford, or you may grow your volumes and utilize economies of scale to lower the price.

Companies that don’t follow this blueprint, may find themselves in trouble.

Bottomline

Using the three pointers above when performing a SWOT analysis will help you dig deeper. When executed thoroughly, a polished SWOT analysis can give you the necessary guidance to identify areas of improvement, highlight your company’s true benefits, guide future decisions and provide critical ingredients to your marketing plan.

When you finally create a stable business through SWOT analysis, you will find that:

The business doesn’t not have a pause button,
rewind button,
fast forward button…
It will only have one button- Run.

To Run the business and to take it to it’s unimaginable heights, Hirav Shah’s Astro-Strategy would be a requisite today.
Yes, very much a requisite !!

To sum up, with Hirav Shah’s Astro-Strategic opinion, you can ensure that your business formulates successful growth and expansion plans based on Astrological analysis.