Porter's 5 forces

Assess your business competitors with the Lucidspark Porter’s 5 Forces template

Competition is an inescapable part of the business world, and if you want your company to be successful, you need to accurately assess your competitors and come up with strategies to out-perform them. You can use a Porter’s 5 Forces template to guide a collaborative assessment session with your executive team. From there, you can brainstorm effective strategies to get ahead.

The Porter’s Five Forces model template is a specific type of situation analysis. It examines the 5 forces of Porter, which include:

• Competitive rivalry: The rivalry of existing competitors in your market, specifically how many competitors there are and what capabilities they have to affect market shares
• Supplier power: The bargaining power of suppliers, or how easily they can drive up prices of supplies in your market
• Buyer power: The bargaining power of buyers, or the ability of buyers to bring product prices down with their ability to go to another company for goods
• Threat of substitution: The threat of substitutes, or the existence of alternate products that customers could turn to in the place of your product
• Threat of new entry: Threat of new entrants, or how easily a new business can establish itself in your market and niche

Examining each of these forces in the five forces analysis template gives you an overall picture of your competition and the state of your market. Gathering this information can help you with current or future marketing strategies and project planning, and can let you know if you need to give your products or business model an extra competitive edge.

How to use the Porter’s Five Forces template in Lucidspark

Our Porter’s Five Forces template is a simple way to guide an analysis session and combine the resources of your team. Simply share the Porter’s 5 Forces diagram to our virtual whiteboard and encourage your team members to add their feedback to the appropriate sections.

For instance, team members might start in the competitive rivalry section of the Porter analysis template by adding the names of competitive businesses and then considering how your business compares. You can add facts and figures to the appropriate sections, such as current product prices, current supply costs, how often prices have changed within a certain amount of time, how many customers have been lost or gained, and so on.

As you gather more information in the same place where everyone can see it, you’ll be able to make a more informed analysis of the competition levels in your market and which of your competitors warrant concern. You can use emoji reactions to facilitate engagement and tag sticky notes with common themes to spot patterns.

After you’re through with your analysis, you can continue to use the template as a resource for your team. To this end, you can use Lucidspark’s Frames to highlight particularly important pieces of information, and can even connect frames to create an ordered journey through the board for stakeholders. With the help of the Porter 5 Forces template, everyone can see the factors that will inform your business strategies as you go forward.