A market landscape is an outside-in view of the markets a company competes in. How large each one is, how fast it is growing, who holds share, why customers buy, how the competition is positioned and where new entrants could come from. Advisory firms produce them for growth strategies, acquisitions and due diligence.
What a good one answers
Nine questions per market are enough: market size, growth, your share, why customers buy, current competition, future competition, market risks, buyer dynamics and who actually makes the purchase decision. Answered honestly, they tell you whether your internal view of a market survives contact with the market.
Where landscapes go wrong
Two ways. They are built for the company as a whole, so the answer is an average that is true of no product in no market. Or they are delivered as a report, admired and filed, with no step that forces the executive team to compare the outside view with what they believed going in.
Make it change something
Build the landscape on the same grid as the portfolio: each priority product in each priority market, the same nine questions in every one. Then put the two side by side. The internal read says this is a growth market for us; the outside read says share is flat and a competitor is two years ahead on the feature customers weight most. That gap is the finding. In our experience the outside view almost always changes the internal one, and that is the reason to do it.
How we build it
In the MOVE® system this is the market reality check, the second half of the product-market matrix. AI does the research in days. The executive team's work is the comparison, and the decision that follows from it.
Monday
For your most important product in your most important market, write why customers buy from you. Then ask five of them. Compare the two lists.