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The SWOT analysis is a simple, albeit comprehensive strategy in identifying not only the weaknesses and threats of a plan, but also the strengths and opportunities available through it.

Strengths

Strengths describe the positive attributes, tangible and intangible, internal to your organization. They are within your control. You may want to evaluate your strengths by area, such as marketing, finance, manufacturing, and organizational structure. Strengths include the positive attributes of the people involved in the business, including their knowledge, backgrounds, education, credentials, contacts, reputations, or the skills they bring. Strengths also include tangible assets such as available capital, equipment, credit, established customers, existing channels of distribution, copyrighted materials, patents, information and processing systems, and other valuable resources within the business.

Weaknesses

Weaknesses are factors that are within your control that detract from your ability to obtain or maintain a competitive edge. Weaknesses might include lack of expertise, limited resources, lack of access to skills or technology, inferior service offerings, or the poor location of your business. These are areas you need to enhance in order to compete with your best competitor.

Opportunities

Opportunities assess the external attractive factors that represent the reason for your business to exist and prosper. Opportunities may be the result of market growth, lifestyle changes, resolution of problems associated with current situations, positive market perceptions about your business, or the ability to offer greater value that will create a demand for your services.

Threats

Threats include factors beyond your control that could place your marketing strategy, or the business itself, at risk. These are also external – you have no control over them, but you may benefit by having contingency plans to address them if they should occur.

Competition – existing or potential – is always a threat. Other threats may include intolerable price increases by suppliers, governmental regulation, economic downturns, devastating media or press coverage, a shift in consumer behavior that reduces your sales, or the introduction of a “leap-frog” technology that may make your products, equipment, or services obsolete.

When drafting a SWOT analysis, individuals typically create a table split up into four columns so as to list each impacting element side-by-side for comparison. Strengths and weaknesses won’t typically match listed opportunities and threats, though some correlation should exist since they’re tied together in some way.

Pairing external threats with internal weaknesses can highlight the most serious issues faced by a company.

Here is a SWOT Analysis template with some examples filled in:

To help you to carry out your analysis, you can write down answers to the following questions.

Strengths:

· What advantages does your organization have?

· What do you do better than anyone else?

· What unique or lowest-cost resources can you draw upon that others can't?

· What do people in your market see as your strengths?

· ______

· ______

Weaknesses:

· What could you improve?

· What are people in your market likely to see as weaknesses?

· ______

· ______

Opportunities:

· What good opportunities can you spot?

· Are there any changes in technology and markets on both a broad and narrow scale?

· Are there any changes in government policy related to your field?

· ______

· ______

Threats

· Are quality standards or specifications for your job, products or services changing?

· Is changing technology threatening your position?

· Do you have bad debt or cash-flow problems?

· Could any of your weaknesses seriously threaten your business?

· ______

· ______

Look at the questions below. Which part of the SWOT do they refer to? Complete the text above with the missing questions

· What obstacles do you face?

· What should you avoid?

• Are there any changes in social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle changes, and so on?

· What factors mean that you "get the sale"?

· What is your organization's Unique Selling Proposition (USP)?

· What are your competitors doing?

· What factors lose you sales?

· What interesting trends are you aware of?

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1135