"Doing industry research is like writing a paper. You must first clarify the theme, such as understanding the position of a company in the industry, understanding the profitability of the industry, or forming a stock purchase reference? " Jin Rui, director of Deloitte Management Consulting, believes that before understanding the industry, we should first figure out why we should study, and then use the idea of proposition composition to answer this question repeatedly and structurally in a vast amount of information. "The structure of this question should be clear when you start collecting information."
For example, investors, consultants and headhunters have different purposes in the research industry. Take investors as an example. They study the industry to determine the position of a company in the industry and see if it is at the core of rapid growth and suitable for investment. People in the consulting industry study new industries in order to give industry trend reports and provide consulting solutions for customers.
Lu, an international senior manager, specializes in headhunting in the consumer goods industry. However, due to the increasingly common cross-border business model, many internet companies have found her and asked her to recommend market talents in the consumer goods industry. The internet industry is relatively new to her, and startups have many risks. Therefore, before deciding whether to cooperate, she needs to quickly understand the market segment where the company is located, see the competitive performance of their products, operating models and profit models in the market, judge their development status, and finally decide which startup companies to reach recruitment cooperation with.
For most companies, the ultimate goal of studying the industry is to solve problems, so starting with the problems can get more targeted results in a short time.
Search engine is the first way for many people to understand the industry, but it has two problems: first, a large amount of network information often makes people feel at a loss and don't know what they need; Secondly, many companies now do search engine optimization promotion, which means that you may not be able to accurately search for real information.
What can I do to get more targeted information? We can roughly divide the research methods into top-down and bottom-up. The former starts from the industry and gradually cuts into a certain subdivision and company; And the latter is from the company, reverse understanding of their own fields and industries.
Top-down: Learn to read industry research reports.
Starting from the industry, the first step is to collect industry research reports. Such reports can usually be obtained through vertical research reports such as keywords and prospective data. However, these reports often contain a lot of information, usually dozens or even hundreds of pages. Faced with a lot of information, how do you grab it? Jin Rui, director of Deloitte Management Consulting, gave us a general framework:
The overall development of the industry: what products and services the industry mainly provides, the growth rate of the industry, the market scale, and the recent development trend of the industry;
Business environment: the provisions of national policies and laws-this part needs special attention when studying finance, medical care and real estate industries; Changes in gross domestic product, interest and interest rates; Changes in consumer habits; Technological innovation;
Competitive situation and environment: which leading enterprises in the industry, resource concentration, high market entry rate, core competitiveness, etc. ;
Operational management level: whether the industry is developing new products; The speed of product update iteration; Major mergers and acquisitions, restructuring and IPOs in the industry
Future trend: whether the competition trend, profit trend, policy orientation and business strategy of large enterprises in the industry have changed.
Through this information, we can initially understand the development trend of the industry in recent years, understand which head companies and main products are in the industry, and have a clear grasp of the industrial chain of the industry. Therefore, reading research papers carefully is usually the starting point to understand an industry.
Bottom-up: judging the industry by the performance of most companies in the industry.
This is a method that investors often use: they may catch a listed company in different links of the industrial chain to study. Through the study of different links of these big companies, they not only understand how the industrial chain works, but also understand which link in this industrial chain has the greatest profit and development potential-that is, where there may be investment opportunities.
However, for most companies, it is too difficult to do so, so the more feasible method is analogy-find the same type of companies in the industry that you are interested in and compare them together. Lu once served a fashion beauty e-commerce platform. In order to determine the company's position in the market, she looked for all the fashion and beauty e-commerce platforms in the market to see their products, profit models and financing rounds. If you look at most companies in a sub-industry, you will naturally form an overall judgment on this industry: is the market as a whole in the early stage of development or in the recession stage? What kind of model development is better?
Bottom-up research methods are often more purposeful, usually to solve a specific problem rather than understand the whole industry.
No matter which way, the foothold of company people after studying the industry is often a subdivided field, and to understand the subdivided field, it is necessary to find the head company in this field and conduct targeted analysis, so learning to study a company is also the basis for understanding the industry.
Generally speaking, when studying a company, you need to look at its products and business, profit model and profit status, mergers and acquisitions, organizational structure, and the company's recent strategic trends. Finally, you should benchmark it with your competitors and see how it performs in the market competition.
This may be too abstract-different industries need to know different information. The best way is to make an information extraction framework according to the research purpose. In Deloitte, Ke Rui and other companies, when employees collect information, they all have an information collection template table as a reference.
Take the consumer goods industry as an example. Lu suggested looking at consumer goods companies from three directions:
Products and brands, including target audience;
Sales channels and regions, to see which channels it sells, which channels and regions sell best;
How the front end of the product affects the terminal, that is, the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain.
Broaden your horizons and benchmark the company you want to know with competitors and overseas markets, which is also an important way to understand a company. By looking at the development of competitors and developed markets in this field, we can know where the shortcomings or potential of the company and its market are.
The most convenient information channel to know about enterprises is official website. When studying the head companies in the industry, try to choose listed companies with transparent data. However, the information on the Internet can't solve all the problems. If you need more professional information, you need to do some offline interviews. Information obtained online can also be verified twice through offline interviews.
The target of offline interview can be your customers, industry experts or practitioners. Most of the information of headhunters comes from interviews with customers, candidates and investors. "Candidates are the best mentors," said Zhou Guohua, a headhunter and department manager in Ren Shida's financial field. "Whether you understand sub-sectors or large industries, you must understand them thoroughly, and you must communicate with experienced people so that you can understand them more quickly and pertinently."