Competitive advantage rating method and apparatus

A method of determining competitive advantage comprising the following steps:

• defining a geographic location in which to measure the level of competitive advantage;
• defining a business market in which to measure the level of competitive advantage;
• defining a list of companies that compete in the business market for the geographic area;
• defining a business unit within each company that competes in the business market for the geographic area;
• and
• defining a set of financial metrics that adequately define how well a company performs within the business market.
• defining a set of functional attributes that adequately represent how a company does business in this market;
• defining a set of emotional needs that adequately represent how a company does business in this market;
• defining a set of pricing power attributes that adequately represent prices paid by customers to a business in this market;
• defining customer requirements that adequately represent the customers for each company within the competitor definition;
• combining the sets of functional attributes, emotional needs and pricing power into single questionnaire;
• locating, interviewing and selecting customers that meet the requirements criteria;
• using the pre-qualified list, interview a set of customers for each company as defined in the competitor definition;
• using the pre-scores of each functional attribute for each respondent, ipsatize each attribute's pre-score;
• creating desires norms tables based on the pre-scores for each ipsatized functional attribute and emotional needs;
• using the desires norms table for each functional attribute, lookup the functional score using the ipsatized pre-score;
• using the emotional scores, calculate the emote scores for each functional attribute;
• using the emotional needs scores, calculate the scores for facets;
• using the functional and emote scores at the attribute level, calculate the desire rating for each attribute by averaging the functional and emote score;
• using the functional and emote scores at the attribute level, calculate the delivery rating for each attribute by averaging the functional and emote score;
• calculating the win rating of each company by dividing the sum of all delivery ratings by the sum of all desires ratings and multiplying by 100;
• using all of the company's desires and delivery ratings, calculate the percentile rank of each functional and emote attribute;
• establishing a threshold score to use when evaluating which companies are performing superior to competitors in this business market and geography;
• calculating the barrier scores based on a company's desire and delivery ratings for the competitive barriers of each company in this business market and geography;
• evaluating if the barrier score exceeds the high performance threshold;
• using the core metrics used to define a company's financials, calculate the percentile rank of each company along each financial metric;
• and
• determine if the company exceeds thresholds across all desire and delivery ratings in addition to financial metrics to build a competitive advantage.