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When you run a business, making the most of it becomes the prime purpose of life. Both big and small business owners need to conduct various analyses. There are many methods, which help to conclude about the firm’s current state before taking an informed decision. SWOT analysis is perhaps the most commonly used technique. STEEP, STEEPLE, and PEST are also used by individuals and companies.
Before I discuss the other methods, I would like to talk about SWOT.
SWOT analysis often talks of the basics of business. People see it as so important because the method evaluates a project or business venture’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The initials of these factors make up the acronym SWOT.
Business owners or project managers apply this structured planning method to know where their venture stands. The analysis’ benefit is not limited to companies or industries only. You can carry out SWOT for products, places, and even people too. Both new and existing businesses can use it.
The process involves stating the business goal. The aim of SWOT is to identify the favorable and unfavorable internal and external factors to reach the goal. You can call the degree to which a firm’s internal environment matches with its external environment as strategic fit.
Strengths:
Assess the characteristics of your business that give it an advantage over the others in this step. Questions like the following are often asked when considering Strengths:
Weaknesses:
These are characteristics that place the business at a disadvantage when compared to others. Answer the following questions:
Opportunities:
In this part, consider elements that the project could profit from. The 2 most important questions to ask in this section are:
Threats:
Find out what elements in the environment could cause trouble for your business or project. Some of the questions you can ask here are:
There are other tools used to find out an organization’s current status and position. PEST, STEEP, and STEEPLE analysis help assess the company’s external environment and current role. All have the same goal and you can perform them, in the same way. You can use them for future planning and strategic management. Which one of them you will choose depends on the nature of your business or project.
A traditional SWOT analysis would take the context of STEEP and STEEPLE to analyze how certain factors may impact. It is often conducted with either STEEP or STEEPLE analysis. Many think it is an interesting exercise.
PEST analysis studies 4 dimensions, like SWOT. The factors considered in PEST are Political, Economical, Social, and Technological. It is a precise analysis that helps to understand how each of the factors impacts business. It studies the opportunities and threats section of SWOT, but in more detail.
Political Factors
The Political factors include government regulations and legal issues. It defines both formal and informal rules that a firm must abide by. Below are some factors you should consider:
Economic Factors
The economic factors affect the potential customers’ purchasing power and company’s cost of capital. These are some related factors:
Social Factors
Social factors involve the cultural and demographic aspects of the external macro-environment. The following factors impact customer needs and size of markets:
Technological Factors
These factors can remove or lower barriers to entry. They can also reduce minimum efficient production levels and sway outsourcing decisions. Some of the technological factors are:
STEEP analysis consists of all these factors but has an additional factor. In STEEP analysis, you have to assess environmental factors too.
Environmental Factors
The environmental factors assess what kind of impact the company is having on the environment. The impact can either be negative or positive. Usually, this affects agricultural firms. Some factors to consider are:
STEEPLE analysis is another step ahead. When conducting STEEPLE analysis you have to study Legal and Ethical factors.
Legal Factors
These are factors, which deal with legal complications. You need to constantly check on new legal requirements to ensure compliance. The factors you should consider are:
Ethical Factors
Ethical factors are all about the social values, which govern business behavior. These act as the foundation for what is right and what is wrong. You must always check the ethical factors of your company. These do not change overnight, but small changes in morality are common.
When business owners want to spend a lot to analyze the internal competencies of their company, they perform SWOT analysis. To learn more about the firm’s external factors they can use PEST, STEEP and STEEPLE analysis.
SWOT analysis is an important tool that assists businesses in the evaluation and discovery phase of strategic planning and analysis. Since it provides an all-round view of the current and forward-looking situation of a business, the term SWOT is often correlated with strategic planning and analysis. Both play a vital role in the high-level planning of businesses as they involve important data, which once identified and analyzed, can help to achieve long-term business growth and success.
SWOT analysis is just one element of a strategic plan. The main difference between the concepts is that SWOT analysis is a business planning tool while a strategic analysis or plan is an overall business proposal which provides directions regarding how the business will find success.
SWOT analysis provides a proper look at a business’s current situation and assesses its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in a thorough manner, it plays an important part in the process of strategic planning.
Strengths : In SWOT analysis strategic planning, a business will be able to discover the advantages it has over other competitors in the marketplace. These advantages serve as the focal point of the business’s operation and strategic planning.
Weaknesses : With SWOT analysis strategic planning, a business can gain better understanding of its weaknesses and come up with effective solutions in the strategic plan.
Opportunities : Identifying opportunities is an important part of developing any strategies which would help a business to improve and grow. SWOT analysis strategic planning assesses the opportunities a business has which is then used to create a roadmap for success through strategic planning.
Threats : Analyzing the threats a business faces might not be a fun part of SWOT analysis but it does help a business to insulate itself against threats. SWOT analysis strategic planning will allow businesses to identify the possible factors that could threaten or hamper growth and success so they can be better dealt with.
So, as you can see, SWOT analysis and strategic planning are distinct concepts, however, both involve the use of essential data about the business to create effective solutions for success.
STEEPLE analysis help assess the company’s external environment and current role. All have the same goal and you can perform them, in the same way. You can use them for future planning and strategic management. Which one of them you will choose depends on the nature of your business or project.
STEEPLE Analysis is just factors that give the company clues as to what is going to happen in the coming years. Socio-cultural factors would be population demographics, income, education ect. Political would be government regulations, taxes, and foreign trade regulations. The others are fairly self-explanatory.
SWOT helps develop strategies for starting the business or expanding. This would include competition, government regulations, community, and market.
Strategic planning requires that each organization or institution develop a vision of what it likes to see itself in the long-term future and this is done through an annual or quarterly strategic plan to be implemented in stages.Vision
Is a long-term future we dream of the organization access to it, is the vision by writing or in general does not understand the vision is limited to what can be achieved by the organization, but it is possible to stretch and be bigger than the organization and reflect what the organization aspires to achieve.
SWOT and STEEPLE analysis are necessary for scanning of external and internal environment.
The simplest definition of strategy is the process of developing long range plan for the company taking into account SWOT and STEEPLE
should be twice because swot is sample not more creativity like steeple
Thanks
Colleague Ramnath covered the question .
The first question is very well answered by colleagues, nothing more to add.
Regarding the second one Mr Ahmed, I would suggest please to check this my answer in this topic:
strategy management . Thanks
SWOT: The goal of a SWOT analysis is to create lists of all of the internal and external strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to inform strategic planning decisions. SWOT is meant to help businesses double down on strengths, eliminate weaknesses, pursue opportunities and avoid or prepare for threats. For instance, if a small business conducts a customer survey and discovers that everyone loves a certain product, it could divert resources away from weaker products and put more money into developing the strong product.
STEEPLE analysis is a great way to prompt helpful discussion. It helps to find out where your business stands within its external environment.
STEEP analysis is a similar strategic tool. STEEPLE and STEEP are almost identical versions of each other. Their common goal is to define strategies for the future or to understand the market. The best way to separate STEEPLE from STEEP is to say that it is a modified version.
The framework for STEEP has gone through many alterations. Along the way, Marketing experts have added certain factors to the analysis. They thought STEEP analysis was not enough for some organizations. The experts felt the need of elements like Legal and Ethical.
The legal and Ethical aspect of business is not considered in STEEP. As they prove important for some firms, they perform STEEPLE analysis. Ethics explores demographics in a different way. The added factors help to use the framework better while researching the market.
STEEP analysis deals with the following questions:
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