Appraising competitors often involves assessing their strengths and weaknesses in some way, comparable to parts of the SWOT approach that management might use to assess their own business. But such approaches are qualitative and high-level, and quite inadequate for designing and implementing specific competitive campaigns. A more rigorous approach builds on two principles:

1. A competitor operating in our own industry will likely have both a similar set of resources and a similar architecture for organizing them to ourselves. Competitors may differ ...