“Know thy enemy’’ is a timeless saying that applies to many competitive scenarios. Well, “enemy” may be an extreme word in the business landscape, but you still need to craft a successful business strategy to outdo your industry competitors and enjoy a healthy share of profits.
Leading economist Michael Porter introduced the 5 Forces methodology in 1979 to identify the five pertinent competitive forces that shape a particular market. It’s a powerful alternative to the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. Instead of a generic and often overly broad assessment, the 5 Forces framework focuses on factors affecting profitability threats and growth goals.
So, if you’re itching to unravel the mystery behind why your existing competitors are either thriving or struggling, we have you sorted. Our collection of 10 free Porter’s 5 Forces templates will help you snatch opportunities before they knock on someone else’s door! 🚪
- What is a Porter’s 5 Forces Analysis Template?
- How to Use a Porter’s 5 Forces Template for Market Analysis
- 10 Free Porter’s 5 Forces Templates in Word, Slides, and ClickUp
- 1. ClickUp Porter’s 5 Forces Template
- 2. ClickUp Market Research Template
- 3. ClickUp Market Analysis Template
- 4. ClickUp Competitive Analysis Template
- 5. ClickUp Competitive Analysis Pricing Template
- 6. ClickUp Product Positioning Template
- 7. ClickUp Competitor Tracking Template
- 8. Word Porter’s 5 Forces Analysis Template by Custom-Writing.org
- 9. Word Porter’s 5 Forces Analysis Template by TCCTrainingandConsulting
- 10. Slides Porter’s Five Forces Analysis Template by SlideEgg
What is a Porter’s 5 Forces Analysis Template?
A Porter’s 5 Forces template is a structured framework specifically designed to facilitate the application of the 5 Forces model in business and strategic analysis. It provides an organized visual format for identifying, comprehending, and assessing the competitive dynamics within an industry through five components:
- Existing competition in the industry
- Potential competition due to new entrants
- Bargaining power of suppliers
- Bargaining power of customers
- Threat posed by substitute products
A typical Porter’s 5 Forces template contains prompts to help you add info about these components. The completed document will present a well-rounded picture of the direct and indirect competitive rivalry within an industry, making it instrumental in crafting effective corporate strategies in areas like:
- Feasibility of introducing a new product or service
- Ways to gain competitive advantage
- Quarterly or annual profitability goals
- Brand loyalty enhancement
This template is an excellent addition to your strategy documentation as it can be shared with colleagues to standardize and streamline the brainstorming processes.
How to Use a Porter’s 5 Forces Template for Market Analysis
Using a Porter’s 5 Forces template is like having access to a magic mirror—while it doesn’t predict the future, it reveals the strengths and vulnerabilities of your competitors. 🪞
Follow these standard steps to conduct a marketing analysis with the template:
- Assess competition: Examine your competitors to understand their strengths (like more resources) and weaknesses (like limited product differentiation)
- Identify entry threats: Address the likelihood of new players entering the market, considering barriers like restrictive regulations and high capital requirements
- Gauge supplier influence: Determine the bargaining power of your suppliers by evaluating their ability to affect your cost and supply chain logistics
- Appraise buyer influence: Assess the bargaining power of customers, considering their brand loyalty, demand pattern, and capacity to influence pricing terms
- Evaluate substitution threats: Analyze the possibility of alternative products or services replacing your offering
You can assign a risk level—low, moderate, or high—to every competitive element as you draw overall conclusions and formulate your strategic approach based on the collective insights.
10 Free Porter’s 5 Forces Templates in Word, Slides, and ClickUp
We’ve scoured numerous templates for strategic analysis and picked the cream of the crop for you! Check out the 10 best free Porter’s 5 Forces templates in ClickUp, Slides, and Word to brainstorm and present your analysis in a compelling manner. 🎯
1. ClickUp Porter’s 5 Forces Template
When it comes to understanding and navigating the complex, ever-evolving forces of the marketplace, the ClickUp Porter’s 5 Forces Template emerges as a reliable guiding light!
This template is designed to help you figure out any competitive landscape faster by illuminating where you stand in the market. It offers a ClickUp Whiteboard view, equipped with a handy toolbar to support real-time edits with multiple collaborators. It presents five color-coded circles depicting the major forces you need to consider to analyze the competition:
- Competitive Rivalry 🔴
- Buyer Power 🟢
- Threat of New Entrants 🟣
- Threat of Substitute 🔵
- Supplier Power 🟠
Each section allows users to visualize and evaluate competitive forces, clearly showing the business environment and how it affects you. Curious about the relative impact of these forces? The ability to mark competitive intensity for each factor as Low, Medium, or High risk before drawing conclusions adds an extra layer of depth to the analysis.
This user-friendly template is a valuable resource for businesses as it adapts to the needs of every industry. Managers love using this tool to bring order to high-stake brainstorming scenarios like:
- Identifying market opportunities and threats well ahead of time
- Maintaining or boosting market share and profitability
- Positioning products for long-term success
- Conducting a gap analysis for process improvements
ClickUp integrates with hundreds of popular work and communication apps, like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, enabling you to present and collaborate on your strategies smoothly.
2. ClickUp Market Research Template
Consider the ClickUp Market Research Template as your scientific guide to understanding customer needs. It doesn’t just collect data but empowers you to refine existing processes and craft winning strategies to gain an edge in the market. 🥇
Within this simple-to-follow template, you’ll discover a suite of powerful tools to organize and store information about your direct and indirect competitors. It has five Custom Fields by default, allowing you to add the following attributes to your analysis:
- Market Research Type: A dropdown field to categorize the type of market research conducted (in this case, Porter’s 5 Forces study)
- Document Link: A website field to link to the report document
- Presentation Link: Another website field to link to the report presentation
- Research Stage: A dropdown field to indicate the current stage of research
- Data Collection Technique: A label field to note the specific techniques (like surveys) used for data collection
Next, you get a thorough Task Checklist outlining 21 subtasks organized step-by-step, each facilitating your market research activities. The checklist takes the guesswork out of the process and enables teams to reach conclusions faster.
This supercharged task template makes it easy for you to keep up with market trends and narrow down ROI-boosting activities. Want better visibility over your tasks? You can access other ClickUp views, like List, Gantt chart, Workload, and Calendar, to gain more insights into your research.
3. ClickUp Market Analysis Template
If you’re eager to uncover where your product stands in the competitive arena, the ClickUp Market Analysis Template is what you need. It serves as your own personal market analyst, but without the hefty price tag. 🏷️
This template allows you to dive deep into competitor categorization. You can identify your Direct, Indirect, Potential, Future, and Replacement competitors, painting a holistic picture of the competitive landscape.
What makes it even better? Nine Custom Fields! Need to rate items, capture unique competitor features, or represent market share? This template has you covered with default fields to enter your data, making it an all-in-one resource for competitive analysis.
This versatile template isn’t just for established giants—even startups can use it to spot untapped customer segments and tailor their offerings, thanks to its multi-faceted views.
With views like Growth Share and Price vs. Quality, you’re equipped to strategize with clarity. In the Competitors view, you’ll find a comprehensive list of competitors, neatly organized by their market share and performance. Lastly, the Advertisements Board view displays what your competitors are doing to promote their products.
4. ClickUp Competitive Analysis Template
Nothing ignites progress quite like healthy competition! Embrace it, and you may find untapped potential for your business. The ClickUp Competitive Analysis Template, in many ways, embodies this spirit of healthy rivalry.
With this template, you can dive deep into competitor marketing strategies and gain insights into your own strengths and weaknesses. Not only that—you can set growth benchmarks as you meticulously propel your product or service to new heights!
This Whiteboard template comes with a Getting Started Guide to help you conduct a successful Competitive Analysis Matrix through six steps:
- Identifying competitors
- Creating a comparison matrix
- Gathering background information
- Profiling target customers
- Focusing on the 4 P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Promotion, and Place)
- Analyzing strengths and weaknesses
With the quadrant layout, you can visualize four different types of competitors: Main Contenders, Industry Leaders, Niche Competitors, and High Performers. Use sticky notes to plot elements into each quadrant as you push your analysis forward.
5. ClickUp Competitive Analysis Pricing Template
The ClickUp Competitive Analysis Pricing Template is your trusted ally in the quest to decode the pricing puzzle of the market. Equipped with two Custom Statuses and one view to handle pricing analysis tasks, this template lets you dive into your key competitors’ products, sales, and marketing strategies, paving the way to claim your slice of the market pie. 🥧
Let’s say you’re determined to optimize the pricing strategy of your new accounting software for maximum profitability. In this case, you can leverage the template to analyze internal and external factors like:
- What pricing model is most successful among your competitors?
- Is there a history of certain promotion policies boosting sales for a competitor?
- Do customers bear significant costs in switching providers for accounting tools?
You can create copies of this template to closely monitor the pricing structures, special offers, and subscription plans of different competitors. This helps you adjust your own pricing strategy, ensuring you remain competitive while achieving your financial goals.
The template includes multiple columns to swiftly compare prices and pinpoint any disparities or opportunities for adjustment. Color-coding facilitates distinguishing different sections, products, or competitors, offering an easy-to-follow view of the market’s ebb and flow.
6. ClickUp Product Positioning Template
Product positioning is a complex puzzle that requires synergy between various teams, from project and product management to marketing and design. With so many departments contributing, it can be challenging to avoid confusion and misunderstandings. The ClickUp Product Positioning Template comes to the rescue, bringing your teams together and helping create a unified front.
This product management template offers three valuable views to assess your competitive position in the market. The first is the Product Positioning Assessment view, where you fill in market research and branding data like the product’s name, launch date, description, market segment, pain points, and unique selling points.
Once your team has filled out the details, all the information flows seamlessly into the Product List view, perfect for handling multiple product positioning processes concurrently. Here, you can review the timeline of tasks related to the marketing process. Use ClickUp tasks to assign duties to specific team members and set priorities and due dates. Organize tasks by status: Planning, In Progress, and On Hold.
Finally, the template offers the Product Positioning Map view on a Whiteboard. This graph illustrates your product’s value for money compared to competitors in the market. The x-axis represents cost, while the y-axis represents quality. Generally, the market leans toward products offering higher quality relative to cost.
7. ClickUp Competitor Tracking Template
The ClickUp Competitor Tracking Template serves as your knowledge repository where you can compile all details about your competitors, from their identities to the products they offer, their target customer base, features, marketing strategies, and more. This information is a goldmine for understanding your competitive landscape and anticipating potential future risks. 🪙
The template is ideal for tracking competitors with large product portfolios. For example, if you’re in the electronics industry, you can keep tabs on the competitive forces for individual products, such as smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, and tablet devices.
The default All Products List view provides an overview of all competitor products grouped by their release year. This segmented approach offers a fine-grained understanding of how your competitors have evolved their product offerings over time. And the beauty of it is that you can easily add more Custom Fields like Unit Price, Product Rating, Features, and Product Type to gain deeper insights into your competition as your tracking needs intensify.
The benefits don’t stop here! You can create customizable Kanban Board views (for example, the Smartphone, Laptop, or Smartwatch view) to evaluate specific products, filtered by Product Type and grouped by Company.
So, whether you’re planning upcoming products or simply staying vigilant in the marketplace, this template is your indispensable ally, offering a comprehensive and organized approach to outsmarting your rivals!
8. Word Porter’s 5 Forces Analysis Template by Custom-Writing.org
Looking to craft a stunning competitor analysis report online? The Porter’s 5 Forces Word Template by Custom-Writing.org is what you need. It’s incredibly user-friendly, with an interface that makes your analysis process a breeze. Plus, it’s fully customizable, allowing you to choose from a range of layouts and color schemes, ensuring your report matches your unique style and brand. 🖌️
Like ClickUp templates, this one is an online document. No more cluttering your device with downloads—access and work on your analysis from anywhere!
To use the template, you first need to fill out an online form containing details about your Porter’s 5 Forces analysis. Here’s what the process looks like:
- Complete the designated input boxes for each competitive factor
- Select a layout
- Download the final result in your preferred file format
9. Word Porter’s 5 Forces Analysis Template by TCCTrainingandConsulting
The Word Porter’s 5 Forces Analysis Template by TCCTrainingandConsulting is a structured two-page document designed with clarity and practicality in mind. Once you’ve conducted your competitive analysis, just download this template in Docs or PDF format and make edits as needed. 🖍️
The template contains five tabled sections representing each element of the 5 Forces analysis. The tables are further split into the following three columns:
- Who: Helps you identify the relevant entities
- What: Outlines factors or conditions that influence the respective force
- How Likely: Encourages you to assess the probability or impact of the identified factors
The template’s minimalistic approach may appeal to many users but might not support overcomplicated competitive models.
10. Slides Porter’s Five Forces Analysis Template by SlideEgg
The Slides Porter’s Five Forces Template by SlideEgg is your ticket to crafting presentations that convey your message with clarity and a touch of flair.
This template is your artistic canvas, offering full customization with options for both 16:9 and 4:3 formats. Its vibrant design adds a splash of color to your content, making it visually engaging. 🎨
The template’s creative infographic designs and drag-and-drop image placeholders are like puzzle pieces that effortlessly fall into place as you build your competitive strategy. It’s a harmonious companion, compatible with PowerPoint and Google Slides, giving you creative freedom as you share the template with your stakeholders.
Solidify Your Market Hold with Porter’s 5 Forces Model
An ideal market is one where healthy competition rules supreme, allowing every player to secure reasonable profit margins. But we don’t live in one, which makes market analysis exercises a strategic imperative.
The templates we discussed can be your compass for dissecting product dynamics, harnessing strengths, and staying one step ahead in a cutthroat market. You can find 1,000 other ClickUp templates designed to elevate your business in a multitude of ways! 🤩
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