Six Market Dynamics
Six Market Dynamics scans the forces that actually move your market - what customers want, what rivals do, supplier and regulatory pressure, and who might enter or replace you - so a strategy isn't built on only the one force you happen to be worried about this month.
Six spokes radiate outward from your market position, each one a separate force worth checking on its own.
Reach for this when…
- Your strategy debate keeps circling back to 'what will the competition do' and ignoring everything else.
- A regulatory change blindsided you that a wider scan would have caught early.
- You're planning as if today's customer needs and today's competitors are fixed.
How to run it
- Assess customer needs and preferences, and how they're shifting.
- Map competitor actions and likely responses to your moves.
- Gauge supplier power over your costs and supply.
- Rate the threat of new entrants given real barriers to entry.
- Identify substitute products or services customers could switch to.
- Track regulatory influences that could change the rules mid-strategy.
A worked example
Situation. Sophie Gruber ran Mur Elektronik, a small appliance manufacturer in Graz, Austria, whose strategy team had spent a year focused entirely on one large domestic competitor.
Applied. Running the six-force scan surfaced two things nobody had tracked: a new import tariff working through parliament, and a cheaper substitute technology gaining share in a market they'd assumed was theirs.
Result. They lobbied early on the tariff and brought forward their own version of the substitute technology. The competitor they'd been watching turned out to be the least of their problems that year.
The catch
Six factors invite a tidy checklist mentality, and a scan filled in once a year goes stale fast in a market that moves monthly. It also treats each force as separate when in practice they interact - a regulatory change often creates the opening a new entrant needed.
The force you're not tracking is usually the one that gets you, not the one you've been watching all along.
Origin: Not a single named framework - extends Michael Porter's Five Forces (1979) by reframing buyer power as customer needs and preferences, and adding regulatory influence as a sixth force.