Week 1, you've learned about the importance of customer value for assessing and designing competitive strategy. I stressed the fact that customers differ in how they assess value. That is the benefits and costs they receive are relevant to them. And how high or low these are. Now let's add a layer of complexity. No organization and no customer acts in a single contained environment. That is customers for example, we look at your competitors offerings, assess how technologies are developing. And whether to hold off purchase. Or whether their income is likely to go up or down. Therefore, for both you and your organization, thinking strategically and being competitive requires you to take many external factors into account, not only the customer. So in terms of the overall course framework introduced in Week 1, we look at the external strategy context. When looking at market needs and market conditions, you need to look at some important strategic factors when developing your competitive strategy. Market needs and conditions can be thought of as layers around organization. With the outer layer making up the macro environment, middle layer making up the industry or sector. And the inner layer strategic groups and market segments. However, understanding your environment is not an easy task. This is because most business environments are turbulent, complex, global, uncertain, ambiguous, and incomplete. To enable you to assess these different layers of the environment your organization is in over the next two weeks, we will discuss customer analysis. Competitor and industry analysis, as well as macro-environmental analysis. We start this week by looking at the inner layer of this framework. Our focus this week is on knowing your customer. As this forms the basis of competitive strategy. And as the term competitive strategy implies, you also need to know your competition. Let's get started. [MUSIC]