How to Benchmark Your Competitors in South Korea
Competitive Benchmarking in South Korea – Ranking among the most digitally connected countries in the world, South Korea is home to many technologically advanced companies. Sitting at the top of the hierarchy are chaebols, family-owned conglomerates that make up the majority of the country’s economy. With that in mind, standing out as a brand in South Korea isn’t an easy task. Not when existing companies already cover a lot of ground in the market.
Before you double down on a niche or finalize a drastic pricing method, it’s better if your business decisions are backed by measurable data. That’s why if you want to penetrate the South Korean market, you need to learn how to benchmark your competitors.
What is Competitor Benchmarking?
In short, competitor benchmarking means studying your competitors’ strategies, performance, and positioning to understand how your business stacks up against them. Doing this allows you to identify industry trends, gaps you can fill in the market, and fine-tune your offerings to the available demand for better customer engagement.
How to Benchmark Competitors in South Korea
Identify Competitors
There are two main types of competitors in South Korea, direct and indirect. Direct competitors are companies offering similar products or services in your market segment. Indirect competitors, on the other hand, are businesses that target the same customer base but offer different products or services. You can choose to benchmark against competitors of similar size and success as your own, or aim towards a higher standard.
To get a clearer picture of what the current market looks like, you can use Korean search engines like Naver to see which company shows up first when you type your industry keywords. Additional tools like Semrush may help with identifying top-performers. Because Google is not the dominant search engine in South Korea, you can stay updated with brand announcements and industry shifts through Naver News.
Press releases and sales reports can provide you with critical data for competitive benchmarking analysis. These are easy enough to access for public companies, but if you are evaluating a private business, then some investigative work will be required.
Optimize Price Positioning
To not overshoot or undervalue your products and services, use pricing benchmarks based on how much competitors charge for similar offerings. By surveying the market, you’ll know how to properly position your deliverables and catch yourself before setting a price too low.
Don’t stop at store value, pay attention to marketing platforms as well, including ads, websites, landing pages, and emails. Scout local e-commerce sites like Coupang, often called South Korea’s Amazon, to spot the offers being made and how they are framed.
Essentially, it’s important to ask yourself these questions for a more informed pricing decision:
- What are your deliverables usually priced at?
- What kind of discounts are your competitors giving away?
- How much demand is there for the offers being made?
- What are the online reviews like for your competitors?
Compare Customer Experience
Explore how your target consumer base reacts and responds to your competitors. You can skim through publicly available reviews or conduct your own closed-door surveys. Online platforms like Naver Café, Daum Café, and other consumer forums can provide valuable, unfiltered insights.
A pro tip: look at the prevalence of advertising for the competing brand and the techniques that they use. If you have access to direct traffic numbers, that can play a significant role in identifying the amount of brand awareness in your consumer base.
Analyze Performance Gaps
Once you’ve collected data from distinct metrics, it’s time to investigate why your competitors are performing better or worse in each area of operation. From there, you can form a conclusion and plan accordingly for your own company strategy. When it comes to choosing which metrics you want to focus on in your benchmarking, you need to go off what area you want to improve.
List of Top Competitors by Industry in South Korea
Now that you know the steps and metrics to benchmark your competitors in South Korea, here is a list of notable competitors in the market based on their industries.
| Industry | Notable Competitors |
| Agriculture | KG Chemical |
| Automotive | Hyundai Motor Group |
| Electronics | Samsung, LG, Hanwha Techwin |
| Food and Beverage | CJ CheilJedang, Daesang, Nongshim |
| Green Energy | SGC Energy, SK Ecoplant, HLB Life Science |
| Retail | Emart, Lotte, GS Retail |
| Shipbuilding | Hyundai Heavy Industries |
Stand Out in South Korea’s Competitive Market with Double M
In the end, competitive benchmarking informs better decision-making. It provides you with the facts you need to make sound, strategic business choices. Benchmarking can track your company’s progress as it grows over time, and you can use it to measure performance against competitors, along with what steps you need to take to improve.
Competitive benchmarking humbles you; it gives you realistic goals to reach for, but it isn’t a one-and-done thing. Instead, it’s an ongoing journey that can continually provide insights into your company’s growth. Finding your benchmark goes a long way to making you stand out from competitors. It allows you to get ahead of future trends and ensures you adopt the best practices in the market.
South Korea has big-name players in e-commerce, tech, manufacturing, and more. To have a higher chance of penetrating the country’s tough market, Double M is here to help you. With services such as competitor benchmarking, competitive analysis, pricing strategies, and market positioning, we’ll make sure your foreign company finds its stride, even alongside the likes of top competitors. Contact us now and spare your company the difficulty of setting up on its own.