A scan of four to six competitors serving the same buyer, compared on offering, price, reach and positioning, closing with the gap the venture could occupy and evidence it exists. Searches like "busi 4003 week 3 assignment example", "busi4003 week 3 sample" and "busi 4003 week 3 example" land here.
What a finished BUSI 4003 Week 3 market scan looks like
The scan is usually three to five pages with a comparison table at its center. Rows are named competitors, direct ones and the substitutes buyers actually use instead, and columns cover what they sell, the price band, the customers they visibly serve, the channels they market through, and their apparent claim to preference. Cells hold observed facts with a note on where each came from: a price list on a website, a menu of services, a review page, a walk-in visit. Around the table sits prose that reads it, grouping competitors into the positions they occupy and naming the position nobody has taken. A closing passage tests whether that opening is empty because it is valuable or empty because nobody wants it.
How a BUSI 4003 Week 3 example is structured
The scan starts from the buyer rather than from the industry, listing everyone that buyer could plausibly turn to, which is what brings substitutes into the table alongside direct competitors. Each entry is then investigated to a stated depth: public pricing, service list, review themes, visible marketing. Observations get recorded as facts with sources rather than impressions. Grouping follows, sorting the competitors by the position each occupies on the two dimensions that matter most for this buyer, often price against convenience or breadth against specialization. The gap appears from the grouping rather than being announced in advance. The final move is the honest one, asking whether the empty position is a genuine opening or a place other firms already tried and left.
Substitutes belong in the table
The buyer's real alternatives include doing it themselves, asking a relative, using a national app, or leaving the problem unsolved. Scans that list only businesses in the same category miss the option most buyers actually take, and a position argued against the wrong set of rivals will not survive contact with a real market.
Prices come from published sources
Menus, rate pages, quoted starting-at figures, published minimums. Where a competitor hides pricing, that concealment is itself an observation worth recording, since it tells a buyer something and creates an opening for a firm willing to publish. Estimated prices get labeled as estimates with the basis attached.
Reviews are read as evidence
Public review text is the cheapest primary research available, and it answers the question the scan exists to ask. Recurring complaints across one competitor's reviews describe an unserved need in the buyer's own words, and quoting two or three of them with the source cited turns a table of facts into an argument about the gap.
Positions are plotted on two axes
Choosing the two dimensions that matter to this buyer, then placing each competitor on them, does more analytical work than any amount of description. The axes have to be ones buyers actually trade off, which rules out plotting quality against value, since nobody has ever chosen the low end of both.
An empty position gets interrogated
The strongest scans treat a gap as a hypothesis rather than a prize. Nobody offering same-day service to this buyer may mean an opening, or may mean the economics of same-day service in this market do not work. Saying which, and why, is what separates a scan from a wish.
Where marks go in BUSI 4003 Week 3
Coverage is checked first, and a scan listing only obvious direct competitors misses the band because the buyer's real alternatives include doing nothing and doing it themselves. Depth is the heavier band: four competitors researched to the level of prices and review themes outscore ten listed with a sentence each, and readers can tell the difference immediately. Sourcing carries points, applied to specific claims rather than to the document, so an unsourced price is a defect even in an otherwise careful table. The analysis band asks whether the writer drew a conclusion from the comparison, and scans that end at the table forfeit it. A separate mark usually attaches to the gap discussion, and it rewards skepticism about the gap rather than enthusiasm for it.
Get a BUSI 4003 Week 3 example written to your instructions
Drop in the Week 3 prompt with the rubric and a full scan lands in 24 to 48 hours, free on the first pass. Name the market and the buyer already defined, and the competitor set is built around that buyer rather than around an industry code. Comparison table formatted to the columns the prompt sets.
BUSI 4003 Week 3 questions, answered
How many competitors should the scan cover?
Four to six researched properly is the usual sweet spot for an undergraduate scan, unless the prompt sets a number. The count matters less than the mix: at least one direct competitor, at least one substitute the buyer uses instead, and at least one firm serving a different price band, since the comparison only becomes informative when the entries differ.
What if the competitors are all national chains?
Then the scan says so and treats that as a finding, because a market dominated by chains has different openings than a fragmented one. Look for what the chains cannot do at their scale: same-day response, custom work, relationships with named customers. Those constraints are usually where a small venture's position comes from, and instructors read for that reasoning.
Does the scan need primary research?
Most sections accept public information, and public information goes further than people expect: published prices, service menus, review text, job postings that reveal capacity, social accounts that reveal targeting. If your prompt asks for mystery shopping or interviews, that requirement is explicit and the sample can include a short method note describing what was done.