BUSI 4003 Week 3 Competitor Market Scan Example

Five Places an Asheville Newcomer Could Learn Pottery and the Hours None of Them Use: A Market Scan of Offerings, Prices, Reach and Positioning That Finds a Weekday Midday Gap and Checks Whether Anyone Is Asking for It

Student Name

Walden University

BUSI 4003: Marketing Strategies for Small Business

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Five Places an Asheville Newcomer Could Learn Pottery and the Hours None of Them Use: A Market Scan of Offerings, Prices, Reach and Positioning That Finds a Weekday Midday Gap and Checks Whether Anyone Is Asking for It

What the Scan Covers

This scan looks at the businesses that already serve the buyer defined in the previous assignment: a remote worker in her thirties, new to Asheville, looking for a hands-on activity and a regular group. For Riverbend Clay Studio (composite; eight wheels on the city's west side), the scan covers five competitors within a twenty-minute drive that offer clay or ceramics experiences. Climbing gyms, choirs and running clubs compete for the same buyer's time and are noted at the end, but the table compares clay offerings directly. I gathered the information from each competitor's website and social media, two phone calls and one visit, in January 2028. No competitor is named; each is identified by what kind of business it is.

The Competitors Compared

Table 1

Clay and Ceramics Offerings Within Twenty Minutes of West Asheville

Composite descriptions based on public listings; no competitor is named. Riverbend Clay Studio is composite.

What the Competitors Offer and Charge

Prices for a beginner wheel course cluster between $240 and $295 for six to eight weeks, with the college course cheaper but tied to the semester calendar. Riverbend's $260 course sits in the middle. Price, then, is not where the studio can stand out.

Every studio that teaches the wheel schedules its beginner classes in the evening or on weekends. The downtown studio told me its evening courses fill weeks in advance, with a waitlist of about twenty people each session.

Whom They Reach

The downtown studio reaches visitors and committed hobbyists through a large social media following. The art center and the college reach people who read printed catalogs, often older residents. The paint-your-own shop reaches families. The studio north of town relies on word of mouth among people who already know it. None of them advertises at coworking spaces or in neighborhood newsletters aimed at newcomers.

What They Ignore

None of the five offers wheel instruction on weekday days. Between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, the only clay activity available is glazing at the paint-your-own shop. That is precisely when the buyer profiled last week has free time. The competitors' schedules make sense for their customers, who work office hours, but they leave remote workers with nothing between their morning calls and their evenings.

Evidence That the Gap Holds Demand

A gap can be empty because nobody wants to fill it. Three pieces of evidence suggest this one is not. First, Riverbend's inquiry log for September through December 2027 records 41 messages asking whether the studio offers daytime classes, nearly a fifth of all inquiries. Second, the manager of the largest coworking space in West Asheville told me about 350 people hold memberships, most of them remote workers, and that members regularly ask the front desk for lunchtime activities. Third, the American Community Survey estimates that about 17.6 percent of Buncombe County workers work from home (U.S. Census Bureau, 2025), a share large enough to support a small daytime program.

None of this proves that people will pay. Inquiries are cheap, and a coworking manager's impression is not a count. The positioning and channel work that follows should be tested with a short daytime pilot before the studio rearranges its schedule.

How Competitors Could Respond

If midday classes succeed, competitors could add their own. The downtown studio is the most likely to try, since it already has a waitlist and more wheels. Two things make a quick response less likely than it looks. Its instructors also teach the evening sessions, so a daytime class would require new staff or a schedule change. And its customers are evening hobbyists and visitors, so a midday class would sit outside its usual marketing. Riverbend's advantage would last a season or two, long enough to build a group of regulars who are unlikely to move for the sake of a slightly different time.

Other Competitors for the Same Hours

The buyer could spend her midday break at a climbing gym, which offers daytime hours and a social scene, or simply walking. Those alternatives set the bar: a daytime pottery class must offer something a lunchtime climb does not, most likely a calmer, smaller group and something to take home. Kotler and Keller (2022) describe competition as including every alternative a customer might choose, not only similar products, and the climbing gym is the alternative the studio's message must answer.

Sharp (2010) argues that small brands grow by reaching more buyers, which for Riverbend means reaching people its competitors never try to reach rather than winning customers away from them. The weekday midday hours are where those people are free.

References

Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2022). Marketing management (16th ed.). Pearson.

Sharp, B. (2010). How brands grow: What marketers don't know. Oxford University Press.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2025). American Community Survey 5-year estimates, 2020-2024: Tables B01001 and B08301, Buncombe County, North Carolina [Data set]. https://data.census.gov/