Businesses today operate in a particularly uncertain and changing environment and are confronted with sudden, unexpected and unpredictable changes. Every day there are new needs, demand is expanding and changing, markets are becoming more demanding, the creation of new industries and industrial clusters, competition increases in all sectors, to accelerate research and development cycles, technology is improving and changing, products quickly become obsolete and new ones yet quickly born. Competition is synonym for market race, which may lead to different strategies of market adjustments and innovative entrepreneurial strategies. Competitiveness, and how to be better than others in the market race becomes crucial and in order to survive in the market and achieve the development goals of the company must be flexible, innovative, efficient, productive and continuously improve their business. To be competitive, companies need to create a competitive advantage, as the combination of determinants of their offers that they allow for greater competitiveness, and a competitive advantage over other competitors in the target market and greater opportunities during the conquest of new markets. Competitive advantage is most commonly achieved through innovation, modification and differentiation of products or services, by adapting their characteristics, range and (after) sales service, through customization and differentiation of prices through market segmentation, distribution, promotion and the like. Qualitative characteristics that particular product or service different from your competitors are the basis for developing a competitive advantage, as evidenced by the expressed confidence of customers. Rating competitive advantage of the company is possible by analysis of the benefits within specific market segments and consumers in order to determine the necessary actions to improve the placement (CORE method), or by using the evaluation and analysis of potential firms compared to selected competitors (benchmarking), while SWOT analysis can be applied in both approaches, analysis and measurement. Therefore, this article talks about competition, competition, competitive advantages (skills), analysis of competition and competitive capacities and on benchmarking as a method of analysis of competitiveness.
Authors retain copyright. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 
The statements, opinions and data contained in the journal are solely those of the individual authors and contributors and not of the publisher and the editor(s). We stay neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.