“In the market you’re analyzing, it’s useful to know if there are a lot of small customers or only one or two big ones. Even if the total spending is the same, the dynamic can be quite different. Once you know how concentrated the customers are, you want to compare this to the concentration of suppliers (your client’s competitors, typically). If an enormous discrepancy in concentration exists between customers and suppliers, then whichever is more concentrated tends to have more power in the industry value chain—the link of relationships between raw-goods provider to manufacturer to retailer to consumer. And quite often the most powerful player in an industry’s value chain will benefit economically at the expense of the weakest participants in the value chain.”