Analysing the market and your competitors will allow you to identify your unique value proposition, simply put what makes you different from all the other players in the market, this will inform you how to best market your brand, product or service and identify areas you can excel past the your competitors by refining your business strategy.
Knowing what your competitors are doing right (and wrong) helps you to identify opportunities in the marketplace as well as keeping pace, and where possible outperforming the competition. This can be through competitive pricing, marketing strategy, feature matching or innovation to name a few.
Research can identify who your competitors are, what services and product they offer, the sales and marketing tactics they use, and arguably most importantly their pricing strategy.