Building Competitive marketing strategies

Achieving Competitive Advantage

Having identified and evaluated your major competitors provides great insights about the nature of the competition. Or better; Access to the aggregated industry statistics on Webalue.com, gives an even better understanding of how competition is performing.

A brand must now design wider competitive marketing strategies that best position its offer against competitors’ offers and give the company the sustainable competitive advantage. Access to priceless competition research is very insightful, but how does a brand implement competitive marketing strategies? Well, we reckon there isn’t any strategy that could be universally applicable and every brand must determine what strategy suits them based on their position in the industry and its objectives, opportunities and resources.

The Three Competitive Strategies

Michael Porter, considered by many the worlds’ foremost authority on competition and strategy, once suggested 3 winning strategies to combat competition and achieve a competitive advantage.

Cost leadership: This strategy entails a company to work hard to achieve lowest costs of production and distribution to ultimately pass it on to the customer with lower prices. This could be achieved through economies of scale.

Differentiation: In this strategy a company concentrates on creating a highly differentiated product line and marketing program so that it comes across as the class leader in the industry. Most customers would trust and prefer to own this brand if the price of the products or service is not too high.

Focus: Here a company, instead of appealing to the entire wide open market, concentrates its efforts on a few segments. The concept of segmenting the market and showcasing the product attributes to the target market helps gain a dominating share of the focussed market.

Michael Porter, concludes stating that the companies that pursue a clear strategy, one of the above mentioned, are likely to perform well. Using insights from Brand analytics allow better decision making and developing a better and clearer strategy simply because managers know more about the industry.