Competitive Strategies

1 Pages 264 Words

Competitive Strategies

Though unwritten, survival is perhaps the fundamental challenge for a business. With a lot of competitors out there, it’s a dog eat dog world out there. And as they say, eat or be eaten. To survive and stand out, companies should outperform their competitors. There’s a whole lot more to it than merely building satisfactory products. Building customers and focusing on relationship marketing is the challenge.

While it is customary for business to focus on attracting customers, the emphasis nowadays seems to lean towards relationship marketing. This marketing task encompasses creating, maintaining, and enhancing strong relationships with customers and other stakeholders. Beyond designing strategies to gain new customers, companies are making efforts to retain their current customers and build profitable, long-term relationships with them. The key to building lasting relationships is creating superior customer value and satisfaction. This results to customer satisfaction when a company’s performance has fulfilled buyers’ expectations.

To create customer value and satisfaction, and to retain customers, companies must manage their value chains and value-delivery networks in a customer-oriented way. And in order to prepare an effective marketing strategy, a company must consider its competitors as well as its customers. They need to identify their major competitors and assesses their objectives, strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, and reaction patterns in order to develop a strong competitive advantage over them.

I personally agree that determining which competitive marketing strategy to use will depend on the position of the business in the market. A market leader, for example, has to focus on expanding their market, protecting their market share, and expanding their market share....