4 Marketing Competitive Strategies for Businesses
Business Competitive Strategies
Marketing competitive strategies are marketing techniques aimed at making a business thrive better than its competitors when employed. Basically there are 4 marketing competitive strategies for businesses. Most people who own a business or intend to start up one are usually caught up in the puzzle of how to beat their competitors. Some may have a vague idea of a workable strategy but lack an articulate ability to pull it off.
Also Read: What is Marketing? The four elements of Marketing
Business competitors, amongst all other challenges, are probably your most important challenge. Even if you have an excellent business system, if your competitors are doing well, it’s just a matter of time and you’re out of business. Everyone needs that technique that can place them a step or miles ahead of their contenders. For example, a student with parallel A Grades with 98% for each subject still has the possibility to come second position after a student with 99% for each subject, even with his excellent grade. If there was a prize for the first position only, the second student with an excellent grade will miss it anyway.
In this article, I have outlined 4 marketing competitive strategies you will need to consider first before devising a technique against your competition.
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Cost leadership
This type of strategy involves an economies of scale where you purchase goods in bulk from a producer at a discounted rate and sell at a rate much lower than that of your competitors, making it difficult for your competitors to keep up. However, to do this, you will need more business capital than required to start up your business. If you lack sufficient capital, there are other ways to do this.
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Differentiation
This involves developing a unique product or service that is difficult to imitate or replicate by competitors. Through the differentiation strategy, you are steps ahead of your competition simply because you can offer what they cannot. This strategy may require you to embark in intense research and development project to build a unique product or service.
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Low-Cost focus
The Low-Cost strategy is the same as the cost leadership, the only difference is that you will have to shift focus to a particular category of (potential)customers’ in the market. For example, you may decide to sell your goods at a cheaper price in bulk to just university students, or bankers. It involves focusing a price system to a particular market niche.
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Differentiation Focus
The differentiation strategy, like the low-cost focus strategy, also focuses on a specific subset of the market. But instead of marketing a product or service as the cheapest, it’s marketed as being unique in some way. For instance, a company might develop a product that is specifically made for left-handed people. By focusing on a narrow market segment, a company can focus its efforts which may require fewer resources than developing a product for the broad market.
Out of the following 4 marketing competitive strategies, none is more important than the other. They all have their roles to play depending on the type of success your business needs.
