What are Offensive and Defensive Strategies ??

“Best defense is a good offense”

War or game this saying applies perfectly. Sales or marketing choose your term, its sometimes a war sometimes a game. Imagine a world where no one but you rules! Everything that you touch turns into gold. There is no one but you who can do what you can do. It’s an ideal situation. But in real world there are no ideal situations. Starting from home where you compete with your siblings, to school with your fellow students to work with colleagues to a market with competitors one has to compete everywhere.

The start of competition occurs when companies experience threat and pressure in the market because of other companies and this always results in a counter move. Competition can be programmed either by creating new markets or attacking existing markets. An alternative to this is entering a new market, repositioning or increasing a market share. Hence to keep competition at bay companies adopt new strategies to safeguard their status. One such method in discussion is offensive and defensive strategy.

 

Defensive Strategy

Defensive strategy is a reactive strategy. It is a developed to protect market share, position and profitability. It is a strategy that can be used to keep up top position in local and existing market. An example for this could be if a company highlights its USP and advantages of its products and services to prove its better than competition. This is also done by introducing new products and services in the market which is better than what competition has to offer.

This strategy is predominantly useful for a market which is well established in the market but is merely looking at pushing competition away to hold top position or monopoly in some situations as the case might be. This strategy will never include attracting customer attention for the first time. It is to keep the reputation intact which has been built in the market. This methodology is most successful to keep up the customer’s confidence which no new competitor can disturb.

HOW IS DEFENSIVE STRATEGY USEFUL ?

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction

Newton’s law of motion applies perfectly well in the situation of defensive marketing strategy. Marketing in general is seen as a reaction to particular situation in most cases, and more commonly in defensive marketing. Companies are not threatened until a new product comes into competition in the market. Defensive strategy can be used to weaken competition by using techniques that will capture customer interest.  This strategy comes to life only where there is existence of competition.

Example: A company uses advertising techniques to highlight a specific feature of its product, by doing which the competitor’s product will seem inferior in comparison. One of the best in this category was the MAC vs. PC campaign by apple which highlighted its own features in comparisons to other PCs of DELL and IBM, which obviously put down competition and created a success factor.

Guard your Fort

 

Defensive strategy can be used protect the territory of a market acquired by competitions product. Companies constantly come up with new effects to hold up their position and ward of competition. By using defensive strategy it is possible to stop competition from eating into your market share. Companies often safeguard their boundaries by dropping prices or exceptionally improving product feature which competition can’t provide.

Example:

A typical example of this was the price war between Wal-Mart and Amazon. Wal-Mart marked down the price of its best sellers books. Instantly amazon matched its price followed by Wal-Mart dropping prices once again and every time amazon matched the price Wal-Mart dropped it further

Sharpen your vision

This can be done keeping a constant vigil on what in your own market. This will include a thorough research on the competition capabilities and assumption on how far their efforts can get them.  Keeping a constant tab on competitor’s innovations is a good point of view. Companies place products in competition to what has newly been introduced in the market to slash down other from becoming stronger. This counter move will also require faster flow of information and efficiency to build superior features or technology which would be more professional.

Example:

Companies like apple and Samsung continuously upgrade product technology to keep up their market share so that it is not taken away by competition and each time there is an upgrade more customer buy the upgraded version

Attack, analyze and improves

Companies constantly challenge themselves to analyze their position and rebuild on their strength. This can be done with techniques such as market surveys and deep analysis on why the competitor’s product might be more successful. The drop and increase of sale often leads to a situation where companies start analyzing their position and competitor’s product strength. As a defense plan companies establish something that makes them strongest to revise the situations

Example:

A classic and well noticed example to this was in when Tylenol (Johnson and Johnson product) faced threats from other products in the market for pain relief. Tylenol revamped its entire marketing strategy and pulled up the focus to its best USP which is mildness of the medicine and recaptured its position in the market to a very large extent

Define you empire

Defensive strategy is useful to define your empire exactly to an extent where you can create walls which are unreachable to competition. One should exactly know strength and market position and define strategy in such a way that no competitor can mimic it. A good way to do this would be create patents, copyrights. This will protect the power statement of the product and remain with the company with no possibilities of buy in

Example:

The most common use of this method is found among the biotechnology companies, which offers breakthrough innovations in high demand categories so that competition does not replicate the product.

Benefits of defense strategy:

1.   Retention of market share

2.   Prevention of entry for new opponents

3.   Long term contracts

4.   Intact reputation

5.   Market Leadership