what are marketing strategies

what are marketing strategies The marketing concep

The marketing concept of building an organization around the profitable satisfaction of customer needs has helped firms to achieve success in high-growth, moderately competitive markets. However, to be successful in markets in which economic growth has leveled and in which there exist many competitors who follow the marketing concept, a well-developed marketing strategy is required. Such a strategy considers a portfolio of products and takes into account the anticipated moves of competitors in the market.

The Case of Barco

In late 1989, Barco N.V.'s projection systems division was faced with Sony's surprise introduction of a better graphics projector. Barco had been perceived as a leader, introducing high quality products first and targeting a niche market that was willing to pay a higher price. Being a smaller company, Barco could not compete on price, so it traditionally pursued a skimming strategy in the graphics projector market, where it had a 55% market share of the small market. Barco's overall market share for all types of projectors was only 4%.

Even though Barco's market was mainly in graphics projectors, the company had not introduced a new graphics projector in over two years. Instead, it was spending a large portion of its R&D budget on video projector products. However, video projectors were not Barco's market.

Barco's engineers had been working long hours on their new projector that would not be as good as Sony's. Some people thought they should not stop work on that product since the engineers' morale would suffer after being told how important it was to work hard to get the product out. However, even considering the morale of the product team, it would not have been a good idea to introduce a product that was inferior to that of Sony. Barco wisely stopped working on the inferior product and put a major effort in developing a projector that outperformed Sony's.

The Barco case illustrates several marketing strategy concepts:

• Price / Selling Effort Strategies: A firm that follows a skimming strategy seeks to be the first to introduce a product with very good performance, selling it to the innovator market segment and charging a premium price for it. It makes as much profit as possible, then moves on when the competition arrives. The price is likely to fall over time as competition is encountered. Such a skimming strategy contrasts with a penetrating strategy, which seeks to gain market share by sacrificing short-term profits, and increasing the price over time as market share is gained.

• Competitors have certain strengths and abilities. To succeed, a firm must leverage its own unique abilities.

• A firm should prepare defensive strategies before potential threats arrive. If the competition surprises a firm with the introduction of a vastly superior product, the firm should resist the temptation to proceed with its mediocre product. A firm never should introduce a product that is obsolete when it hits the market.

• The competition's probable response to a firm's actions should be considered carefully.

Source : Quickmba Market strat