ABOUT DEFENSIVE MARKETING

What is Defensive Marketing?

DEFENSIVE MARKETING 

Even when it does not launch offensives, the market leader must not leave any major flanks exposed. The aim of defensive strategy is to reduce the probability of attack,divert attacks to less-threatened areas,and lessen their intensity.Speed of response can make an important difference to profit.

A dominant firm can use the six defense strategies :-

• Position Defense:  Position defense means occupying the most desirable market space in consumers’ minds, making the brand almost impregnable, as Procter & Gamble has done with Tide detergent for cleaning, Crest toothpaste for cavity prevention, and Pampers diapers for dryness.

• Flank Defense: The market leader should erect outposts to protect a weak front or support a possible counterattack. Procter & Gamble brands such as Gain and Cheer laundry detergent and Luvs diapers have played strategic offensive and defensive roles.

• Preemptive Defense:  A more aggressive maneuver is to attack first,perhaps with 

guerrilla action across the market—hitting one competitor here, another there—and keeping everyone off balance. Another is to achieve broad market envelopment that signals competitors not to attack. Bank of America’s 18,500 ATMs and 6,100 retail branches nationwide provide steep competition to local and regional banks. Yet another preemptive defense is to introduce a stream of new products and announce them in advance. Such “preannouncements” can signal competitors that they will need to fight to gain market share. If Microsoft announces plans for a new-product development,smaller firms may choose to concentrate their development efforts in other directions to avoid head-to-head competition. Some high-tech firms have been accused of selling “vaporware”—announcing products that miss delivery dates or are never introduced. 

• Counteroffensive Defense:  In a counteroffensive, the market leader can meet the attacker frontally and hit its flank,or launch a pincer movement so it will have to pull back to defend itself. After FedEx watched UPS successfully invade its airborne delivery system, it invested heavily in ground delivery through a series of acquisitions to challenge UPS on its home turf. Another common form of counteroffensive is the exercise of economic or political clout. The leader may try to crush a competitor by subsidizing lower prices for the vulnerable product with revenue from its more profitable products, or it may prematurely announce a product upgrade to prevent customers from buying the competitor’s product.Or the leader may lobby legislators to take political action to inhibit the competition. 

• Mobile Defense:  In mobile defense, the leader stretches its domain over new territories through market broadening and market diversification. Market broadening shifts the company’s focus from the current product to the underlying generic need. Thus, “petroleum” companies such as BP sought to recast themselves as “energy” companies. This change required them to research the oil, coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, and chemical industries.

Market diversification shifts the company’s focus into unrelated industries. When U.S. tobacco companies such as Reynolds and Philip Morris acknowledged the growing curbs on cigarette smoking, instead of defending their market position or looking for cigarette substitutes, they moved quickly into new industries such as beer, liquor, soft drinks, and frozen foods. 

• Contraction Defense:  Sometimes large companies can no longer defend all their territory. In planned contraction (also called strategic withdrawal), they give up weaker markets and reassign resources to stronger ones.Since 2006,Sara Lee has spun off products that accounted for a large percentage of its revenues—including its strong Hanes hosiery brand and global body care and European detergents businesses—to focus on its core food business.