Attacking the market leader tool

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Question - How do I compete with the market leader?

Answer - Unless you have infinitely more resources than the market leader, our advice is not to attack him head-on; rather discover a new way to define your proposition which turns the whole structure of the market upside-down

Key points

This tool is designed to contribute towards the second phase of our "Business Standout" process, called TOP.

In the Phase 1: CA$H process, you are invited to answer the fundamental question: "Do we have a strong proposition we only need to exploit more, or do we have a weak proposition that needs to be improved?"

If your proposition is strong, you need to focus on your deliverability. If it is weak, this is where this tool fits in.

In more detail….

There are a number of tools we have developed to take you through the Phase 2: TOP process.

You can build your optimal proposition from the ground up, using our Brand Definition Workshop; or you can use the Brand Overlap process to identify how similar your proposition is to everyone else's and where your weak points are; or there is the Star Signs process to enrich your proposition by making it livelier, more ambitious and more compelling; there are our two Understanding Customers processes - role play and laddering; and finally our Brand Proposition Optimisation process, which is a research-based tool to help you understand the current brandscape and who owns the critical issues for the customer.

Our recommendation is that for the TOP process you use these tools in sequence:

1. the Market Segmentation tools to define the target customers upon which you wish to focus

2. the Understanding Customers tools to explore customer needs

3. the Brand Definition Workshop to help you identify the current brand propositions and start to develop / improve your own

4. the Brand Proposition Optimisation process to measure where you are and to identify who owns the high ground

5. the Brand Overlap process to look for proposition redundancies and gaps

6. the Attacking the Market Leader process to generate some exciting radical ideas about how you could develop a truly market-seizing proposition

7. the Star Signs process to add the final creatively compelling touches

So, the background to the Attacking the Market Leader tool is that you really want to go after a big chunk of the market with a fresh and compelling proposition, and that you are up against a tough market/brand leader whereby head-on attack would be futile. The tool takes you through a series of short exercises to explore current thinking, then challenges you to come up with something radically different.

To view our time-honoured "Attacking the Market Leader" article on the MV site, click here.

© 2008, Mud Valley ™ brand marketing community.

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