Competitive Strategies Marketing Reading

Core Curriculum Readings in Marketing cover the fundamental concepts, theories, and frameworks that business students must study.
This Reading illuminates the dynamics of companies in competition and offers a process for planning and executing marketing strategies to compete in a rapidly changing marketplace. It will also enable marketers to make decisions that account for competitors' likely responses. The Reading delineates processes for understanding the opportunities and challenges of competitive play, providing guidance for choosing contexts that enable success while avoiding those in which profitability will be elusive. It then examines how marketers can create opportunities by alleviating constraining competitive forces and by opening up new ways to compete that are more conducive to growth. The Reading concludes with insights into how consumers respond to marketplace competition and examines how companies can frame competitive games to their advantage in brand positioning and marketing communications.
This Reading includes an Interactive Illustration that explains how the prisoner's dilemma theory applies to pricing issues in industries with two dominant competitors (Pepsi and Coke). It also includes 3 video clips: (1) "The Two Choices to Make in Strategy," which distills strategy into two basic questions: "Where will you play?" and "How will you win there?"; (2) "Marketing Myopia," an animation presenting Theodore Levitt's concept of marketing myopia and identifying ways to avoid it; and (3) "Porter's Six Forces," which explains the key elements of Michael Porter's strategy model.