Attacking the Leader

1. MARKETING
WARFARE
Attacking the Leader

2. Ground rules
Know your strength and weakness
relative to the market leader.
Estimate the strength of the leader's
position.
Find a weakness in the leader's strength
and attack at that point.

3. Launch the attack on as narrow a front
as possible.
Do not fight head-on with a market
leader unless you have at least three
times its resources.

4. Offensive Strategies
Frontal Attack
Encirclement Attack
Flanking Attack
By pass Attack
Guerrilla Attack
Be the Opposite Attack

5. Frontal Attack
Pure Frontal Attack
The cola giants
have been battling
on all marketing
fronts to dominate
the carbonated
soft drink market.

6. Frontal Attack
Limited Frontal Attack
Nirma exploited the
entry level in
washing power
market, a gap not
addressed by HUL
then.

7. Frontal Attack
Price Based Frontal Attack
Fierce price
war took
place
between
HUL and
P&G

8. Frontal Attack
Research & Design
Ujala dislodged
Robin Blue from its
market leader
position in whitener
segment by
launching a liquid
version of the
product.

9. Flank Attack
Geographical Flanking
Majority of profits come from the
international areas where competition is
not fierce or non existent.

10. Flank Attack
Segmented Flanking
Instead of taking cola giants head on Red bull
decided to focus on energy drink segment.

11. Encirclement Attack
Product Encirclement
Licensed JAVA software to companies and
developers for all sorts of consumer devices. As
the products began to go digital, JAVA started
appearing in a wide range of gadgets.

12. Encirclement Attack
Market Encirclement
By tapping into every distribution
channel for watches, Seiko took over
as much shelf space as possible.

13. Bypass Attack
New Product/Technology
Niche area in telephony services. No competition
from Airtel and Vodafone.

14. Bypass Attack
Diversifying (new geography; product)
ITC diversified
from cigarettes to
FMCG

15. Guerrilla Attack
Jyoti Laboratories in order
to hold on to its share in the
cloth whitener market,
launched mosquito repellant
products to reduce Reckitt
& Benckiser’s focus on
whitener market.

16. Be the Opposite
Dell Computers
became the worlds
largest seller of
personal computers by
choosing a direct
orders through phone
instead of retail stores.

17. Common Attacking methods
Price discounts
Cheaper goods
Prestige goods
Product proliferation
Product innovation
Service innovation
Distribution innovation
Process innovation
Advertising innovation

18. Thank you
Navanitha Krishna G (MS12A045)
Prabakaran S (MS12A056)
Roshini Anna John (MS12A068)
Santosh JK (MS12A075)