From my personal experiences as a marketing student and practitioner, I realized that most textbooks are awash with examples that are sometimes difficult for students to grasp. Marketing as a course is clearly related to our ‘day-to-day’ activities and it should be as practical as possible and full of fun.
This article seeks to explain a few marketing-related strategies with illustrations from the Ghanaian corporate environment. It has been written based on personal observations from afar and may not necessarily reflect the strategic intent of the organizations used in the illustration.
What is Marketing?
There are various definitions of marketing but the essence of marketing is the delivery of customer-centric solutions to maximize the achievement of organizational goals. Every organization exists to offer some form of solution to its target market and those solutions can be in the form of products or services. Those solutions should be ‘customer-centric’ in the sense that they should be developed from the perspective of the consumer. Organizations should be able to put themselves in the shoes of their target audience so that they will be able to satisfy the customer’s needs adequately!
Every organization has a goal, be it profit or non-profit, but marketing should seek to maximize the achievement of those goals through a clear identification of customer needs, a detailed assessment of organizational competences/capabilities and detailed analysis of the external environment to identify the strengths and weaknesses within the organization and the opportunities and threats inherent in the external environment.
Marketers should then devise strategies to help the organization to improve its internal weakness and use its identified strengths to exploit the opportunities in the external environment and minimize external threats. Some of the marketing-related strategies that will be discussed include; position-based competitor strategies, Porter’s competitive strategies, branding strategies and Ansoff’s Growth Strategies.
Competitor Strategies
Position-based competitor strategies originated from military strategies, and they are strategies that organizations can deploy to fight their competitors. The type of strategy the players deploy depends on their market position/market share. Theoretically, players in the industry are classified as Market leaders, challengers, followers and Nichers with 40%, 30%, 20% and 10% market shares respectively. Practically, some of the strategies may not necessarily be applicable within a particular context and may also not be the exclusive preserve of players with certain market shares. Some of the competitor strategies that will be discussed include; Frontal attack, flank defense, encirclement attack and bypass attack.
Flank defense and flank attack
The focus of a flank defense or attack is for the company to protect its flanks (weakness) or attack a competitor’s flanks. Within the radio broadcast industry, the Multimedia Group has been able to deploy a flank defense and an encirclement attack effectively. The liberalization of the airwaves by the National communications authority in 1994 resulted in the proliferation of various privately owned frequency-modulated radio stations in the country. What can be termed the mad-dash to “tune in” started in 1995 with the introduction of Joy Fm and subsequently Radio Gold. The FM stations broadcasted only in English and were deemed to be only for the educated Ghanaian. The non-English speaking Ghanaian felt alienated as all the programmes including the news broadcasts were in the English medium.
Peace Fm blazed the trail in 1999, when it was established as an Akan-speaking radio station. It generated euphoria amongst the Akan Speaking segment of Accra’s population and made it the most widely tuned-in radio station. The educated Ghanaian who hitherto was perceived as averse to local language programming also started tuning-in and thus Peace Fm started chirping at the market share of Joy Fm and Radio Gold. The success of Peace FM transformed the broadcasting style of the radio stations and opened the floodgates for other stations to broadcast in the local language. As various local content radio stations sprung up, it became relatively difficult for the likes of Joy Fm to increase their market share.
Frontal attack and Flank defense
Joy Fm was faced with a dilemma as to how to compete head-on with Peace Fm. Joy Fm couldn’t introduce local content as that will tend to distort its brand positioning and lead to confused positioning and brand dilution. The Multimedia Group strategically acquired Adom Fm (a local content radio station), and used it to pursue two basic competitor strategies; Frontal attack and Flank defense.
The acquisition of Adom Fm offered Multimedia Group the luxury of competing head-on with Peace Fm (Frontal Attack) without any effect on the group’s premier brand (Joy Fm) since Adom Fm operated as a distinct brand independent of Joy Fm.
The second was a flank defense as it enabled Joy Fm to defend its weakness of not being able to compete directly for the huge local language market. It also prevented these local language broadcasters from chirping away its market share and revenue.
Encirclement attack
Finally, the Multimedia group launched an encirclement attack by launching various brands into the radio broadcasting market to cater for various segments of the market. For example, they launched Hitz FM for the music loving youth and Asempa Fm for Sports loving fans. These multi-media brands help them to compete more effectively with the likes of Happy Fm.
Bypass strategy
A bypass strategy involves using superior technology to leapfrog a competitor or serving markets that competitors are currently not serving. A classic example within the Ghanaian corporate environment is the “analogue-digital” saga in the telecommunications industry. Mobitel (now AirtelTigo) was the innovator in the mobile telecommunications market but it entered the market with analogue technology. At the time, it enjoyed a first mover advantage with Ghanaians using the brand name “Mobitel” as the generic name for mobile phones.
However, the limitation of analogue technology was that the telephone line was embedded with the phone and consumers did not have the option of swapping their phones easily.
Spacefon (now MTN) entered the market with digital technology by providing sim cards embedded with telephone numbers. The sim card therefore made it possible for consumers to swap phones easily by just removing and inserting the chips in any phone of their choice. That technology and other factors drove MTN to overtake Mobitel as the market leader; a position it has defended tenaciously for many years.