Abstract:

To achieve and maintain market dominance, it is necessary to see the market from the consumers’ perspective, to track how that market changes over time, and to understand how you and your competitors are competing for limited consumer interest. In this report, you will observe an interaction between competitors vying for share in a changing market landscape, and you will see how to detect emerging opportunities in a competitive environment. In a previous technical report, we discussed strategies for managing product portfolios and showed that targeting different consumer groups with different products was a critical feature of an effective strategy. In that report we described an approach to portfolio management in which the objective was to maximize the number of first choices your brands collectively receive. A consumer does not consider all the possible products in a category when making a first choice. A consumer purchasing breakfast cereal does not actively consider all available brands but chooses from a consideration set of alternatives. In a successful product portfolio, most consumers will find at least one product from the portfolio in their consideration set.