 |
|
|
| The 10 Best Practice Principles of Market
Leadership |
|
Best Practices are programs and activities that help you eliminate costly trial and error, and enable you to make quantum leaps in performance by replacing gradual evolution with rapid results.
Over time, leading business professionals have analyzed why some companies have been able to achieve a position as market leader while others with similar opportunities have not. AlphaBrand Strategies has synthesized the lessons for success and failure and developed a roadmap for increasing success by following The 10 Best Practice Principles of Market Leadership.
1. Select and segment your market
The first rule of successful business is to clearly understand whom you serve, and what they care about. The process of identifying and refining a market segment will drive you to the right decisions on all other aspects of the business—people, processes, tools, investments, and scope of services.
2. Narrow your focus
The essence of marketing is narrowing the focus of your market offering. You become stronger when you focus the scope of your operations and concentrate your resources. To be the leader, in a given market segment, you must find and commit to the unique value that you alone can deliver.
3. Align business activity
There are three key value disciplines that you can decide to pursue: operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy. Your value discipline impacts all aspects of your business. When a company commits to a value discipline and aligns its efforts with one of the three value disciplines, it ceases to resemble its competitors.
4. Claim the alpha position
To realize the benefits afforded to the market leader, it is critical that you brand yourself as such. Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products. Effective branding shortens the purchase cycle, creates competitive barriers, and increases the gap in perceived differentiation.
5. Integrate communications
Key to driving up corporate value is implementing a successful branding strategy and full integration of all market messages. Each contact with market audiences must advance your Unique Value Proposition (UVP).
6. Leverage on-line
Brand is all about the customer experience, and includes how your brand is experienced on-line. A company's web site is a central part of the consumer experience, the place where all aspects of your company—from the annual report to your products, services, and support—intersect.
7. Lock-in strategic partners
Many forces outside of your immediate control impact your success. You need to be tightly focused on your core capabilities and your market segment. Partners extend your reach in terms of markets, scope of services, delivery methods, time to market, and more.
8. Expand the segment
The eighth principle focuses you on being the thought leader and promoting your category for the purpose of expanding your market. Choice stimulates demand, and competition often helps establish the validity of the category and ultimately brings more customers into the marketplace.
9. Drive market share
When you take the long view of marketing, you find the battle usually winds up as a struggle between two major players usually the old reliable brand and the upstart. Only businesses that are No. 1 or No. 2 in their markets can win in the increasingly competitive global arena.
10. Attack synergistic markets
Determining how, when and where to leverage your current position of strength to enter and dominate additional market segments is key to continued growth. Can you leverage the existing brand, or should you create a new brand for a new segment?
For a free consultation on how to apply The 10 Best Practice Principles of Market Leadership in your organization, please call 719.487.7345.
|
|
|
|
|
|
