The Rule of Three: Surviving and Thriving in Competitive Markets by Jagdish Sheth & Rajendra Sisodia

Author:Jagdish Sheth & Rajendra Sisodia [Sheth, Jagdish]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2002-05-13T14:00:00+00:00

Strategies for #1 Companies

Founded over a hundred and twenty years ago, Anheuser-Busch took more than 50 years to become the first nationwide brewer in the United States, a position it attained in 1957. When the company started, the beer industry had only regional and local brewers. Quality control was practically nonexistent. The first company to make beer of consistently high quality, Anheuser-Busch relied on volume production and aggressive pricing to stake out its leadership position, which it has never relinquished. It is now approaching a 50 percent market share in the United States.

The company has been a masterful marketer; indeed, Advertising Age named it the fourth best marketer of the twentieth century. It has had consistently memorable advertising—the advertising for Bud Light has been described as the “gold standard” for beer advertising—and the company has been a pioneer in sports sponsorship and event marketing. Although it does not seek to be an innovator in developing new types of beer, the company moves aggressively when it decides that the market has responded favorably to the innovations of others. When rival Miller Lite was introduced in 1975, Anheuser-Busch responded with Bud Light five years later. While this go-slow approach avoids disasters such as Coors' ill-fated Zima, it can prove costly, and clearly the company will need to pick up the pace a bit! Although #1 companies do not need to be innovators in order to be successful, they must be fast followers.5

This brief overview of the #1 brewer in the United States suggests several of the basic strategies a market leader needs to consider in order to remain at the top of its game. Among these are the following seven:

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