How well does our system work? You can use the numerical index to check our blogs from the last big recession.
Much of the world suffered a severe recession from 2008 to 2011. During that time, we wrote more than 250 blogs using publicly available information and our Strategystreet system to project what would happen in various companies and industries who were living in those hostile environments. In 2022, we began to update each of these blogs to see what later took place and to check the quality of our conclusions. To date, we have completed the first 175 of our original blogs. You can use these updated blogs to see how well the Strategystreet system works.
The telephone industry has had its ups and downs over the last twenty years, but the wireless business has helped it survive nicely. Telephone customers are changing how they buy phone service. For the last several years, customers have been migrating away from land line phones to cell phones. Many of the under-35 set rely exclusively on cell phones for their phone service. The largest telephone companies, including AT&T and Verizon, solved the problem of the lost land line business by buying cell phone carriers and expanding the cell phone business. This move kept their…
Read MoreOver the last year, private label sales of food and other grocery products in the U.S. have grown at over 10% per annum. These private label products are examples of Price Leaders, companies and products who offer performance less than that of the larger, industry-leading, Standard Leaders for a price substantially less than Standard Leaders. Standard Leaders are the companies and the products that are most common in an industry. Standard Leader products make up the majority of the industry’s sales. A Camry and an Accord would be Standard Leader products. The Yaris and the…
Read MoreIn StrategyStreet terminology, a Standard Leader is a company who sells the majority of its products at the most common industry price point. The most common product we call the Standard Leader product. At the high end of the market are those companies who offer products with extra features and services for prices starting about 10% higher than the Standard Leader product. We call those companies, and their products, Performance Leaders. In the personal computer industry, Apple is a Performance Leader; Dell and Hewlett Packard are Standard Leaders. Apple introduced its Mac-Book Air laptop early…
Read MoreNew Price Leader competitors entering a market usually do so under a comfortable price umbrella set by the industry’s Standard Leader competitors. If left unchecked, these competitors can pose significant pricing challenges to the industry leaders. Here is an example of how they start and develop. Nothing to see here… Until there is. Posted 4/2/09 In our terminology, a Price Leader product is a low-end competitor in the market place. It competes against both other Price Leader products and against Standard Leader products, which are the industry leading products. There are two types of Price…
Read MoreHere is the story of an industry about to be disrupted by a Next Leader product. The server market when Cisco entered had attractive growth and predictable, but tough, competition. A few years later, some smaller server competitors began to modify their business models to provide unique Performance and Price benefits to the industry’s Very Large customer segment. That customer segment vaulted these smaller competitors to the industry heights. The original market share leaders in the server market continued to prosper for sound economic reasons. But their market shares have declined markedly. Posted 3/30/09 Cisco…
Read MoreWhen we think of disruptors in an industry (we call these companies Next Leaders), we usually envision an attack from below, the disruptor offering something better for a lower price to a segment of the market. Examples include Amazon, Uber, Netflix and Google in the office suite market. Here is a Next Leader who attacked from above and overwhelmed an industry. Posted 3/19/09 The advertising industry is suffering along with the rest of us. As marketers in all industries retrench and cut costs, advertising agencies are feeling a margin squeeze. They are looking around for…
Read MoreThere is a natural tendency for a successful company to exploit its outstanding reputation by adding an ancillary product to its core product line. It seems that this succeeds only half the time in this industry. The experiences of these competitors in adding a new product have much to tell us about how to make an ancillary product succeed. Posted 3/16/09 The pizza industry is struggling. It has been struggling for some time, well before the recession put its icy grip on the industry’s throat. The costs of pizza ingredients have caused the prices in…
Read MoreManagements who perform very well in one market may stumble badly in another, even if the two markets seem quite similar. Often, poor assumptions cause expensive failures. Here is a story of three such failures and the assumptions that caused them. Posted 3/12/09 Many people in the United States have heard little of Tesco, but it is a great retailer. In fact, it is the fourth largest retailer in the world, following Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Home Depot. Tesco has about 30% of the total grocery sales in the U.K. There it operates with several different…
Read MoreHere is a story that begins with Cinderella holding her slipper and gazing at her prince. In a few short years the story puts Cinderella back in the ash heap. How did that happen? Can she be rescued? If so, how and when? Posted 3/9/09 GM has been a strong performer in the Chinese auto market. But their sales have hit a wall. In 2008, the Chinese automobile market was up 7%, but GM’s automobile sales were down 16%. GM is losing market share to the usual Japanese suspects, Toyota and Honda, who are aggressively…
Read MoreWhat started as a relatively straightforward customer service a generation ago has evolved into three separate businesses. Each business prospers today by focusing on what each of them does uniquely. We use the Customer Buying Hierarchy components to analyze the strengths of each unique business. Posted 2/19/09 I’ve done it. I’m sure you have as well. In fact, virtually everyone has done it at one time or another. What is the “it”? You call for customer assistance or information and you get…India or the Philippines. Both India and the Philippines are fine countries. They both…
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