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.
For years, Chico’s FAS grew rapidly by selling attractively priced, colorful clothes, to baby-boomer women. But the company began to stumble in 2006. Its growth rate slowed and its core customers migrated to other companies’ offerings. The company’s costs rose faster than its revenues, squeezing margins. The company stumbled by chasing after customers of other competitors, especially younger women. From the standpoint of their original core customers, baby-boomer women, Chico’s failed to deliver the products that they had come to expect from Chico’s. (See the Perspective, “Reliability: The Hard Road to Sustainable Advantage” on StrategyStreet.com.)…
Read MoreNo matter the rate of growth in a market, the key growth measures to watch are those of the various Price Points. Here is an example. The U.K., as the U.S., is in a recession. As a result of tougher times, customers are trading down their purchases in retail stores, including grocery stores. A beneficiary of this trade-down in the U.K. is the supermarket chain, J. Sainsbury PLC. Sainsbury is the U.K.’s third largest food retailer. It picked up customers from some of its more upscale grocery competitors. Sainsbury has three lines, or Price Points,…
Read MoreOver the years, Schwab has revealed itself to be a remarkable source of innovation. Here is one innovation that has succeeded for Schwab because it streamlined its participation in the business. It redefined the business of credit cards and how that business fit with its primary business. It made some changes and received the award of a more profitable and cost-effective innovation. Posted 12/18/08 Charles Schwab Corporation is introducing the Schwab Bank Invest First Visa Signature credit card. This no-annual-fee card offers an unusual set of benefits. First, it returns a 2% cash rebate…
Read MoreWhen a company has successful assets to manage and grow, it is difficult in the extreme to think like a customer rather than as an owner of attractive and expensive assets. Unfortunately for the business, but fortunately for customers, innovators have to think like customers in order to create successful new products. This blog tells the story of an entirely new product that took down a dominant industry leader in just a couple of years. This new product clearly outperformed the industry leader’s product on all four dimensions of the Customer Buying Hierarchy. Lights out…
Read MoreIt is not common for a competitor who sells less than half the total units of the market leader to outcompete that leader for several years. It takes an unusual failure by the market leader to open the door for that to happen. However, once that door is open, the smaller company must clearly outperform in order to gain the share that the leader surrenders. Here is an example of how that happens. Posted 12/8/08 Over the years, we have studied several thousand customer buying decisions. We concluded from these studies that customers buy in…
Read MorePosted 12/1/08 I was struck by a recent article about statins. A recent study has found that these cholesterol lowering drugs reduce the heart risk in even healthy patients. That fact was not what struck me, though. What jumped out at me was the size of the market share for generic statins. The generics in the statin market make up 49% of total prescriptions. The well-known Lipitor is the leading branded statin, at 27%, followed by Crestor at 9%, Vytorin at 7%, and Zetia at 6%. But the generics dominate all of those branded…
Read MoreWhen you see a dominant industry leader struggle or fail, most of the time the fault lies with a change in formerly successful company policies. These new policies usually damage the Reliability of the leader’s relationship with its most important customers. We have seen the same thing before in other blogs. This blog illustrates this unfortunate principle. Posted 11/17/08 Nike, ever the innovator, has found a new way to build brand loyalty. It has created a web site, NikePlus.com, that connects runners around the world. This web site tracks a runner’s data and allows a…
Read MoreVery large, established industries change slowly. This pace of change allows competing companies to adjust to those competitors making effective strategic moves… If they want to do so. Here is an industry where relatively new competitors continue to march up to the top ranks of the industry. Everyone can see them coming. But no one seems to be able or willing to slow them down. The Blog tells the story of the last 17 years. Posted 11/10/08 Consumer Reports recently had a load of bad news for the domestic auto manufacturers. The big car…
Read MoreHere is a consumer product that was a dismal failure for both the producer and the customer. Surprisingly, it did not go away. Instead, it found a home in the larger business market. There are simple and clear reasons why the product failed with consumers and why it was so successful with enterprises. The consumer product failed on each of the four aspects of the Customer Buying Hierarchy but succeeded brilliantly on all four aspects in the enterprise market. The product turned out to be a win – win, just to not where the carriers…
Read MoreFor a number of years, many of us have seen Macy’s as the prime representative of the “traditional” retail market for apparel and home goods. They may be traditional, but they are far from the market leader. Instead, market leadership resides with companies once considered price discounters. The “traditional” retailers have surrendered pride of place to far larger and more aggressive competitors. This change happened over a number of years. Here is how some of that change took place over the last 10 years. Posted 11/3/08 Kohl’s Corporation is opening forty-six stores soon as…
Read More