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.
A company selling exclusively high-end, Performance Leader, products offering Low-End Products with discounts sometimes exceeding 50% seems like a contradiction in terms. Sometimes it works. It has to be managed very carefully so that there is virtually no overlap between the customers of the two separate product categories. Here is how some distinctly high-end companies have pulled it off. Posted 5/12/08 Even high-end brands can offer lower-end products. We call the high-end companies and products Performance Leaders. These companies and products offer better performance than the Standard Leader products in an industry for prices starting at least…
Read MoreCan a relatively small competitor, positioned well behind the industry leaders, both grow and prosper in an industry? This competitor has succeeded…with considerable help from its much larger industry leaders. However, we have found several companies who have succeeded well in the industries where they are clearly followers. We cite these companies in our 2025 update to this blog. Posted 5/5/08 Heico Corporation is a Predator, a low end competitor. In our research, we have found that there are four types of low-end competitors. They differ from one another in the benefits they offer,…
Read MorePosted 5/1/08 Low-end competitors don’t think like industry Standard Leaders. As a result, they often blow big holes in the leader’s plans. For twenty-five years, from the early 70s until the late 90s, the color television manufacturing market was one of the worst places on Earth to compete. Those companies who did survive, and there weren’t many, became hard-bitten competitors with no illusions about the inevitability of success of even the largest companies. The two largest U.S. competitors, RCA and Zenith, are now nearly-forgotten names. GE was another titan victim of the inexorable pressure of…
Read MoreWhen does it pay for a Low-End, Price Leader, company to skip over the Standard Leader Price Point and introduce its own Performance Leader product? It does not happen often. It did happen here under some special circumstances, especially under the benign neglect of the industry’s much larger and more powerful Standard Leaders. Posted 4/21/08 One of your competitors may be a low-end player today. If that competitor stays at the low end, the likelihood is that its share of the market will not exceed 15%, even if it is quite successful. However, that…
Read MorePosted April 2008 14-Garmin Tail Wags the Dog Garmin is having big trouble these days. As one of the leaders in the personal-navigational device business, Garmin is besieged by much larger competitors from an adjacent industry. In particular, the cell phone hand set makers are doing the same thing to GPS functions that they did to the PDA market a few years ago. They are turning GPS into one of the functions on smart phones. In 2007, 18% of mobile phones already had the GPS function embedded in them. That percentage may double within a couple of years.…
Read MoreIn 2008, the combination of GM, Ford and Chrysler held about 50% of the US domestic automobile market. However, they each had been losing market share for 10 years. Can they reverse this market share loss? If so, how? 13-Toyota’s Good News/Bad News Story Posted 4/17/08 The North American auto market has turned ugly. Normally, analysts expect the industry to sell about sixteen million vehicles a year, about what we sold in 2007. We seem to be on track to sell around fifteen million in 2008. Today GM, Ford and Chrysler are all losing money…
Read MorePosted 4/14/08 Google has entered Microsoft’s most treasured domain, the office suite. Google offers its Apps for free. Using these Apps, a consumer may prepare basic reports and spreadsheets. Google claims two advantages over Microsoft with its Apps product: it operates on the internet, and it is free or very inexpensive in its premium version. So, what might be the outlook be for both Google and Microsoft? Microsoft has to worry, but not too much at this stage of the game. Over the last few years, we have analyzed several hundred low-end competitors entering…
Read MorePosted 4/7/08 10-The Company Did Not Get an Invitation Remember the grade school experience when you learned of a party to which you did not receive an invitation? For most of us, that was a hurtful experience. But the failure to receive an invitation can cost real money in the business world, both now and in the future. In our research, we have found that there are two sources of failure when a new piece of business becomes available. The first is an invitation failure. A company did not get invited to bid. The second is evaluation failure. A…
Read MorePosted 4/3/08 Delta recently announced that it was trimming its domestic capacity and shifting that capacity to international flights. It will cut its domestic capacity by about 5%, which will bring its capacity in August of 2008 to a level 10% below that of one year earlier. United Airlines did something similar earlier in the year. In the short term, this will help these two legacy airlines’ margins because international passengers pay more per available seat mile than do domestic passengers. In the long term, the benefits are considerably less clear because of the encouragement…
Read MorePosted 3/24/08 Bear Stearns is gone. The explanation is in my old neighborhood. Recently I had the time to visit my old neighborhood in New York, a typical set of brownstones on the upper east side of Manhattan. I lived there for two years nearly forty years ago. When I returned there, I entered a sort of time warp. Most of the buildings looked the same. The streets looked the same. The cars, if I ignore make and slightly smaller shapes, looked very similar. The laundromat I used still resides on the corner. Across the…
Read More