Market Challenger

The first step that must be performed by a market challenger is setting strategic goals and choose the right opponent, for this purpose, the company must conduct a systematic analysis of the competition. Strategic target of the most market challengers are: increased market share that brings higher profitability.

Basically, the market challenger can choose one of three types of companies that can be attacked, namely: market leadership, these companies are the same size but less successful and lack of funds, and smaller regional firms.

Choosing an attack strategy. There are five attack strategies can be selected and conducted by market challenger: Frontal Attack. This attack is done by putting all the power to deal face to face with opponents. Its characteristic is attacking the opponent’s strength rather than the weak point.

In this frontal attack, the attacker would compete against his opponent through products, advertising, prices, so if your opponent is not that strong it will be lost. Usually the one who use this strategy is the strong market challenger.

The existing of many business challenges require a company to have the ability to respond quickly and flexibly against every opportunity, outside threat, customers demand, competitors movement, and regulatory changes. To achieve this goal it requires mechanism to provide the right information at the right time and given to the right person so finally it can help to provide faster and better decisions.

To be able to provide the information, then it will need support from the company’s integrated infrastructure, which is able to utilize the IT resources that already exist which also can easily be add with new features and functionality. The infrastructure must be flexible and agile in order to adjust to the changes that occur both on business or IT. Currently, business must have the adaptive and responsive ability in order to be competitive.

Intel, which is known for its Pentium series probably become the most perfect example for this category. The second step is operational excellence oriented (operational excellence). For companies in this category, the most important is to build a super efficient business processes. Hoping that with this efficiency process, they are able to reduce production costs, and finally they will be able to sell their products with competitive prices.

The last step is customer intimacy oriented (intimacy with the customer). For companies in this category, the most important thing is to build an intimate relationship with its customers; hoping that it can create long lasting relationships. Many companies are adopting this step especially that involved in hotel management and flight management in order to build loyalty among their customer.

Of course, there are many companies are also combining different steps, and not just focused on one step only.