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 MoreIn 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 Leader products. They differ from one another in the benefits they offer the user and the buyer of the product. The user and the buyer may be the same person but the activities of each create different needs. The first type of Price Leader, a Stripper product, offers both the user and the buyer of…
Read MoreCisco recently announced that it was entering the server market. Details are sketchy right now, but we might take a brief look at what Cisco needs to do to be successful. We will use the Customer Buying Hierarchy as our analytical tool. A bit of background. Cisco is entering the market for servers in order to increase the amount of the global IT purchase that it is able to address. Cisco claims that today it addresses about 10% of the total annual purchase of IT products. With the introduction of its server product, it believes…
Read MoreThe 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 new services that might distinguish them from their competitors and enable them to gain share in a declining market. Some of these new services are Function innovations. (See the Perspective, “How Customers Buy” on StrategyStreet.com.) A Function, in our terminology, refers to the characteristics of the product that affect the way it is used by the customers. Function innovations are powerful in customer…
Read MoreThe 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 the industry to rise. The industry has always had to struggle with its less-than-healthy reputation. So, for some time, the industry has been losing share to healthier and fresher competition on the one hand, and less pricey hamburger and sandwich competitors on the other. One company, Domino’s, is responding to these challenges by broadening its menu. It is beginning to sell…
Read MoreMany 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 formats and price points. It has been very successful, both in the U.K. and in the several other countries in which it has operated. In late 2007, the company opened its first U.S. stores, called Fresh & Easy. There are now 114 of…
Read MoreGM 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 expanding in China. But the company is also losing market share to the more expensive Audi and BMW models. What is behind this loss of market share? Two reasons seem apparent. First, GM’s problem with potential bankruptcy in the United States has scared away some…
Read MoreI’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 have much to admire. But their ability to speak English clearly to an American listener is, by most accounts, limited. They do speak English, though, and they ask for little in compensation in return. So, many companies have shifted their customer service, especially consumer customer service, offshore…
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