| The Communication Blog

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

By James Scott


In the strategies of war, how does a new regional military power or upstart guerrilla troop solidify their position? They identify their adversaries and eliminated them. How is business any different? The truth is the strategies are identical while the actual elimination process differs. War is fought with bombs and guns, economics is fought by crushing an idea or believe system that perpetuates the money machine behind a company, take away the public believe system based on the concept put out by a company and you've eliminated their ability to survive.

Corporate branding, marketing and all promotion centers around piercing the minds of the public to inject an idea that ultimately triggers them to have an emotional need for your service or product. Few purchase decisions are spontaneous but for those that are it's a matter of putting making something available with the threat of taking it away.

When injecting an idea in the mind of the involuntary recipient it must be like a candy coated indigestible as opposed to a spinal tap entry. Smooth and easy as opposed to painful and forced. Some sugar coatings take on the identity of a comedic TV commercial where laughter is the mechanism used to bypass the critical faculty while a sappy emotional segment may work for others.

The key to obtaining and maintaining one's position is to identify your immediate competition, deal with them and once this is facilitated move on to the next potential threat. For the immediate competitor one elimination strategy that tends to work regardless of industry is to analyze the regional market in which you find a competitor of equal size who is in direct competition with you and then find his localized upstart or micro competitors and via third party strategically align your agenda with their promotional tactics. Help them to collectively and unknowingly pinpoint and weaken specific products and services that pronounce the actual threat to your company. Phase two is to make yourself known to them via this third party introduction and buy equities in these companies and contractually obligate them to use this capital for designated promotional solutions that will grow that regional company. You want this money to be used to infiltrate the region with your services/products and have the new partners go into their established client base with mailers, phone calls and in person sales calls and introduce your company and solutions to them.

Your initial competitor will begin to lose traction (assuming they are a public company) and their stock price will begin to fall, you want to begin buying stock in this competing company but not enough to stimulate or increase the share price. A combination of multiple subsidiary elements ganging up on this one particular company in addition to your firm buying equities in a plummeting stock will deliver to you the control you need in order to remove this entity as an obstacle to your growth.

As the company lessens in market share and comes into a new phase of financial hardship, help the process along by now adding the sell/buy process to damage their stock that much more (obviously, before initiating this phase talk to legal counsel for advice). Now that the stock is at a critical volume and price you can step in and flood the market with the stock that you purchased to send them into 'penny stock' domain, the kiss of death for any company that wants to stay on or eventually qualify for the NASDAQ (don't look at this as losing money, you should see it from the perspective of gaining long term market share) and when the company is close to shutting their doors, you can step in as the savior with investment capital, acquisition proposal or workout a subsidiary type merger.

By this time the company is so weak they have no choice but to accept on of the above options thus, you've accomplished the elimination of a competitor while creating a virtual monopoly in this regional based strategy. There is a template strategy that straddles political and economical situations. The template is the same while it needs to be adapted with a customized process.




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