Marketing Strategy: Every battle is won before it is fought


The unicist approach to manage the competitive triangle in business provides the information to define the possibilities of accessing a new market or specifically a new customer or client.

Unicist Competitive TriangleThe ontogenetic map of the competitive triangle has been designed to define the fundamentals to expand the boundaries of the commercial operation of a business. Sun Tzu was right.

To expand the boundaries of a business it is necessary:

  1. To generate an additional added value to the client; this implies innovation.
  2. To develop a value proposition that allows establishing a common space where the goals of the client and the provider are being integrated.
  3. To ensure a meaningful return on investment for the client.

About the competitor

Competitors are substitutes and succedanea delivered by another provider, the client itself or alternatives of the providing company that cannibalize the original value proposition.

It has to be considered that the egos of the participants of the client’s organization are also competitors.

The unicist approach to the competitive triangle generates the perception of apparent paradoxes that can only be apprehended if one is conscious of one’s buying process.

There is no doubt about the fact that the final purpose is to satisfy the clients’ needs.

A market confrontation is won by the one who is able to build a common place where the needs of the client and the value proposition fit in.

But if one considers that the building of a common space requires being complementary with the client, it is self-evident that the provider needs to propose a complementation to the buyer.

The Competitive TriangleTherefore the winner of the “contest” is not the one who is more active but the one who has a better energy conservation function (seen from the client’s point of view).

The competitor is the one who assumes the active function and fosters the installation of solutions that are considered utopian by the buyer. Innovations are not aesthetic in themselves.

There are several inferences that can be done based on the knowledge of this structure:

  1. The selling problem is simple. It just requires following the rules of a minimum strategy. What is complex is the design of a strategy based on actual business intelligence. It is necessary to know precisely which are the needs of the client and the content of the value proposition of the competitor.
  2. Innovations can only be bought if they are understood, reliable and considered necessary to produce a demanded result.
  3. While the clients appear to be looking for the most productive solutions they will buy the safest solution which might or not be the most productive. Even innovators need to rely on solutions.
  4. The competitors are the “catalysts” of the buying process. That is why competition expands markets. The existence of innovative alternative solutions proposed by the company allows building a virtual competitor, if the business is managed based on a value adding ethics. This has to be included in the attributes of the brand.
  5. If there is a virtual competitor there has to be a double action on the market, on the one hand, an innovative maximal strategy and, on the other hand, a complementary minimum strategy.

This implies that to enter a new market a company needs to establish a superior competitive alternative (star product/service) that provides an “umbrella” to the possible and complementary solutions.

The core of this approach is to have accurate business intelligence, including specific SWOT analysis, to define the marketing strategy and selling actions.

Diana Belohlavek

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized world-class research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. http://www.unicist.org

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