Whether a company is a market leader, challenger, follower or niche, it has to closely keep an eye on its competitors and what competitive strategy they follow. A company should keep adapting its strategy according to the fast challenging technology oriented environment. Now here the question that arises is how can a company spend its time and energy in tracking competitors and at the same time damaging its customer orientation? The answer is yes! This is possible when a company becomes too competitor centered that it neglects the importance of focusing on its customers and therefore could not maintain a profitable customer relationship.
The concept of competitor centered company comes into significance, when a company engages most of its time in tracking the competitor’s activities, the market share and to find a better implication of strategies to counter them. However, this approach has its own pros and cons. The positive element is where a company acts as a fighter orientation; watch over its weaknesses in their own positioning, and look out for weaknesses of their competitors. On the negative side, the company becomes very reactive. Rather than to work on customer relationship strategy, it directs its shift on the move of its competitors. Consequently, this ends up by simply comparing or expanding industry practices instead of initiating innovative ideas to create more benefits for the customers.
In seeking a competitive advantage and to increase profits, the business leaders and the entrepreneurs focus on revenue growth strategies, new business development methods, cutting edge formulas and new management techniques and most importantly look out for ways to differentiate itself from its competitors. Throughout the whole process, the one thing that is being ignored and overlooked by a competitor centered company is its customers.
A competitive centered company is a type of competitive orientation that explains how a company constantly reassesses its existing strengths and weaknesses relative to its competitors. In order to evaluate the performance, it involves the production efficiency, pricing, customer satisfaction, innovation and the market share. In any economic system, each economic unit is attempting to generate maximum advantages for itself at the cost of its competitors. For instance, companies take analysis of competitors very seriously that deals with the wholesalers, retailers of raw materials rather being concerned about marketing or public image.
This is the dilemma of today’s marketers i.e. to adopt competitive centered strategy or customer centered strategy. According to conventional wisdom, firms are more likely oriented towards customer centered as they say in marketing: “The purpose of business is to create customers”. However, this is not fully practiced in real sense. A marketer would love to make the customers its centre of attention but to compete in an intense competitive environment they have to look beyond the customers and move on towards the rivals. A competitive centered company exists in a favorable condition when they are competing in a fast paced growing industry and therefore, the companies must invest in collecting more data about competitors which will help them to innovate at lower costs.