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Part - V

Increasing army’s marching rate

In this perspective, businesses like armies, must march at faster pace to keep up with the growing trends and demands. One of the advantages of using this approach in marketing is referred to as the ‘first mover advantage’. It helps you implement tactics faster and make changes when it does not seem to be rewarding. Unlike the enemy you get more time to think upon the timing, the point of attack and the methods to attack and can arrange the resources. But it informs the enemy of your moves and often in the rush to not lose out market share, one may implement ideas that are not effective.

Therefore, the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him. Hence, the organizational life-cycle theory with r-strategy is the clear derivation of this principle of early mover advantage.

However, General Clausewitz begs to differ and stresses the superiority of defence to offence especially for smaller companies. The thumb rule for an attacking force to get successful is to have superiority of at least 3:1 at the point of attack. The only reason attributed to offensive strategy, is the thrill of victory. If you become the leading brand, you enjoy the victory for a long time. However, AL Ries and Jack Trout in ‘Marketing Warfare’ stress on r-strategy only when you are superior in number to the competitor, i.e., a company with larger sales force, greater advertising budget, bigger research department is likely to take business away from the smaller company. So smaller company can take advantage of defensive strategy whereby it does not waste time in bringing the forces into action but takes advantage of time to remain alert to potential threats from any direction. This is the k-strategy of organizational life-cycle.

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* Contributed by: -
Minu Batish,
PGP 2003-05,
TAPMI, Manipal,
Published in Bi-annual Journal of TAPMI - 'Amartya'.