UGC NET COMMERCE December 2018 Q94
| List-I | List-II |
| (a) Mobile Defense | (i) Occupying the most desirable position in consumers’ minds, making the brand almost impregnable. |
| (b) Contraction Defense | (ii) The leader stretches its domain over new territories through market broadening and market diversification. |
| (c) Position Defense | (iii) Large companies give up weaker markets and reassign resources to stronger ones. |
CODES
| (a) | (b) | (c) | |
| 1 | (ii) | (iii) | (i) |
| 2 | (i) | (ii) | (iii) |
| 3 | (i) | (iii) | (ii) |
| 4 | (ii) | (i) | (iii) |
- Option : A
- Explanation : Kotler and Singh: have defined the following defensive strategies:
∎ A position defense is designed to defend a position by strengthening the firm’s brand power.
∎ A pre-emptive defense is an attempt to anticipate a competitive attack. This may involve covering every segment and niche within a market and flooding the market with products, targeting specific competitors before they can attack or indicating to the market the ways in which the leader intends to defend itself.
∎ A flank defense creates interventions in order to protect the leader’s position. For example, a competitor’s price attack on a firm’s brand may be responded to by introducing two new brands, one designed to be sold at the same price as the competitor’s brand, and the second at a lower price in order to outflank the competitor.
∎ A mobile defense involves market broadening. This usually involves an attempt to shift the emphasis from a specific product to the underlying need. An example is the repositioning of television companies as multimedia companies. An alternative to market broadening is market diversification, which involves the mergers of firms in wholly different industries into conglomerates.
∎ An alternative defense involves concentrating corporate resources in the areas of its greatest strength rather than defending all of the firm’s positions.
∎ A contraction defense involves a strategic withdrawal from specific areas of lesser strength.
∎ A counteroffensive defense may lead the organization to respond to a competitor’s price cuts in one market sector by slashing prices in another market sector considered to be more important to the competitor.
