Strategic Competitive Positioning

Synopsis

The new market environment has brought to most senior managers a more difficult, less predictable and more competitive environment. Many products and services offered by different suppliers seem similar or identical to many of their potential buyers. Many previous business assumptions are no longer valid. Growth for growth’s sake has been found wanting. Business as usual is not a valid option. The competitive principles and strategies discussed here can be used to help in these difficult times to bring a sharper focus to your business.

Many of your customers are now more experienced and more confident in knowing what they want form outside suppliers and in choosing their different vendors. Your customers have formed perceptions of their current and potential suppliers and match their performance against what they expect from them. Many vendors are not aware of these “Perception Battles”. The Perception Battles are in the minds of your chosen customers. Vendors ignore them at their peril.

This intensive two-day programme will provide delegates with an understanding of Strategic Competitive Positioning principles and strategies. A modular Case Study, based upon a real life situation, is used throughout the two days, with worked solutions, to help in understanding the principles better. Through the use of a proven, practical, Ten Step Planning Methodology, delegates will learn how to successfully use these principles in their own business environment.

Benefits to You

  • Understand the major competitive principles and strategies, with a special reference to proven military principles, and how they can be applied successfully in your own business.
  • Learn how to build your own longer-term, Grand Strategy for your organisation and for your key markets and products.
  • Understand why focus and concentration are still your key disciplines in succeeding in business.
  • Understand why you need to learn more about your customers and about their perceptions of your company and of your competitors.
  • Learn how to make more tangible your many current customer and competitive issues and thus improve your collective internal communications and decision-making.
  • Understand better when to acquire companies or products and where alliances come into the picture.
  • Begin to understand better what your largest competitors might be planning against you, and how you should react.
  • See how by using these planning concepts a real business could use them in a powerful, graphical, Planning Methodology.

Programme Outline

  • Learn a powerful Planning Methodology
  • Seeing how a real business situation occurred in Business Warfare
  • Defining your Market Segments from a hierarchical customer viewpoint
  • Some Generic Competitive Planning and Positioning Concepts
  • How using proven Military Principles and Strategies can help you
  • An Industry Maturation Model
  • The Strategic Square and how it helps in analysing your competitive positioning
  • The Four major Competitive Strategies of Defence, Offence, Flanking and Guerrilla
  • Forming a total picture of your Market Segments and Competitors
  • Shorter Term Tactics and where they fit in
  • The Seven classical manoeuvres and how they are redefined in Strategic Competitive positioning
  • The Value Wheel and Value Matrix: a way to place yourself in your customers’ minds
  • Concept Positioning and how it helps you form an overall competitive position in your markets
  • SWOT Analysis, form different viewpoints and how you can act on them
  • Determining your Grand Strategy for its different markets and geographies
  • Risk Analysis and Value Propositions and where they fit in the total picture
  • The Eight Principles, Four Key Strands and three Variable Factors in Strategic Competitive Positioning

Who Will Benefit by Attending

  • Managing Directors who have responsibility for setting and implementing a longer-term, strategic direction for their Company or Division, including alliances and acquisitions.
  • Financial Directors and Senior Managers who wish to complement their financial skills and experience with some more Customer-oriented and Competitor-oriented planning disciplines.
  • Senior Marketing and Sales Directors who have a longer-term strategic responsibility as well as the more normal operational role.
  • Strategic Corporate Planners who are looking for a powerful, yet practical and interesting, Planning Methodology in order to help determine and then communicate internally their strategic recommendations.
  • Senior Research and Development Directors wishing to complement their current processes with a more external, market-oriented process.

Programme Leader

This programme will be conducted by:

Thomas Day (Tom) is an independent international strategic business and marketing planning consultant with over twenty years’ experience. Before moving into consulting and training he worked for nine years with Digital Equipment Corporation, two years of which were spent at their commercial business and marketing headquarters in New Hampshire, USA.  His other senior management and company director experience was gained at NCR, ICL, The Hoskyns Group and Leasco Software.

Tom’s consulting and training work, with companies in the UK, Europe, the USA and Asia, ranges from strategic business planning through marketing planning to corporate account management planning.  He has helped large, high technology manufacturing and services companies, and Users of such products and services, to build more cohesive management teams and produce effective marketing-led Plans in often fast-moving, unstructured but highly competitive markets.

Tom’s real drive is to help individuals, and the companies they work in, to become more Customer-oriented and more Competitor-oriented in their planning processes. He feels that many important decisions are taken daily largely from an internal viewpoint. Little real analysis is performed by looking at the changing perceptions and needs of their existing and potential Customers, or in forecasting how their existing and potential Competitors might attack them.  Consequently, they implement strategies determined largely in the past now and in the future. Tom has developed over the years a practical Planning Methodology to address these issues.

Companies Tom has worked for over the years include the following well-known companies: American Airlines, Ameritech Corporation, Barclays Bank, Canon Business Systems, Cisco Systems, Chartered Institute of Marketing (UK), Ericsson Telecommunications, Frost & Sullivan, Fujitsu-Siemens, London Stock Exchange, Lucent Technologies, Management Centre Europe, Microsoft Corporation, Misys International Banking, Motorola, Philips Electronics, Sun Microsystems, and Lloyds TSB Bank.

Venue The Ritz Carlton Kuala Lumpur
Duration Two Days
Time 0900 to 1730
Fee RM3, 922 per person for local delegates and

US$1, 250 per person for foreign delegates [price is inclusive of 6% GST, programme documentation, tea breaks and lunch]
Enquiries +603-27131165
Email info@pkmh.com or pkmh.training@yahoo.com