Differentiated Product Competition Strategy Research

The subject of marketing has been attracting increasing attention from institutions and business. The importance of customers in marketing management has been fully realized, as well as the fierce competition in the market. On how to deal well with them in the meantime, people have different ideas both in theories and practices. It is found that, however, most of them are only at strategical level not tactical level. Therefore, according to the framework of market management, this thesis tries to explore preliminary tactics on product competition through differentiation.1. Basic disciplines and analytical approaches:The thesis is based on the modern market management theories, particularly on Philip?Kotler theory on market management and Michael?Porter's ideas on competitive strategy, making product, the most important element of the marketing mix, in the core, and addressing the application of differentiation at the tactical level.It also draws heavily on research methods in West, along with Finding problem — Summarizing literatures — Building a model — Choosing and applying tactics. It applies cases studying and induction instead of pure theoretical deductions, adhering to marketing practices.It must be pointed out something especial about the method in this paper, the author has put attention to the marketing practices of nearly 100 sound companies in the country for a long time and a great deal of efforts has been done in materials' collection, arrangement, classification, purification and studying before the thesis started.2. Theme, Structure and Main ideaTheme: As an important approach to bring about competitive strategy and achieve competitive advantages, a company's marketingcapabilities large partly relies on its product, which can be survival and successful in the market through differentiation by means of product's concept and character, service, brand and so on.Chapter 1 introduces the theory basic for the thesis and sums up literatures it concerns about and in advance develops its theme: achieving competitive advantages through differentiation.It's first part, theory on competition and market management, firstly analyzes popular theories on competition, which include 5 elements of competition, three strategies and value chain, following the theories the relationship between marketing competition and market management is studied, touching upon the debates about competition's role in market management. Finally, it concludes that on one band, market competition is an indispensable part in modern market management; on the other hand, market management is an important step in the process of achieving competitive advantages. A company's capability of marketing is strengthened by its product competition.It's second part, differentiation and product competition, after commenting on the materials, develops the theme—achieving competitive advantages through differentiation, which means taking use of differentiation into product competition on the tactical level, i.e. differentiation in product competition.Chapter 2. Model of differentiation in product competition. The model consists of 3 elements: 1) differentiation's key factors and relations among them; 2) the way for the factors to influence a company's competitive advantages—win the differentiation advantages and deliver the differentiation value to customers; 3) differentiation's aim is to achieve competitive advantage.Chapter 3. Tactics for differentiation in product competition, discusses the tactics and their application from the four aspects: 1) Concept differentiation, which addresses 3 principles—tit for tat, conceptinnovation and concept transcending; 2) differentiation of characteristics, which is examined in terms of characteristics and qualities; 3) service differentiation, which focus on staff, consuming process qualities services and so on; 4) brand differentiation, which is most important. Branding and brand equity, values of differentiation in brands, competitive positing for brand...