Research On Competitive Strategy Of SUV Parallel Product Formcompany

The rapid development of Chinese auto industry in the recent decades has alreadyattracted worldwide att’ention. Chinas auto sales continued to rank first in the worldmarket for four consecutive years starting2009, which indicates China has unquestionablyb’ecome the worlds largest auto market. The market share of various models have occurredobvious changes throughout the passenger car area, specifically, the best selling of SUVsector. For the first time, the sales of entire SUV sector exceed2million cars in2012,which accounted for10.36%of total domestic car sales. Local SUV brands have also maderemarkable achievements, reached annual sales of862,100cars.As competition becomes more saturated in1st tier cities, more and more joint ventureSUV brands have targeted2nd and3rd tier cities which were once dominated by localSUV brands, to start competing due to its huge market potential. Facing the increasinglyfierce market competition, it is major issue for local brands to think about how to takeadvantage of market opportunities and continue to innovate so that they could gain the trustof consumers and seize more market share.The writing logic of this paper, taking example of SUV product X manufactured bycompany M, followed the guiding ideology of STP marketing theory. It selected carowners of seven different brands from top ten sales brands in low-end SUV market withproduct price of RMBlOOk to200k which X competes in. Using a questionnaire surveyapproach, this thesis had421interview records of owners from five different2"^tier cities,investigated insights into the consumer segmentation of low-end SUV market, collectedcustomer satisfaction in areas of car appearance, body size, interior space, functionalelements, and future configuration requirements from421car owners of X and itscompetitors in each segmentation that X competes in. The survey informed the awarenessof current product competitive situation of X, helped to gain the product positioningstrategy for X parallel replacement in target market selection. Being a part of competitivestragety, it introduces the paper go further into detailed discussions including the characterics of competitive environment, competitive strategy of major competitors andpositin in the competition of X replacement. Then the paper had a comprehensiveexplanation of the competitive strategy of X replacement, provide suggestions andmust-dos, summerzies that X replacement could only survive if it could get as muchdifferentiation whether on product itself, services or branding, from its competitors, and itis widely acplicable to all Chinse auto brands.