How To Implement A Strong Defensive Marketing Strategy To Protect Your Brand & Market Position

Every day new brands are emerging in the market. Some are bringing in fresh new products while some are launching competitive products of higher quality, better features, and lower costs with the hope of confiscating the existing market leader.

But the question is, how are you going to safeguard your brand and market position?

In this blog, we are going to discuss what defensive marketing strategy is, its importance, and how to implement your own defensive marketing strategy.

Let’s dive into the details.

What Is Defensive Marketing?

The actions that a brand, primarily a market leader, takes against its rising competitor in order to protect the market position of its products, profitability, market share, and mindshare is known as Defensive Marketing.

In case a brand fails to protect its market position, then they are liable to lose some of its consumers to the competitor. Or, in the worst-case scenario, they might lose their whole business.

This reason alone is enough to explain why defensive marketing must be a critical part of your comprehensive marketing strategy. Not just this, it should be discussed and assessed often.

Importance of Defensive Marketing

The majority of the industries have a market leader who can be typically defined as the organization with the most prominent consumer base and highest earnings.

Just because you are at the top right now, does not mean you are always going to be at the top. This is why you need to take specific measures to protect your brand.

However, these attacks are not just limited to the market leaders. We are living in the digital age, and here every business needs to defend its market position. Start-up businesses being lean and agile, especially the ones in the technology sector, can hamper the market faster than traditional companies.

Let’s understand this with a real-life example. Before Netflix emerged in the market, Blockbuster was running a successful DVD Rental Business. Even though Blockbuster tried adapting and changing their business norm by introducing an online service, they were unable to compete with the pricing and services offered by Netflix. Thus eventually, they were wiped out of business.

So unless you have a strong defensive marketing strategy in place, you will remain at the risk of losing your market position and business.

Now, this was an example of what happens when you don’t have a defensive marketing strategy. Let’s take a look at another real-life example of a successful defensive marketing strategy.

An Example Of A Successful Defensive Marketing Strategy

The famous brand Starbucks wasn’t the first coffee shop to give free wifi to their customers. And actually, they used to charge people for using their wifi in case they didn’t purchase anything from them.

However, as soon as other coffee shops began providing and promoting free wifi, Starbucks observed a plunge in its revenue.

So what did Starbucks do to defend its position then? Let’s find out.

After this, Starbucks decided to not only offer free wifi for everyone, but they also started providing the fastest wifi to match its competitors.

Their defensive strategy aimed at differentiating them from others, defending their brand while attracting old and new customers as well.

How To Implement A Strong Defensive Marketing Strategy?

Before moving on to the implementation part, you first need to decide your best form of defense, i.e., what you’ll fight with, including:

• Your brand identity or how consumers recognize you
• The combination of products and services that support your brand identity incorporating their prices
• The method of conveying your brand identity like advertising

Defensive Marketing strategies can be classified based on their objectives:

• A positive strategy is planned to retain consumers.
• The inertial strategy is built to put the brakes on the rates of consumer loss.

These strategies can also be classified based on the means to accomplish those objectives:

• Retarding Strategy focuses on your own strengths
• Parity Strategy focuses on your competitors’ perceived strength

Let’s take a look at some of these strategies.

1. Attacking Yourself

As soon as you read this, it might appear illogical to you. But this is a defensive strategy mastered by none other than Google itself!

This strategy involves developing and launching new products that are better than your existing products. In this way, you force your current products to become outdated.

For example, Google is the most popular search engine today, yet it does not standstill. It keeps on adding new features like answer boxes and knowledge panels to improve the user experience.

Now, this defensive strategy makes Google a ”moving target” and leaves its competitors confused as they can’t figure out what to target.

In this case, the competitors keep on competing with Google instead of creating their own new innovative technologies.

With this strategy, you might incur short-term profit margin losses, but you can retain your long-term market share goal.

2. Awake your sleeping market

At times brands might become self-satisfied with its market share and quit evolving. Defending your brand does not mean waiting to get attacked. You can remind your existing consumer base and attract new prospects with advertising campaigns that will protect your position, develop your brand, and make sure that your competitors do not make any substantial profits.

3. Employ specific measures

You can employ specific tactics using your unique customer insights and protect your market share.

4. Tweaking your product

Sometimes defending your brand requires just a little bit of tweaking your product or service. Like in the Starbucks example, we saw how they made their wifi free for everyone while increasing its speed too, which in turn helped it to defeat it’s competitors successfully.

However, you must keep in mind to only tweak your product and not transform it completely. Making too many changes might backfire and result in the loss of your existing customer base.

5. Adjust your product pricing

Adjusting pricing is one of the most popular defensive strategies, but it does not mean reducing prices particularity. You can:

• Decrease your costs to either match or beat your new competitors.
• Increase your prices to establish yourself as a premium option and make your consumers feel more special. For example, a premium car brand like Mercedes always keeps its prices higher than its competition.
• Do not change your prices; instead, increase the value of your product or service by offering more features and benefits for the same price.

6. Promote your strengths

Advertising is a typical defensive strategy against a new competitor, and generally, a market leader or an established brand should have extra money to invest in it.

Although the marketing budget is not the only important aspect, knowing how to utilize that budget is crucial.

For instance, when defending your brand, running a brand awareness campaign makes no sense as people already know you. Your focus should be on advertising your strengths and targeting your competitors’ liabilities.

When you execute your defensive marketing strategy correctly, you will be able to retain your position, defend your brand, and help your business to flourish.

Let us know your views about the defensive marketing strategy via the comments below.