What is market share? Does market share mean share of product, share of category, share of channel, share of customer, share of region or share of something else? How does your company define market share? Companies that cannot answer this very important question cannot effectively engage in Strategic Market Positioning (SMP) and in the long term, will find it difficult to invest successfully for growth.
What is Strategic Market Positioning (SMP)? For a business or product line that competes in only one strategic segment, SMP is simply the market share of the business in its strategic market segment. For a company competing in multiple strategic segments, its overall SMP is the average of its SMPs in each strategic segment, weighted by the business’s sales or investment in each strategic segment.
Achieving effective SMP involves analyzing an industry to determine strategic market segments and then making investments in those segments that will lead to increased returns.
Does SMP = Market Segmentation? Normally market positioning is considered as market segmentation. This is totally a marketing technique that involves breaking down market into smaller segments in order to better understand consumer behavior & identify opportunities to increase overall market share.
However on the other hand SMP is different because it creates shareholders return. It brings together the disciplines of strategy and finance to help shape a company’s approach to value creation. Organizations that fail to differentiate between market segmentation and Strategic Market Position may be at risk because the definition of market share often does not correlate with company profitability, returns and strategic potential.
Do you think larger market share provides superior return? As per research by one of the top consulting, larger market share even provides low return in comparison to companies having smaller market share with Strategic Market Positioning. There are several reasons supporting to this finding. The smaller, more profitable company may avoid going head-to-head with larger, more powerful competitors. It may deploy its investments into segments where (among other things) the dominant players simply do not compete. In essence, it positions itself in its industry strategically and allocates more assets in fewer, carefully selected ways. As a result, it has a much higher market share in its chosen segments.
How to create Value through Strategic Market Positioning (SMP)
Following 3 approaches should be followed to create value through SMP-
Be Creative & think Broad: To maximize the chances of identifying successful strategies, think beyond the current business offerings. Apply the Blue Ocean Strategy principle “Reconstruct Market Boundaries” & “Reaching Beyond Existing Demand”. Evaluate other businesses that share the same customers or leverage the same technologies. Consider services as well as product offerings. Identify the range of organic or acquisition initiatives that could be used to pursue potential growth strategies.
Conduct SMP Test: Identify the growth strategies that have the greatest potential to increase the company’s weighted average relative market share, as measured across all strategic segments impacted by the strategy. This will identify strategies that have the potential to improve the company’s overall position on the most important drivers of profitability. Conduct SMP test quantitatively to specific initiatives to see whether market share, appropriately defined, increases or decreases.
Conduct Value Creation Test: “Strategic value” is defined as the net present value of cash flows from higher revenues, lower costs and lower capital requirements that will accrue from the growth opportunity and the existing business being run together versus separately.
We will see an example of Southwest Airline & America West Airline to know how SMP creates higher value.
Southwest Airline & America West Airline started in roughly the same position, but ended in very different places. Both formed as low-cost, low-fare regional carriers, both airlines grew their operations and profits on roughly parallel tracks through the early 1990s.
America West followed a traditional hub-and-spoke design for its flights and became well known for its expansionist strategy. Southwest, on the other hand, grew at a slower pace, taking the time to build up strong positions in specific markets before penetrating additional markets. Southwest’s emerging strategy was creative in that it focused on short haul, high frequency flights in city pairs where the airline could secure a strong market share position, often flying to a secondary, lower-cost airport. In addition, its costs were controlled as a result of the corporate decision to use (and therefore maintain) only one type of aircraft: the Boeing 737.
By contrast, America West’s expansionist strategy called for international routes, which in turn called for a heterogeneous and expensive-to maintain fleet. America West did not base its strategy on the core tenet of SMP: build the type of market share that maximizes high-impact growth and leverages economies to the greatest extent possible.
Summarize two Airlines positions & Strategies
| Summary Stats ( 1990) | South West | American West |
| Revenue | $1186 M | $ 1315 M |
| Number of Aircraft | 106 | 104 |
| Types of Aircraft | 1 | 4 |
| Flight Design | Point-to-Point Short Haul | Hub & Spoke |
Figure 1: Compares the two airlines in terms of traditional market share and Strategic Market Position to reveal the true impact of their different strategies
Source: Bloomberg
Although America West and Southwest had similar US total market shares in 1990, this measure obscures their relative competitive strengths.
In the airline business, pricing power and operating costs are driven more by share of flights between states or, more precisely, by share of flights between specific city pairs. Travelers prefer to fly an airline that has several daily flights between two points because it gives them more flexibility in the event of a missed or delayed flight. This is better for airlines because they are likely to have larger scale and more efficient operations at each end.
Southwest Airlines recognized this as a critical factor and was careful to enter a new market only when it felt it could achieve substantial strategic share in that market. By contrast, America West assumed that, by entering larger and increasingly international markets, it was strengthening its overall position in the airline market. In fact, it was neglecting its core franchise and spending limited resources to enter new market segments where it had little to offer against strong competitors.
Figure: 2 illustrates the value creation outcome of these two Airlines while adopting different strategies
As America West’s emergence from Chapter 11 in 1994, its stock has declined at a CAGR of -4.9 percent, while Southwest’s stock has grown at a CAGR of 9.9 percent.
Conclusion
Strategic Market Positioning (SMP) is a proven and highly effective tool for creating value. It is founded on the assumption that not all growth is good – in fact, that some growth actually destroys value. SMP helps companies identify the difference and respond accordingly. By being creative and thinking broad to maximize the chances of identifying successful strategies, and by conducting the SMP and value-creation tests, an organization’s leadership can gain valuable insight into organic growth ,acquisitions and other growth investments and be better able to formulate strategies that have the potential to improve the company’s overall performance.
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