The most common growth strategy is to focus on what you do best by emphasizing your current products in your current markets. This strategy is also called the concentrated growth strategy because you’re thoroughly developing and exploiting your knowledge and expertise in a specific market with known products.
How do you grow if you’re already doing what you do best now? Simple. Do the following:
Increase present customers’ rate of use. You achieve this goal by
Increasing the size of purchase
Maximizing the rate of product obsolescence
Finding new uses for your product
Advertising other uses
Offering incentives for increased use
Attract your competitors’ customers. You lure customers away from your competitors by establishing differentiation, increasing advertising efforts, or cutting your prices. Look at Chapter 5 to find ways to differentiate yourself from other companies.
Attract non-users to buy your products. This process can be done by offering trial uses of your products, adjusting the price up or down, and promoting other uses to attract these customers (check out the following example for details).
Think about Arm & Hammer Baking Soda. You can easily argue that it’s not the most exciting product; in fact, it’s almost boring. Agree? It’s white powder in a box, but the company dominates the market as the number-one baking soda for cooking year after year.
But with such a large market share, you may be wondering how the company grows by using its current products. The answer: It finds a new use for an existing product.
The company launched a year-long marketing campaign, promoting the use of baking soda as a refrigerator deodorizer, which resulted in a 57 percent increase in sales! Arm & Hammer didn’t stop there. Check out the company’s website for a timeline of how it continues to reinvent uses for its core product.