(Fox and Porcupine thinking in marketing (Part 3

In previous articles, we explained fox and porcupine strategy in marketing.

There is a direct correlation between professionalism and focus. A heart surgeon can easily perform general surgeries, but he knows that for keeping his credit as a professional heart surgeon, shouldn’t be satisfied to the lower income from general surgeries, otherwise his personal brand as a professional heart surgeon won’t develop.

If companies would like to be known as the best in their industry, have to avoid providing variety of products and services. Although this decision has lots of advantages, it will increase the environmental risk. Often, huge changes in business is so fast to the extent that you can’t easily notice the changes and it leads you to the point that your product or service doesn’t fit the market and your customers have already found other solutions to meet their needs. Here is the point that if you don’t evolve and get in sync with changes, you are sure destined to fail.

Kodak is a well-known sample of this kind. This American company was the leader of the market since 1888. By late 20^th century its Japanese rival, Foji film entered the market, Kodak was holding 90 percent of the market share of negative in the United State. Despite Foji film was offering its product with a cheaper price, it only managed to increase its market share 7 percent from 10 percent in 1990  to 17 percent in 1997.

Digital camera was first invented in 1975 by Kodad. Since the managers looked at it as a threat to their negatives, decided not to make it commercial. This technology was first used in 1994 for apple products.

While Kodad and Foji were busy with intense competition to bring innovation to their negatives and developing their digital cameras so slowly, suddenly found out that Sony had become the best seller digital camera globally. Canon and Nikon overtook Kodak in no time and left only 7 percent of the market share for Kodak. This was the time that digital industry drove negative and old cameras out of the market.

When Kodak managers realized their strategic mistake, in January 2012, declared bankruptcy so that to be able to apply for a loan of 950 million dollars according to chapter 11. During the time Kodak was busy doing research and development in digital cameras to get their market back with innovation, again failed to take into consideration that smart phone and tablet producers are trying to install high quality cameras on their device to meet customers’ needs for digital cameras on cellphone.

Finally, in 2013 this company sold most of its property to several companies namely Apple, Samsung, HTC, etc. with the value of 525 million dollars and officially announced that had decided to leave digital camera industry and start producing scanner and photo printing machinery.

Iran Communication organization is a successful sample of getting in sync with environmental changes. Around 3 years ago when smartphones were entering to Iran market, there was a good market for applications such as Wechat. Having the capability of sending texts, pictures and voices, these applications encouraged lots of users to buy smartphones in order to decrease their expenses.

Since the invasion of applications posed threat on the income of communication organization and operators, they filtered all these social messengers. Customers’ needs were still there and every single day a new solution was offered. Finally, communication organization drew a conclusion that has to change its income model from short message and voice call to selling data and internet packages and get itself in sync with technology changes.

 Imagine the data capacity related to all the videos and voices that are continuously downloaded and uploaded by fourteen million telegram users. That’s why communication system reacts rapidly as soon as any distortion occurs in telegram, saying that they are not intended to filter telegram and their only red-line is channels that are disruptive to national security.

Written by: Majid Barghi

Written by: Javad Barghi