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Commentary—Defensive Marketing Strategies

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142
Warrington College of Business, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611
jhauser{at}mit.edu
steven.shugan{at}cba.ufl.edu

For every new product and service entrant, there are usually many incumbents who must defend their positions in the market. Hence, defensive strategy is as least as critical as new-product strategy. Our 1983 article argued that defensive strategy critically depends on the distribution of buyer preferences and the position of the new entrant relative to the position of the incumbent in a multidimensional attribute space. Since the appearance of our 1983 article in Marketing Science, research in defensive strategy has progressed in both prescriptive and descriptive directions. Subsequent research on defensive strategy has also addressed empirical, methodological, theoretical, and substantive issues. Today, defensive strategy is more important than ever, with shorter new-product life cycles, persistent service innovation, remarkable technological change, global competition, and the invention of new channels of distributions.

Key Words: marketing theory; strategy; defensive strategy; competitive strategy; heterogeneous buyer preferences; product positioning; multidimensional perceptual spaces; new-product strategy; pricing; advertising; distribution decisions; marketing strategy