Marketing Article: 3 Disruptive innovation

Disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and ultimately invades the established markets through new technology improvements. Clayton Christensen first coined the phrase "disruptive technologies" in his article Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave. It allows access to a product or service to an entirely new set of consumers. This kind of Strategy forces the companies to have higher flexible products to cater the needs of the changing environment.

Types of Disruptive Innovations:

1. Creating a new market by targeting on non-consumers called new market disruption.

2. Contending in the low end of an established market called low end disruption. This strategy targets the least  profitable and over served customers.

Examples:

1. Disruptions often occur in storage devices industry. The Floppy Disk was replaced by CDs, CDs was replaced by DVDs and so on.

2. Being a leading player in the optical media storage market in India, Moser Baer entered into entertainment business that focuses upon distributing movie CDs at lower prices.

Marketing Article: 2 Marketing Warfare Strategy

Marketing Warfare Strategies are the kind of strategies used by companies to increase its prominence in Business and Marketing. There are two types of marketing warfare strategies:

1. Offensive marketing strategies

2. Defensive marketing strategies

Offensive marketing warfare strategies are premeditated strategy that focuses upon obtaining the market share from its target competitor.

Defensive marketing warfare strategies are a type of marketing strategy that protects a company's market share and its brands.

Flanking Attack: It is a type of Offensive marketing warfare strategies where by a company focuses upon competitors flank. It is mainly used in a market segment in which competitors consider it as less important. Companies look for finding out new market niches for segmental flanking and uncontested areas for geographical flanking.

Examples:

1. In order to protect the lower price flank from its competitor, Fast track introduced a sub brand, Fast track Denim which is priced relatively low to compete directly against other low priced watches in the market.

2. Canon gained huge portion of Xerox’s market share by focusing upon small size copier market.

3. Being India's first Ready To Stitch jeans brand, Ruf N Tuf faced flank attack from the local jeans brands which were of low quality jeans with good stitching and competitive price.

4. When Nestle launched Kitkat, Cadbury launched Perk to flank its flagship brand Dairy Milk.

Marketing Article: 1 Ambush Marketing

Ambush Marketing is a marketing strategy by Non-Sponsors who tries to take advantage from any Mega Event by giving a false impression that it is a sponsor. It is marketing campaign that happens around an event without paying the sponsorship fee. The term "ambush marketing" was coined by the famous marketing strategist Jerry Welsh.

It is also known as Parasite marketing, as a parasite attaches itself to an unwilling host and takes sustenance from it. Effective Ambush Marketing confuses the customers and urges them to associate the ambusher with the event, thereby reducing the effectiveness and attaining the benefits of the actual sponsors.

The basic technique of Ambush marketing is buying up billboard space around an event and ensuring the people who attend the event will see the promotion. Ambush marketers enhance their presence by involving themselves in doing things like passing out T-shirts and other promotional things to people who are attending the event. Ambushers focus mainly upon buying time to broadcast their ads through media as they can reach more people than venue audience.

Some of the ambushers utilize brand ambassadors of different product category for their product. In 2008 Olympics, Nike sponsored Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang( Adidas being the official sponsor), is also being sponsored by Coca-Cola, which is also an official Olympic sponsor.

Many brands involves in ambush marketing because of higher cost of right fees. Earning more profits with low investments is the ultimate objective. This type of marketing also confuses the consumers as to who is and who is not the official sponsor of an event.

In 1984 Olympics, Converse was a official sponsor. Nike executed an ambush strategy purchasing outdoor advertising space along the roads leading to the Olympic venues and displaying the Nike “swoosh”. It also used former Olympic athletes Mary Decker and Carl Lewis in many of its promotions. As a result of the ambushing campaign, a consumer poll revealed that most of the people identified Nike as an official sponsor than Converse.

To protect the official sponsors of the ongoing Cricket world cup 2011, International Cricket Council has asked the players to stop promoting companies and products not related to the World Cup. Recently Indian Cricket team Captain MS Dhoni was warned by ICC doing advertisements for Sony and Aircel.

Did you found any Ambush Marketing in Cricket World Cup 2011?