The dominant strategy is to concentrate and open chain stores in a specific area. It is widely used as a marketing method.

Dominant strategies can be expected to bring significant benefits by monopolizing the market. On the other hand, it is essential to carefully consider the selection of the need to enter and the balance with other chain stores.

Therefore, in this article, I will explain the outline of the dominant strategy and its advantages.

What Is Dominant Strategy

The dominant strategy is a management technique to monopolize a specific market and improve market share. Dominant is an English word that means superiority or dominance.

A dominant strategy is for a chain company or a company with many group companies to intentionally open multiple stores in a certain area.

Advantages Of Dominant Strategy

The dominant strategy of concentrating on a certain area and opening multiple stores of the same chain store or group company is a method that can expect great benefits if successful.

What are the specific benefits? I will also explain what you should pay attention to.

Merit

• Raise awareness
• Customer retention effect
• Optimal marketing activities by area are possible
• Deterring the entry of other companies in the same industry
• Increase delivery efficiency of products and materials
• Optimization of personnel and inventory

Raise Awareness

Having multiple stores with the same brand and store name in a neighboring area increases the chances of being seen by people who come and go from that area.

It is a great advantage of the dominant strategy that it leads to an increase in awareness and naturally increases the advertising effect.

For people in the area, having a brand or store name that is “familiar” or “frequently seen” will create a sense of trust and security. In addition to expecting an increase in utilization rate and an improvement in profit margin, it is possible to have the advantage of “a new store of that store that you already know” when opening new stores.

Customer Retention Effect

The dominant strategy can be expected to retain customers within the company’s chain rather than letting customers flow out to other stores.

For example, in a cafe, if you are developing stores with a dominant strategy. Store A was full. However, if a store B or C of the same chain is nearby, the customer is more likely to think, “There is the same (chain) store nearby, so let’s go there.”

Also, if the availability of seats at stores B and C are known, store A will announce to the customer, “If you are at store B or C near here, we can guide you immediately.” It is also possible to prevent the

If we can guide customers to the same chain stores instead of letting them go to stores operated by other companies, we can expect an increase in profits for the group companies as a whole.

Optimal Marketing Activities By Area Are Possible

The dominant strategy of developing stores by concentrating on a specific area has the advantage of making it easier to collect the data necessary for area marketing.

The more stores you have, the more information you can collect about the area. It also increases the accuracy of information.

A dominant strategy is useful for building a sales strategy that targets a specific geographic customer base.

Deterring The Entry Of Other Companies In The Same Industry

If you can quickly monopolize the market through a dominant strategy, it is possible to block the entry of other companies in the same industry. You can eliminate competition and maintain your advantage by securing a good location ahead of other companies.

If we can prevent the entry of other companies, we can focus on meeting customer needs without getting involved in price competition.

It is possible to bring to the state of “winning without fighting” while building a relationship of trust with customers.

Increase Delivery Efficiency Of Products And Materials

If you concentrate on opening stores in neighboring areas, you can expect the effect of lowering the delivery costs of ingredients and products.

It takes time and money to deliver ingredients and products every day. It is especially noticeable in restaurants and retailers that handle food, especially if the distance between stores is long.

If we can deliver efficiently through a dominant strategy, we will be able to increase the delivery frequency and always provide fresh products (ingredients). In addition, it is possible to avoid opportunity loss due to shortages and increase profit margins by reducing delivery costs.

Optimization Of Personnel And Inventory

If there is a chain store nearby, you can share store staff and inventory.

One of the problems that plague restaurants are the lack of staff. For example, if a delivery specialty store is short of the workforce, they can request help from other stores to avoid opportunity loss due to a shortage of delivery workers.

In addition, even if ingredients are out of stock, it is possible to avoid opportunity loss by borrowing from nearby stores to make it through until the next delivery.

Having stores of the same chain nearby functions as a defensive measure against risks due to various situations that may arise during business.

ALSO READ: How To Measure The Impact Of Brand Strategy?

The “building a brand identity” core of brand strategy formulation. The framework used is a framework called “Brand Prism”, developed by a French university professor Below, I will explain the components of the brand prism.

Target Persona

The first component of the brand prism is the “target persona”.the worksheet of Brand Prism often includes the following.

• Target persona synopsis
• Value keywords for persona (e.g. humour, discovery, excitement, adventure, etc.)
• Persona’s emotional keywords (e.g. anxiety, pressure, impatience, loneliness, etc.)

Value Provided By Brand

“Brand value proposition” refers to the practical and emotional pleasure that a brand can provide.

In other words, it is a “reason to be chosen” and is a core element in formulating a brand strategy.

As you can see from many TV commercials, most brands try to talk about “we…” and “we” as the main characters. However, for many personas, the leading role is “my lifestyle”, and the brand is just a “supporting role” to enrich the lifestyle.

If so, the brand should not be centred around “us” but “for you”. It is precisely the “proposition (= value conversion)”, and it is the part that requires a change from a corporate perspective to a consumer perspective.

At workshops, we often divide the value provided by the brand into three categories and discuss them.

Practical Value: What ” Pragmatic Benefits ” Does The Persona Get From The Brand?

The most basic joy for consumers is the “joy of getting actual profit” from the brand. Many companies must be racing to develop this pleasure better than their rivals.

In the case of mineral water, both “brand “and”practical value” is recognized, the active purchase intention rate increases by 16% and the price premium (= the percentage of people who want to buy even if it is slightly higher) ) is known to increase by 9%.

Mineral water is “water” inside and has almost no functional differentiation. However, purchase intentions and price premiums change significantly depending on whether or not the practical value is recognized.

Emotional Value: What Kind Of “ Positive Emotions ” Does The Persona Evoke For The Brand?

Everyone wants to be “positive” rather than “negative”. And when people get “positive emotions”, they feel joy.

In the example of mineral water mentioned earlier, we know that the positive purchase intention rate rises by 21% and the price premium rise by 22% when “emotional value” is recognized, not just brand recognition.

When we conduct workshops on the value provided by a brand, clients who can speak fluently about “actual value” often stop thinking and get lost in “brand x emotional value.” I use the “111 emotion cards” mentioned above as an inspiration tool in such a case.

Self-Actualization Value: What Kind Of “ Positive Self ” Will The Brand Change?

How can that brand transform your persona into a positive self?

In workshops on the value provided by a brand, we often have a “From→To” session where “I was like this before I got the brand” → “I’ll be like this after I got the brand”.

In the example of mineral water mentioned earlier, it is known that if not only the brand is recognized but also the “self-realization value” is recognized, the active purchase intention rate will increase by 24%, and the price premium will increase by 30%.

Brand Life Vision

Once you have defined the three values ​​your brand provides, follow that flow to determine your “brand life vision.”

“Brand life vision” refers to “a future image of society and lifestyle that can be realized by spreading the value provided by the brand to the world.”

In other words, it is a “social existence value”, and in recent terms, it can be rephrased as “brand purpose”.

Since “value” means “joy” and “happiness”, “social existence value” is synonymous with the “joy” and “happiness” that a brand can bring to society. The image of the future when this permeates the community is called the “Brand Life Vision.”

Taking steps to consider the “brand life vision” after considering the “value provided by the brand.”

• Practical Value: People who received tangible benefits through the brand
• Emotional value: people who are with positive emotions through the brand
• Self-actualization value: People who have transformed into positive selves through brands

What kind of ideal society can realize if the world is full of Because consistency is essential.

In this way, by setting a “brand life vision” based on the defined “value provided by the brand”, it becomes possible for the brand and society to co-create the same purpose (= life vision).

• Choosing, recommending, and supporting that brand is the same as changing society for the better.

Then, the brand transcends the barrier between products and consumers, plays a role in society, and can elicit sympathetic emotions from consumers.

It also enables us to write a coherent story about how brands transform society and markets and how they create customer experiences.

Furthermore, those involved in brands with a “brand life vision” will feel the significance and pride of the mission of realizing the life vision together with consumers and society.

Ultimately, the brand will be a supportable brand that is “trying to make the world a better place” and will become an irreplaceable presence for consumers.

The result is an empathy that makes many consumers and stakeholders feel that “only this brand is special.” And that empathy creates a long-selling brand that continues to be bought by nomination.

Brand Personality

“Brand personality” refers to the “individuality and personality unique to the brand”.

Properly building your brand personality will dramatically increase your empathy for that brand. As a result, it is not a dream to become a powerful brand that creates strong feelings of attachment and brings about nomination purchases.

Several items should be set in brand personality, but the following two are particularly important.

• Values: What “values” does the brand stand for?
• Attitude: What kind of “attitude” does the brand have when interacting with consumers?

“Brand values” not only determine the brand’s distinctive personality but also elicit resonance from consumers.

In the beginning, I said that “brand strategy is a guideline to bring about empathy”, but because “brand values” go beyond “good” and “like” to bring about strong empathy that “can resonate”, This is an item that must be set.

In addition, the “attitude of the brand” determines the “Personality” of the brand.

A Unique Role

“Unique role” refers to “a unique role that the brand can only fulfil from the persona’s perspective”. In marketing terms, it’s called “positioning.”

When we think of “positioning,” we tend to think of it as “differentiation,” but that is not the case.

“Differentiation” assumes that there are competitors, but “compete” means challenging physical strength’s exhaustion while being constantly compared within the existing competition rules.

The original purpose of the positioning is not to “win the competition” but to find “areas where you can win without competition” and to cleverly win.

Brand Characteristics

“Brand characteristics” refers to the “facts that give credibility” to the “value provided by the brand,” “brand life vision,” “brand personality,” and “unique role,” which have been considered so far.

No matter how wonderful brand prisms are defined, if there are no facts that directly or indirectly support them, they end up as mere “bad words”.

Therefore, we discover “facts supporting the brand prism” from all aspects such as “quality”, “performance”, “technology“, “usability”, “UI”, “history”, “third party evaluation”, etc. It is necessary to add “reinterpretation”.

Brand Symbol

A “brand symbol” refers to “a visual element that symbolizes the brand.”

Since “brand symbol” corresponds to “construction of visual identity”, if “how to show the brand” is also changed significantly, it is often a separate project as Phase 2.

If you want to know more about visual identity, please refer to the article below.

In recent years, there has been an increase in the following consultations related to brand strategy.

• I feel that there is a limit to the current digital marketing that continues to pay advertising expenses like taxes every time you acquire several CVs.
• We plan to invest significantly in advertising, such as TV commercials, but we would like to formulate brand strategy guidelines so that the measures will not be sporadic.
• Brand sales are sluggish, and we are considering rebranding.

ALSO READ: What Is A Dominant Strategy? Merits Of Dominant Strategy

The end of the year also marks the beginning of many things. The end of the year is a good time to review the activities that have been carried out in the past.

 It is also time for public relations and marketing professionals to evaluate the effect of the brand strategy in the past year and report on the success achieved. , a good time to face future challenges and opportunities.

The boss expects us to determine the budget for the coming year on a fact-based basis, and brand evaluation insights can help us do this.

How do we measure and evaluate the success of PR campaigns? Let’s take a look at a few ways to measure the impact of a brand’s strategy.

Media Coverage

The number of times a brand is mentioned in publications and the reach of potential audiences can impact our profitability and is a sufficient basis for measuring media coverage. 

We can evaluate the influence of brand strategy and media relations to know the goal achievement in public relations activities by analyzing the highs and lows of articles reported in a certain period. 

Making comparisons against previous years is a good way to see where you are competing. Media coverage analysis provides answers to the following questions:

Which publications are interested in our brand? Do we need to be more targeted? Are publications of high value to us? Does it lead to a large potential readership and target audience? Which reporter is covering our brand? Have we reached the level of an influential industry voice? What information is circulating? The answer might be a new product launch, company news, or a branding campaign.

What do opinion leaders think about our brand? This can fully indicate whether we need to adjust our external communication information.

Voice Share

Broadcast press releases Measure voice share in terms of publication quality and market response to disseminated information.

Don’t just rush to catch up with your competitors, but beat them! It’s simple, all we need is to monitor our competitors’ PR activities and news, and that’s enough! Suddenly, we have a wealth of useful depth perspectives.

Comparing our performance in terms of market share and corresponding with our competitors is a good way to measure the success of our brand strategy.

For people to remember our brand, we must be memorable and outdo our competitors. The need to repeatedly repeat our brand and outreach message and voice share is an important measure to monitor media coverage. 

However, we should be clear that just getting headlines in a publication isn’t enough; it can’t stop there. Reaching the potential reach of a publication’s target audience is as important as measuring reviews so that you can see how many people visit our message.

Influence In Different Regions

Knowing our brand’s geographic reach helps us measure the reach of our marketing PR campaigns, performance in specific regions, and the combined impact of our brand across countries. 

We might see areas of potential growth or rational decisions to pull resources away from areas where we have little influence. It is also beneficial to compare our market reach with our competitors and find the reasons behind their successes or failures for us to emulate or avoid.

Market Sentiment

The most effective way to measure the success of a brand strategy is to combine qualitative and quantitative data. For example, mentioning our brand in a record number of publications is great unless the mention is promoting us negatively and demeaning our brand. 

Sentiment analysis helps us dig into large amounts of data and reveal the tone of reports, saving face in adverse situations. This metric is useful in times of crisis because it helps us study how a brand message resonates with the media.

Advertising Value Equivalent (AEV)

Online article coverage is a common measure of the value of PR activities and the keyword values, not quantity. The value here refers to the scope of influence and the target audience, and the target audience must be useful to us.

Social Media Report

When measuring the impact of a brand strategy, we should pay close attention to media coverage and keep in mind the people who matter most to us – our customers. Listening to what our customers have to say about us on social media helps us understand:

• The most engaging marketing PR campaign they found
• Based on the customer’s participation in marketing PR activities, we can reasonably decide whether to increase marketing PR activities in a certain channel or a certain part of the world.
• Our social voice share
• Who are the most influential people? How well do we connect with them?
• Find out how much our customers love us with market sentiment analysis.

Online article coverage is a common measure of the value of PR activities and the keyword values, not quantity. The value here refers to the scope of influence and the target audience, and the target audience must be useful to us.

 Several high-quality online news monitoring tools, such as the Meltwater PR tool suite, can measure brand strategic impact. Additionally, our newly launched product, Meltwater Pulse, provides strategic analysis and results, enhancing media monitoring campaigns and reporting.

 We can deliver monthly, quarterly, or annual reports straight to our inboxes, easing our busy day-to-day office life and, ideally, earning us compliments from our bosses along the way.

Summary:

Some brand strategies of enterprises are the business strategies formulated to obtain profits by taking the brand as the core competitiveness—the goal.

ALSO READ: What Is A Dominant Strategy? Merits Of Dominant Strategy