Premium
An alternative efficient representation of demand‐based competitive asymmetry
Author(s) -
DeSarbo Wayne S.,
Grewal Rajdeep
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
strategic management journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 11.035
H-Index - 286
eISSN - 1097-0266
pISSN - 0143-2095
DOI - 10.1002/smj.601
Subject(s) - competition (biology) , competitive advantage , business , industrial organization , marketing , representation (politics) , divergence (linguistics) , economics , microeconomics , ecology , linguistics , philosophy , politics , political science , law , biology
Abstract Competitive asymmetry is defined in terms of the directional level of competition among brands/firms (i.e., unit of analysis), where the degree to which brand/firm A may compete with brand/firm B does not equal the degree to which brand/firm B competes with brand/firm A. Such a market structure phenomenon is quite commonplace in virtually every market, e.g., where there exists distinct market leaders and followers. DeSarbo, Grewal, and Wind recently (2006) proposed a new spatial methodology in SMJ to assess these competitive asymmetries based on information on consumer choice sets (i.e., a demand‐based approach). However, the approach espoused by DeSarbo et al . results in as many competitive maps as there are brands/firms in a dataset. In this research, the authors devise a distance‐based unfolding multidimensional scaling procedure for deriving joint spaces of brands/firms both as givers and takers of consumer consideration with the objective to have a more efficient representation of competitive asymmetries (i.e., one map irrespective of the number of brands/firms under study). An application is provided for an actual commercial study undertaken by a major U.S. automobile manufacturer examining the mid‐size car marketplace. The strategic implications of the results are detailed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.