Competitor Targeting: Winning the Battle for Market and Customer Share [Hardcover]

Ian H. Gordon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2001

Powerful weapons for waging and winning the business war
Most books on competitive intelligence are full of vague theoretical constructs regarding information gathering and storage. This book, on the other hand, gets right down to the nitty-gritty, with proven techniques for identifying and laying waste to a company's most serious competitors. Readers learn why going on the offensive rather than just gathering information on competitors helps increase market share and shareholder value. And they get loads of practical advice and guidance on identifying the most serious competitors, flushing out competitors' secrets, using technology to advance a competitive initiative, creating strong allies, "harvesting" competitors' employees, staging a successful counter offensive when you've been targeted, and much more.
Ian Gordon (Toronto, Canada) is President of Convergence Management Consultants, a leading strategic marketing consulting firm. He is a founding member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, President of the Association for the Advancement of Relationship Marketing, and the former head of Ernst & Young's (Toronto) strategic marketing consulting practice.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A well structured, informative view of how competitive intelligence can be used to better target preferred customers to improve the bottom line. The winning of customer and market share is becoming increasingly difficult in business today, and winning the right sort of customers from ever more aggressive competition is even harder. This book will help you understand the many issues involved and help you formulate appropriate strategies to improve business results."
— Ian Brown, Senior Market Analyst & Strategist, BT Government Marketing, British Telecom plc.

"The new marketplace challenge of observing competitors' practices and combining relationship marketing strategies has been made practical by Ian Gordon's new book. A must-read for any marketing professional."
— Rogers Turner Jr., Senior Manager, Relationship Marketing, Williams Communications

"In the fast-paced new economy, Competitor Targeting can help leaders maintain their market share and can allow the underdog to chip away at the gorilla's foothold. The techniques and insights in Competitor Targeting on how to weaken a competitor's chain of relationships, take uncontested territory, operate below the radar, and anticipate an attack from your competitors can allow a company to gain key insights, strengthen its position in the marketplace, and ultimately win more business."
— Rob Lalonde, Senior VP Products, Delano Technology

"In an era which competitors are often in the same channel or alliance as your own company, identifying and defeating those competitors has never been more complex. As Competitor Targeting demonstrates, competitive intelligence has evolved from simple information gathering into a sophisticated discipline. Practised as Mr. Gordon outlines, it will enable you to defeat your competitors, not only by learning more about them, but by understanding and responding to what your customers— who are your competitors' customers— value most about them."
— Stephen Bernhut, Editor, Business Journal

From the Back Cover

In an increasingly competitive business environment, Competitor Targeting gives you the tools you need to wage and win the business war. Competitor targeting is the process of identifying specific competitors and creating a strategic and tactical offence against them in order to increase your own company's differentiation, market share, and shareholder value relative to others in the industry. Most competitive intelligence (CI) professionals and books on the subject deal with high-level strategy, or are mired in increasingly sophisticated ways of gathering and storing competitive information. Competitor Targeting goes beyond traditional competitive intelligence gathering and benchmarking. It presents competition as a central component in business strategy and shows how CI can advance a company's competitive initiatives ethically, legally, and responsibly.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1st edition (December 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471644102
• ISBN-13: 978-0471644101
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,932,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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