Market Follower Strategy
This article covers meaning, types & example of Market Follower Strategy from marketing perspective.
What is Market Follower Strategy?
Market Follower strategy is a strategy of imitating the products, services and strategies from the market leader. The innovator or the leader bears the expense of developing the new product, bringing in the technology, breaking entry barriers and educating the market. However, another firm can come along and copy or improve on the new product.
Although it probably will not overtake the leader, the follower can achieve high profits because it did not bear any of the innovation expense. Many companies prefer to follow rather than challenge the market leader. Many runner-up companies do not challenge the market leader.
Types of Follower Strategies
The four follower strategies are as given below:
1. Counterfeiter: Copies the leader’s product and packages and sells it. E.g. copied music
2. Cloner: Copies the leader’s products as it is as well as name, packaging with slight variations. e.g. Brand name with slight variation. In this strategy, the product quality may not be same as the leader. That is what makes the strategy not a correct one but it is still used.
3. Imitator: Copies some of the things from leader’s product but maintains difference in packaging, and other factors.
4. Adaptor: Launches improved products over that of the innovator’s. The adaptor is not necessarily a wrong strategy but it is mostly done in the market. Big firms launch similar products with differentiation and improvements.
Example of Market Follower Strategy
There are numerous examples of such strategies.
We often see fragrances and deodorants which are sold in the market and are very similar to the original brand in the market but when you see closely it may be different in terms of look or color or the spellings of the brand name.
Also apparels is another area where a lot of such strategies are used. Similar clothing and logos are used but they are much cheaper and have slight differences from the leader products.
Hence, this concludes the definition of Market Follower Strategy along with its overview.
Browse the definition and meaning of more similar terms. The Management Dictionary covers over 1800 business concepts from 5 categories.
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