Competition:an inspirational marketing tool

Eric Waarts

ERIM Inaugural Address Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Abstract: Competition is the engine behind innovation and dynamics in the marketplace. Sectors like public transport,water,energy and telecom are liberalized and deregulated by nationalandinternationalgovernmentsinordertoincreasecompetitionamongcompanies. The ultimate goals are to create transparent markets with ample opportunities for new firms to enter, fair prices and a varied, innovative range of consumer products and services. Competition may indeed stimulate firms to run faster, and to create better products and services by using effectivemarketing practices.This can,for example,readily be observed in the high technology sector. In that sense, competition can be an inspirational and stimulating marketing tool. At the same time, competition can have destructive effectsaswell,whenfirms’primarygoalsbecometobeat orharmtheircompetitors.Thiswas, for example, recently the case in a taxi war in Amsterdam. Constructive and destructive behaviours are partly determined by both the characteristics and rules of the market, the manager and his company. Research is required to fully understand the effects of the various factors on competitive behaviour and subsequently on the performance of the market. This is essential, both for theory development, and for governments, companies and consumers as well.

Keywords: company performance; competition; competitive interaction; drivers; industry; innovation; marketing research; marketing strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M M31 M39 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-08-26
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/1519/EIA-2004-022-MKT%20905892068%20WAARTS.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ems:euriar:1519

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERIM Inaugural Address Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).