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An examination of marketing terms and strategies with copious case histories and examples of firms who have become market leaders in their field or (in some instances) have had their fingers burnt. Concludes by looking at strategic decision making and marketing as a means to gain reasonable returns given the appropriate circumstances.

The purpose of this article is to describe the rationale behind and analyze the results of a strategy in regards to changing conditions and market share dominance. For more than 20 years, with the growth in available product varieties, product and brand proliferation have become increasingly evident in many consumer markets.

This article examines how three L’Oréal mass market businesses, i.e. L’Oréal Paris, Lascad and Gemey-Maybelline-Garnier (GMG), managed proliferation activities between 1988 and 2012 on their domestic market. Data were extracted from the information resources, inc. (IRI) Census and Sample Databases (retail panel data), and information was collected from internal sources and semi-structured interviews with top executives. Brand performance was assessed using panel data structure analysis, as recommended by IRI and Nielsen. Some data, as they remain confidential, were not included in the paper.

The study reveals that when opportunities are lacking, demand is declining, and competition is fierce – the situation that marks most mature markets – a proliferation strategy actually can yield diminishing results and reduced brand dominance.

Offering broader lines appears to generate confusion and to be counterproductive in relation to theoretical assumptions. Additional research on proliferation strategies is needed, particularly in declining market conditions, which implies diminished demand and market saturation due to increased competition and isomorphic practices.

When deciding to extend product lines, managers should take into account competition and more qualitative factors than those included in the models developed by and for store brands. The respective positioning and marketing strategy (i.e. challenger and leader) of the brands involved have also to be considered.

Prior research on proliferation strategies has relied on strong assumptions such as increase in demand and unsaturated markets. Through these case studies, this article shows that making the shelf space denser affects brand dominance, particularly when market conditions change. These results challenge current thinking as, in facing internal and external contingencies, managers might think which scenario is most favorable for maintaining a dominant position: changing the structure of the market by reducing (i.e. concentration) or increasing the number of brands/products in the market.

This paper first attempts to analyze the issue of brand proliferation by a monopolist allowing transfer pricing as a channel to bridge headquarters and brand divisions, and then to view how the headquarters uses transfer pricing as a strategic device to encounter intra‐brand competition, inter‐brand competition and cross‐border profit‐shifting under an oligopolistic market.

This paper models cross‐country interactions in a Cournot‐Nash framework, and characterizes equilibrium that involves both transfer pricing and output decision. MNE's behavior is based on a two‐stage process in which the centralized headquarters' prior action on setting transfer pricing is to backup the decentralized subsidiaries in their output decision‐making.

It is demonstrated that MNEs have the incentive to manipulate their transfer prices in order to shift profit cross‐border. Higher transfer pricing enables brand divisions to collude easier in the intra‐brand competition model, and the level of transfer price hinges upon the strength of intra‐brand competition and inter‐brand competition. In addition, transfer pricing is affected by tax differences between two countries.

This paper provides the theoretical underpinning to see how headquarters may use transfer pricing as a strategic device to face intra‐ and inter‐brand competition that is visibly evident in many diverse industries.

The purpose of this paper is to show how authenticity limits businesses' responses to competition in the food and beverage industry.

This paper focuses on a unique dataset of over 300 breweries and more than 1.300 beer drinkers in Franconia (Germany) to test the impact of authenticity on firms' reactions to competition within geographic communities. The paper uses ordinary least squares (OLS) and fractional logit models.

The findings reveal that breweries tend to enlarge their product portfolio by introducing non-authentic products as a response to competition in geographic communities, while reducing their product diversity and engagement in non-authentic segments when preferences for authenticity prevail in the geographic community. The findings further suggest that in geographic communities where both competition and preferences for authenticity are present, firms tend to keep their product portfolios narrow and withdraw non-authentic products even when product proliferation strategies would be more efficient to deal with competition.

This paper offers novel insights on the impact of authenticity on product proliferation strategies for food and beverage businesses. By showing that expectations on authenticity can constrain firms' product portfolio even in the presence of competition, this paper contributes to contemporary discussions in the fields of strategic management and organization theory about the role of authenticity for food and beverage firms. Unlike previous studies focusing on the benefits of authenticity for firms, the present study is one of the first ones to highlight the negative spillovers of authenticity for firms operating in the food and beverage industry.

Nuclear proliferation in Asia is basically rooted in psycho-cultural complexes of their ruling elites who are engaged in a frantic search for national security, national identity, and influence by developing n-weapon capability. A propensity for acquiring a credible nuclear deterrence as a security guarantee against any potential threat from adverse or hostile neighbours, political and military elites in volatile regions such as South Asia, Middle East, and Northeast Asia are perpetually indulged in producing artificially insecurity syndrome among their people to legitimize the imperative of nuclear weapon building programme. Inter-Asian regional nuclear collaboration, for instance, between North Korea and Pakistan, between North Korea and Myanmar, between Iran and Pakistan, between Pakistan and China are alarming signs of fomenting the nuclear armament and missile race in Asia. Alexei Arbatov, Director of the Centre of International Security, Institute of the World Economy and International Relations, Russian Academy of Sciences; writes that with the ceasing of ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the two superpowers, nuclear proliferation has gained momentum in the horizontal proliferation in countries of volatile regions of Asia – India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya – with the flawed support systems of the NPT, IAEA, and Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). For instance, NPT does not offer any tangible benefits to those countries renouncing acquisition of nuclear weapons, nor does it “envision serious punishment for military nuclear activities” (Arbatov, 2004).

The purpose of this paper is to describe how one company built and sustained market leadership by implementing a market‐oriented business strategy involving defensive and offensive management.

With an historical approach, this article examines how L'Oréal's Consumer Products Division increased its dominance in its domestic cosmetics industry. Data were extracted from the IRI Census Database (retail panel data). Some data, as they remain confidential, were not included in the paper.

The transition from an offensive to a defensive management style (and vice versa) is part of the dialectic in relations between the company and its environment, including consumers (demand), competitors (their behaviour in the market) and market conditions (growth, stability, decline) in an extended sense (see Kohli and Jaworski).

The joint management of offensive and defensive market‐oriented strategies leads to enhanced competitive positioning and increased market share of a portfolio of brands and products.

The trade‐off between offensive and defensive management, involving whether managers are influenced by or influence the structure and the behaviour of market players, depends on their mental disposition toward challenges in increasingly competitive mass markets.

Prior discussions of offensive and defensive management approaches have remained mainly theoretical. Through the illustration of the undisputable leader of the cosmetics sector, this study offers a practical example that can help companies reconsider how they differentiate themselves from competitors with respect to market conditions. This case offers an initial investigation of offensive and defensive management.

The high‐tech companies that will succeed in this environment will fundamentally revise their strategies from the historical technology‐driven product proliferation to strategies that control the rate of technological advances, segment markets according to distinctive customer needs, and design products to respond to those needs.

This article discusses power and resistance in commercial environments. It finds that a company's ability to realize its goals (fulfill its strategy) is a function of its ability to deal with resistance; to recognize it first of all, and then to find ways to overcome it, which inevitably involve the use of power in some form.

The paper examines strategies used by pharmaceutical companies for getting drugs prescribed, programs by credit card companies to defeat resistance to card proliferation, and strategies by software companies to overcome resistance in OEMs to product acceptance.

The author concludes that the success of the products/companies studied is explained by their capacity for overcoming resistance, that it cannot be attributed to a compelling vision statement, or a five‐year plan, a competitive analysis, or any of the other strategy approaches used by the majority of companies.

All companies, presumably, have goals, and all companies operate in power‐dependent environments, and all companies, whether they recognize it or not, face resistance beyond the existence of competitors. The key is to be able to see resistance, and to understand how it is manifesting itself against a specific goal.

The thesis of the paper is important to practitioners because it gets them thinking about resistance beyond the existence of competitors. It reveals other, more powerful sources of opposition, and gives them a new platform for strategy based on finding power over resistance.

This paper aims to investigate how the current size and structure of a branded product portfolio impacts new product performance for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), testing the long-standing proposition that extending a firm’s brand and product portfolio too far is a dangerous proposition that may damage the market performance of the firm’s new product launches.

Aspects associated with brand size and structure that may impact new product performance are operationalized along two key dimensions: within-category (scale) and cross-category (scope). The impact of the brand’s scale and scope on the sales performance of newly commercialized products by the brand is empirically investigated in the context of FMCG. Over 2,000 new products launched in 2009 and 2010 across 31 food and non-food FMCG product categories in the USA are included in the regression-based analysis.

The authors find strong evidence that brands with broader within-category scale and cross-category scope overall are associated with more successful new product introductions, and that these influences generally are driven more by increased product trial than by repeat or persistence. The authors argue that the higher new product performance observed for more established and proliferated brands may be attributed to advantages of firm product development abilities and product acceptance by the marketplace.

The current results serve to temper the strong cautions set forth in much of the marketing literature about the dangers of overextending the firm’s brand and product portfolio. These results also suggest that future research should be conducted to further understand more nuanced implications of how best to grow the scale and scope of the firm’s brand and product portfolio.