What Are Market Strategies?

What are examples of successful strategies used to topple the market leader?

• Interested in examples of a market leader with  >3x market share of the next player being unseated by a challenger (e.g., Siebel vs. Salesforce); especially b2b software examples. Consider product and marketing/PR strategies.

• Answer:

  Find the largest weaknesses and attack from there. What do I mean? Let's say large, long established enterprise company 'A' has billions of dollars. Tons of salespeople. And implementations in most of the Fortune 1000 companies. And they have a huge profit margin from licensing fees in their core product. Attacking them directly won't work. Selling a competing product for similar pricing is a waste of time. Large corporations are already dependent on the existing product. They won't take a risk on you. But these days budgets are tight. People probably hate those large, ever growing licensing fees. So take it from a different angle. Solve new problems. Focus on initiatives that need new technology. You may not have the big bucks to build a product that competes with them. But using open source technology, you can recruit thousands to help you compete. For example, Big Data is going to explode. Lots of new data is incoming. Build tools around that. Use open source to support it. Read up on MongoDB. Oracle is now touting their own NoSQL solution. But which NoSQL DB are people talking about most? How will it shake out? Who knows, but MongoDB has a $1.2 Billion with a B valuation. If you can focus on something that if your competitor built, it would cannibalize their existing business, they will be completely torn, and might well put their head in the sand. For example, Big Media companies know that television is changing. But despite the Hulu experiment, they aren't going to go whole hog in developing a competitor to their core business for as long as their cash cow is going strong. A YouTube didn't take them head on. They just let people upload mostly low quality content, but for free. The rest is history.