Market Your Way to Growth: 8 Ways to Win

1 Grow by Building Your Market Share

Poor firms ignore their competitors; average firms copy their competitors; winning firms lead their competitors.

In a recent survey, the Conference Board asked CEOs to rank various business priorities and found unsurprisingly, that the top priority was business growth. Procter & Gamble (P&G) CEO Bob McDonald highlighted the point by saying “We've got to grow; that's the main thing.”¹ Growth is the goal in normal times, and is especially the goal in depressed times.

Growth, however, is not that easy to achieve, even in normal times. And even before the Great Recession started in 2008, times were far from normal. Excess supply existed in almost every industry. Companies found it hard to raise or even hold prices. Their margins were low and in danger of getting lower.

The onset of recession and its slow recovery have only worsened the situation. Companies find that they don't merely need a growth strategy; they need a defense strategy. However, they're far more lax about defense than about growth—since growth is where the action is and where the rewards go. CEOs don't get kudos for keeping what they have in place; they get kudos for expanding it.² Yet in hard times, the attacks on one's core business will increase in frequency and severity as a result of competitors' desperation. Since many companies are losing customers or sales, they are willing to cut prices and resort to aggressive or predatory moves against other competitors to preserve ...