Competitive marketing strategy occurs within departments, across organizations, and within people’s heads as a way of doing business. Competitive marketing strategy is defined as

The key elements are:

1. Market-oriented: the strategy is based upon the needs and wants of the marketplace.
2. Establishes a profitable market position: the end goal of the strategy is tomake a profit in the for-profit sector or to meet alternative metrics such as in the not-for-profit sector. In the latter case for example, a road safety campaign based on a particular marketing strategy might ‘make a profit’ if there is a decline in road injuries and deaths attributed to it.
3. Establishes a sustainable market position: marketing strategy is not about one-off transactions. The aim is to reach a point where an organization finds a place in the market that fits its available marketing resources.
4. Forces that determine industry competition: these are all the complex mix of ingredients that create the marketing ‘whirlwind’, such as government regulation, global competition, or the extent of buyers’ knowledge and understanding of a particular market.
5. Continuously creating and developing a competitive advantage: few (if any) organizations can just rest on their laurels, so the idea is to find a spot where, if need be, the primary challenges can be tackled. Not all organizations have to do this on a continuous basis of course, but if it had to, an organization with a sound competitive marketing strategy would be able to. A simple example: you might make the best tomato ketchup in the best-recognized glass bottles, but if the market moves towards plastic ‘squeezy’ bottles you need to be able to adapt.
6. Potential sources that exist in a firm’s value chain: competitive marketing strategy relates to what value any organization wants to create using its available marketing resources.