Strategic tools for the practising manager

THIS WEEK: THE INDIAN GAMING MARKET

The gaming market is defined as a combination of arcade games, internet parlours, PC games, video games and mobile games.

The size of Indian gaming market is estimated at Rs 335 crore in 2005 and projected to reach Rs 1,479 crore by 2008.

The Indian gaming market currently accounts for just 0.25 per cent of the world's market for gaming.

PC games contribute to 39 per cent market share, followed by consoles, which contribute to 30 per cent of market share.

Consoles will be the biggest market capturers. Their market size is expected to increase to Rs 234 crore by 2008

In India, an average gamer comes from SEC A cluster, aged 20 years with monthly household income more than Rs 30,000.

The market is significantly male-dominated, with women accounting for only 12 per cent of gamers.

Kit by Technopak Advisors

Selections from management journals
NUGGETS

For every new entrant, and every innovation launched by an existing competitor, there is at least one incumbent seeking to defend its market share and profit.

Yet market defence has attracted much less attention than market attack. Managers repeatedly talk about growth. They spend little time talking about the actions they need to take to ensure that they maintain their marketing assets. This is a serious weakness in strategy and marketing.

Defence against competitive attack poses an important problem and the issues facing the defender are different to those facing the attacker.

The article aims to help major incumbent players understand the marketing environment in which they are currently leaders, identify likely sources of attack to their position and develop strategies to defend it, by fighting on a battleground on which they can win.

Defending against new entrants: Let's hang on to what we've got
By John H Roberts,
Marketing Insight,edition 6
London Business School

Read the complete article at http://www.london.edu/executiveeducation/marketinginsight.htm

Of all the competing objectives every company faces, three pairs stand out: profitability versus growth, the short term versus the long term, and the whole organisation versus the units.

In each case, progress on one front usually comes at the expense of progress on the other. The authors researched the performance of more than 1,000 companies worldwide over the past two decades and found that most struggle to succeed across the three tensions.

From 1983 to 2003, for instance, only 32 per cent of these companies more often than not achieved positive profitability and revenue growth at the same time.

The problem, the authors discovered, is not so much that managers don't recognise the tensions. Rather, it is that managers frequently don't focus on the tension that matters most to their company.

The authors describe how companies can select the right tension, what traps they may fall into when they focus on one side over the other and how to escape these traps by managing to the bonds between objectives.

Managing the right tension
By Dominic Dodd and Ken Favaro
Harvard Business Review,
December 2006

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