Rare Mettle: Gold and Silver Strategies to Succeed in Hostile Markets
研究了数百家公司在四十多个行业中的表现，发现成功应对敌对市场的企业遵循五大基本策略，但实施方式因规模而异：黄金级竞争者利用规模优势，白银级竞争者则依靠精准和灵活。
Hostile markets have low returns due to low market pricing. Most companies will eventually face a hostile market and would benefit from the experiences of managements who have successfully coped with hostility. In a nine-year effort, encompassing several hundred companies in more than forty industries, Windermere Associates has studied the strategies of companies who have performed well in this environment. All these companies pursued five basic strategies: they focused on large customers, but accepted others; they differentiated themselves from their competition in terms of reliability; they covered a broad spectrum of price points; they turned price into a commodity; and they emphasized high resource utilization. However, the successful companies were notably different from one another in how they implemented these themes. The differences related to their size. Gold competitors, one of the top two industry competitors, exploited their size—but with great discipline. Meanwhile, the smaller Silver competitors, ranked third or below in market share, succeeded with finesse and focus.