【正文】 lements of the model don’t matter as much as the interactions among them. Consider Inter bookings for airline tickets, which don’t deliver the kind of cost reductions to traditional airlines that they do to lowcost carriers. First, lowcost players generate 98% of their bookings through their Web sites, while only 20% of incumbents’ customers use the Inter to make reservations. Inter bookings are more attractive to the leisure travelers who use lowcost carriers than to business travelers, who often fly to multiple destinations. Consequently, when traditional airlines set up Interbased booking systems, the impact on their costs is limited. Second, an Interbased reservation system is inexpensive to develop and maintain when all the aircraft in a fleet are identical, there is only one cabin class, tickets are not refundable, and passengers can’t reserve seats. However, the traditional airlines’ systems must provide for multiple cabin classes, handle several kinds of tickets, provide several levels of refunds, and reserve seats, making them expensive investments. Third, most incumbents participate in industrywide reservation systems such as Sabre, which robs them of control over some seats. Finally, the traditional airlines have set up works of travel agents, which would rebel if the carriers made a plete shift to direct bookings. For all those reasons, traditional carriers are unable to reduce their booking costs to the levels the discount airlines have achieved. Slashing prices usually lowers profits for all incumbents without driving the lowcost entrant out of business. I learned that firsthand while serving as a consultant to a European teleequipment provider that was peting against traditional rivals as well as a lowcost Asian petitor for a multimilliondollar contract in Africa. All the bidders kept cutting prices in order to best the Asian rival’s offer, which proved to be the lowest after every round of bidding. Eventually, the tele giants discovered that the Asian pany had offered a 40% discount on the lowest price the customer could negotiate with its rivals! Not surprisingly, the lowcost pany won the contract. In addition, although the tele giants would not have made profits on their lowest bids, the Asian contender seemed likely to do so. When Differentiation Works When businesses finally realize they can’t win a price war with lowcost players, they try to differentiate their products in a lastditch attempt at coexistence. This strategy, the consultant’s favorite antidote, takes many forms. Companies, we’re told, should adopt the following approaches: Design cool products, as, say, Apple and Bang amp。 and contributor issues, or the other players in the industry whose selfinterest or profiles may affect the oute of a price war. (For a more detailed explanation of such analyses, see the sidebar ―Analyzing the Battleground.‖) Companies that step back and examine those four areas carefully often find that they actually have quite a few different optionsincluding defusing the conflict, fighting it out on several fronts, or retreating. We’ll look at some of those strategies and how panies have deployed them successfully. Stop the War Before It Starts There are several ways to stop a price war before it starts. One is to make sure your petitors understand the rationale behind your pricing policies. In other words, reveal your strategic intentions. Price matching policies, everyday low pricing, and other public statements may municate to petitors that you intend to fight a price war using all possible resources. But frequently these declarations about low prices, or about not engaging in price promotions, aren’t lowprice strategies at all. Such announcements are simply a way to tell petitors that you prefer to pete on dimensions other than price. When your petitors agree that such petition will be more profitable than peting on price, they’ll tend to go along. That is precisely what happened when WinnDixie followed the Big Star supermarket chain in North Carolina and announced that it, too, would meet or beat mutual rival Food Lion’s prices. After two years, the number of equipriced products among 79 monly purchased brand items at the supermarkets had more than doubled. Further, the overall market price level had increased for these products. What happened? The stores stopped peting on price. In fact, the data suggest that Food Lion raised its prices after its petitors announced they would match Food Lion’s prices. Tactic Example Nonprice Responses Reveal your strategic intentions and capabilities Offer to match petitors39。 短學(xué)期課程報(bào)告 外 文 翻 譯 題 目 價(jià)格戰(zhàn)的研究綜述 學(xué) 院 商學(xué)院 專 業(yè) 市場(chǎng)營(yíng)銷 班 級(jí) 學(xué) 號(hào) 學(xué)生姓名 指導(dǎo)教師 審核意見(jiàn)： 指導(dǎo)教師（簽名） 年 月 日 一、外文原文 （一）標(biāo)題： How to Fight a Price War 原文： In the battle to capture the customer, panies use a wide range of tactics to ward off petitors. Increasingly, price is the weapon of choice – and frequently the skirmishing degenerates into a price war. Creating low price appeal is often the goal, but the result of one retaliatory price slashing after another is often a precipitous decline in industry profits. Look at the airline price wars of 1992. When American Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and other . carriers went toetotoe in matching and exceeding one another’s reduced fares, the result was record volumes of air traveland record losses. Some estimates suggest that the overall losses suffered by the industry that year exceed the bined profits for