If you travel in your electric Renault Zoe across major roads in Europe, you might be able to readily recharge at stations in France, the Netherlands, and Germany. These countries are leading the way in terms of the number of charging stations available in the continent. Other nations have lower numbers but are looking for ways to respond to the growing demand for electric vehicles. Overall, the European Union has more than 300,000 charging stations, with plans to substantially increase that number in the coming years.¹

In places with the right charging infrastructure, it may be easy to drive up to a station and plug in. If we pull back the layers, however, we'll see that great efforts have been made to get the battery rechargers in their place. This is especially true in Europe, where plans to build efficient battery‐renewing stations started long before the charging units popped up.

Interestingly—and of significance for our discussion—the power behind these recharging places didn't come from a single player. This is because the resources required to construct an ultra‐fast, high‐power charging infrastructure are enormous. The project was simply too much for a single company to take on.

Therefore, several years ago, auto manufacturers from various parts of the world got together. They decided to collaborate to install a charging infrastructure in Europe. The BMW Group, Daimler AG, Ford, and the Volkswagen Group, together with Audi and Porsche, pooled their resources.² They laid out plans to build charging units, which would support their up‐and‐coming electric vehicles (EV). The project's goals included making electric‐powered cars more acceptable to the public eye and shifting them to become mainstream. This, in turn, could drive up EV sales for all manufacturers involved.

The collaboration exemplifies a key characteristic for companies—and specifically marketers—moving forward. Take note of the players involved. Aren't they competitors? you might ask. The answer, of course, is a resounding yes! Are they working together to create a resource that will serve their individual purposes? Again, the response is an overwhelming yes!

Welcome to the playing field of today and tomorrow. Times have changed and are continuing to evolve. To stay alive, corporations need to look to their competitors and work together, to a certain extent.

There are limitations to this strategy, of course. To fully understand the balance between cooperating and staying competitive, let's explore the dynamics that are affecting these collaborative trends (see Figure 3.1). To do so, we'll turn to our omnihouse model and dive into the “dynamics” section. We'll look at the 5Ds, which stands for the drivers of this collaborative trend.

What's Shifting Our Marketing World

Let's consider the five drivers that are affecting how companies compete. These factors are related to technology, the political and legal environment, the economy, social and cultural factors, and market conditions. We'll consider each of these briefly.

Change Is in the Air

These forces are stirring up change, which we can see in our omnihouse model. In Figure 3.2, you'll find the 4Cs depicted in what we call the 4C diamond model. Change, in turn, affects the way companies operate, compete, and interact with customers.

Fujifilm―a giant in the photography film industry―got knocked down when they couldn't shift to the digital age and keep up with others in the space. This could have led to the company's demise. Instead, team members figured out a way to be agile and shift gears. As a result, Fujifilm pivoted its technological applications to serve the health care and cosmetic fields.⁷

In addition to adapting at full force, some players are becoming more aggressive. Take the case of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), established in 1984. ICBC worked hard to grow and increase in size. In 2007, it beat Citibank, which at the time held the leading position in the banking industry, in terms of total assets. During the following years, ICBC has remained the largest bank in the world.⁸

Much of the success of Fujifilm and ICBC can be attributed to a growth mindset. This goes beyond a focus of offering unique products and services. Richard D'Aveni, a US thinker, stated that a traditional competitive advantage approach was no longer relevant in aggressive market competitions.⁹

Competing amid the Drivers

To fully understand the topic of collaborating in this emerging environment, we'll take a careful look at the “competitor” component of the model. Let's think about why it's important to collaborate both with direct and indirect competitors. We'll start with a glance at how collaboration works. We'll then move on to discuss what companies need to know about today and tomorrow's competition, and how to balance both collaborating and competing going forward.

As we saw in the auto industry example, the unlikeliest of competitors are teaming up to a certain degree. There are others that also support our case, such as Samsung and Apple. These two giants found a mutually beneficial collaboration. Samsung agreed to supply Apple with an edge‐to‐edge Super Retina OLED screen for the iPhone X. Apple, for its part, shares knowledge about its suppliers. This gives Samsung an opportunity to learn and elevate the quality of its products.¹⁰

Let's go over the three main reasons organizations are collaborating today:

• They cannot face the significant drivers individually. By uniting, they share knowledge, grow more robust, and solve problems quickly.
• A single company may not have the financial backing to overcome a challenge. When facing large issues, firms can pool their resources to share the costs involved.
• Together companies can achieve a win‐win situation, as opposed to a zero‐sum game. If they establish a standard or platform in their industry, they'll all strengthen their position in the market.

Although collaboration has its strengths, let's keep in mind that companies are still working to achieve their own goals. As we consider entrepreneurial marketing, it's essential to keep several factors in mind when competing today. Here's a brief overview of competency, capabilities, intangible resources, strategy, execution, and domain.

• Building a distinctive competency is urgent. Having a competitive advantage is no longer enough; companies must form a distinctive competency.¹¹ This might encompass their culture or operating system.
• Appropriate capability development is required. Companies need everything from basic capabilities, such as managerial skills, to complex abilities, such as innovation, strong leadership, and customer management. Capabilities that are honed continuously and developed consistently will, in turn, shape competencies.¹²
• Intangible resources are increasingly important. Tangible resources, in general, are easier to imitate than intangible resources and can be obtained from the open market. Intangible resources are usually more difficult because they undergo a relatively long formation process. Hence, investment in intangible resources―including human capital and talent―has become a must to establish competitiveness.
• Robust strategy must align with policies. A company should develop its strategy based on relevant macro‐environmental conditions, competitive situations, and relevant competitors and customers. Developing policies is the next step. Organizations will want policies to fall under the same umbrella; they should complement each other and support the strategy.
• Execution should focus on productivity. The company should carry out all business operations efficiently and use assets effectively. When it comes to productivity, we can't compromise. Management can use several financial ratios to measure productivity levels. There are also nonfinancial measures that reflect on performance. Some of these include customer loyalty, product quality improvement, and employee productivity.¹³
• Clearly define competition domain. Companies must ensure that they are always compatible and have the necessary competitive advantages wherever they participate in the competition domain. The competition domain can also adjust in line with changes in the business environment and business development can redefine it from time to time.

The Future of Competition

In line with the increasingly dynamic macro environment, competition will become more challenging because the future is increasingly full of uncertainties. Several issues will define the competition now and in the future. Companies should pay attention to these trends.

Balancing Competition and Collaboration

There are several advantages and disadvantages in competing and collaborating (see Table 3.1). Regardless, a challenge for companies is to make the most of the advantages. At the same time, they'll look for ways to mitigate the impact or eliminate the causes of disadvantages.

Collaboration also opens the opportunity to increase the company's flexibility in dealing with changes that occur rapidly in the business environment it faces. This flexibility is an essential capability in dealing with conditions full of uncertainties that require modification or even the adoption of new business models. For example, in 2020, JD.com was the only e‐commerce brand in China with consistent product delivery during COVID‐19, beating Alibaba. JD.com, which is one of the biggest e‐commerce platforms, collaborated with their merchants to predict and send supplies to ensure product availability. With this flexibility, JD.com became one of the earliest in delivering virtual night‐time party experiences by joining alcohol brands and music groups.³⁵

With the same resources, the company can reach a higher level of sales more quickly and easily achieve a better level of economies of scale. Even further, if the company can develop various other products and carry out cross‐selling or upselling with the same resources―and core competency―it will also achieve better economies of scope.

For example, the invention and development of additive manufacturing is one way for a company to achieve better economies of scale and scope. Additive manufacturing, popularly known as 3D printing, is a process of creating objects from data input, initially made for a company that needed to make small manufacturing parts that would be expensive to purchase from the available supply chain. This technology helps the company manage low‐scale productions because it can print some parts with the exact quantity they need. Hence, additive manufacturing helps the company achieve economies of scale because the company can control the cost of prototyping.³⁶

One distinctive trait of a successful company with digital capabilities is collaboration. Digital transformation blurs bureaucracy and compartmental work functions.³⁷ Collaboration can also shorten the process from the idea stage to commercialization, where it can answer business challenges related to the speed in making a product available in the market according to the rapidly changing customer demands. Another story of collaboration in commercial activities is Marhen J., a vegan Korean fashion brand with a large fanbase in Southeast Asia. When entering Thailand, Marhen J. created a showcase in Samsung stores to show customers how they'd deliver fashion and technology experience to people's daily lives. The campaign resulted from both Korean brands supporting each other and positioning themselves in customers' daily lives.³⁸

As an African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We can see that “go alone” means we choose an approach to compete, and “go together” means we choose a collaborative approach. Going alone can quickly decide things within our management ecosystem, but we need to collaborate to be sustainable in the long term. The company's challenge is how to combine the dichotomy. Not fast or sustainable, but fast and sustainable. This illustration explains why a collaborative approach while competing is becoming an increasingly relevant approach.

Cooperation between competing organizations―or coopetition―to achieve common objectives has become a prerequisite for global competitiveness and innovativeness.³⁹ The ideal coopetition is to seek to obtain the advantages of each partnership and become more competitive. According to this approach, the parties involved can integrate and synergize the increasingly needed strengths to face a challenging business environment, especially in crisis times.⁴⁰

Greater Challenges, Stronger Collaboration

As mentioned previously, a challenging condition that is increasingly difficult for companies to deal with individually, if their resources, capabilities, and competencies―or sources of advantages―are indeed minimal, encourages companies to collaborate. By looking at the two aspects―namely various challenges and sources of advantages―we find three conditions.:

Third Condition: Challenges > Sources of Advantages

This condition occurs when advantages become limited and companies do not have sufficient time to strengthen, even though the challenges arise quickly. This third condition can threaten the sustainability of the company. That is why entrepreneurial efforts and creativity are needed to build networks with various parties―including competitors―in a business ecosystem. Within this condition, collaboration is necessary to overcome the shortage of sources of advantages and face these formidable challenges.

Contrary to the first condition, in this third condition, we need to build a network to find compatible partners to complement each other's lack of advantages. Companies must focus their attention on external aspects and explore relevant sources of advantages (see Figure 3.3).

From these three conditions, it is clear that collaboration is vital, significantly when the company's sustainability is compromised. Collaboration is in line with the shared‐economy principle, which is now commonplace in the era of high connectivity with solid interdependence. Companies can collaborate by becoming part of a platform ecosystem or even becoming a platform provider, and then invite other companies to join.

A company can also collaborate with elements in a conventional value chain that is more static and linear. This might occur between a company and vendors and channels. With collaborations like this, companies can have a much better product management capability and reach their customers more massively, enabling them to implement better customer management. Companies can achieve product and market suitability more efficiently and effectively because of seamless working relationships, integrated systems, and an open flow of information to other elements in the value chain.

Key Takeaways

• To understand the balance between cooperating and staying competitive, marketers can turn to the five drivers (5Ds): technology, the political and legal environment, the economy, social and cultural factors, and market conditions.
• Organizations collaborate to face the five drivers, to pool their resources, and to strengthen their position in the market.
• When competing, companies need to build a distinctive competency, develop capabilities, invest in intangible resources, align strategies with policies, focus on productivity, and define the competition domain.
• Going forward, competing will be more digitalized, involve more unforgiving players, have a level playing field, be harder to differentiate, move at a faster pace, and have stronger interdependency.
• As they collaborate and compete, companies will look for ways to maximize their advantages and mitigate their disadvantages.