Tag: Competition

The right general principle is that brand names and trade marks should be protected, not where there is a producer interest in doing so, but where there is a consumer detriment from failing to do so.

Competitive advantage is bound up with a company’s history and needs to be matched to market opportunity. When it is lost or the market evolves, the consequences are generally fatal.

Technology, globalisation and competition drive prices down. The status of positional goods, the rising cost of domestically produced labour-intensive services and the absence of vigorous competition push prices and inequality up.

Intellectual property rules are an attempt to strike a balance between conflicting public interests and the need to provide economic incentives. However, companies should find commercial success through new products, not new legislation.

Every business tells you that its economics is unique, and it’s rarely true. But for television in the twentieth century, it was true. But today this is no longer the case and like in any other market, people pay for what they want and show great diversity in what they do want.

Natural monopolies – industries in which it is difficult for more than one firm to survive - seem the easiest, most rewarding of business opportunities. It’s not as easy as you think.

The instinct that favours competitive solutions to problems of industrial structure is almost always sound. But the evolution of competitive markets is a process of experiment and discovery whose outcome is unpredictable.

A successful business is more often defined by the distinctiveness of its relationships with customers than by the distinctiveness of its production systems.

Just as in football, business success is not simply a matter of acquiring the best people, or the best technology, or the best resources. It is the team that wins and in this year’s World Cup it was the Italian team being more than the sum of its parts.

Trust was a real competitive advantage for mutual businesses. But the difficulty of meeting the conflicting expectations of different users and the slow adaptation to the requirements of changing technology explains why mutuality ceased to be a viable basis for stock exchanges.
However, if mutuality is not the answer to customers’ requirements for providers they can trust, the industry badly needs to find other answers.