过去三十余年国内消费市场处于增量扩张周期，空白赛道、未被满足的需求大量存在，企业仅需通过规模化扩张、渠道覆盖的跑马圈地策略，即可获得对应市场份额。当前行业增量红利已完全出清，这一感知已在商事主体中形成广泛共识。
线上流量渗透率突破天花板，线下实体网点供给显著过剩，行业同质化竞争加剧，低价倾销导致的劣币驱逐良币现象频发，订单规模持续收缩、利润率中枢下移，是当前国内多数企业面临的共性经营困境。这一背景下的企业增长来源，本质上只有存量市场的份额转移。
商业竞争是贯穿产业发展全周期的核心命题，仅在增量周期中，企业对竞争的敏感度被市场自然增长所稀释。存量周期下生存压力凸显，企业对战略规划、增长体系搭建的需求显著提升，而基于竞争博弈的策略制定，是企业守住生存基本盘的必要前提。
市场普遍存在认知误区：将竞争等同于价格战等同质化对抗。这类属于最低层级的竞争策略，且会将企业拖入负向循环的陷阱——低定价直接压缩利润空间，反向传导导致产品研发、服务体系投入不足，最终将竞争维度收窄至价格单一要素，相当于主动放弃多维度竞争的可能性，陷入单一赛道的恶性内卷。
高阶竞争策略的核心是不对称打击：基于自身核心能力边界，瞄准竞争对手的能力盲区，在对方的优势赛道中采用其无法快速跟进的竞争方式，实现降维打击。典型案例如早期电商行业竞争中，京东针对淘宝C2C模式下的品控、履约痛点，锚定B2C自营模式，主打“正品保障、自有仓储配送、时效可控”的核心差异点，本质是脱离对手的优势战场，重新定义竞争规则。
新消费品牌的破局同样遵循这一逻辑：传统碳酸饮料赛道中，可口可乐、百事可乐凭借口味心智、渠道网络构建了极高的进入壁垒，元气森林避开“经典口味”的正面竞争，切入“0糖0脂0卡”的健康化细分需求，以气泡水品类作为差异化载体，撕开市场缺口，这是典型的侧翼包抄策略。
而在汽车产业的变革周期中，传统豪华品牌BBA的价值锚点是操控性能、品牌底蕴、豪华配置，特斯拉进入市场后完全绕开这套评价体系，重新建立“智能座舱、自动驾驶、加速性能、使用成本”的全新价值标准，将百年车企拉入自身具备技术优势的竞争赛道，实现了用户认知的底层重塑——让对手积累百年的传统优势，在新的评价体系下失去战略价值。
竞争博弈的范畴不仅局限于用户抢夺，更包含全产业链的稀缺资源控制。现制茶饮行业的终局竞争核心就是点位资源争夺：核心商圈的优质门店位置是供给刚性的稀缺资源，自身多布局一个点位，即等于直接压缩对手的布局空间。供应链端同理，与上游核心原材料供应商签订独家供应协议，相当于直接掌控对手的供给命脉。因此竞争博弈是覆盖全产业链的体系化对抗，谁掌握了稀缺资源的控制权，谁就掌握了竞争的主导权。
竞争策略制定的核心禁忌是盲目跟随竞争对手：过度聚焦对手动作会导致自身战略陷入被动反应模式，最终丧失战略定力与自身节奏。正确的路径是回归自身核心能力识别：明确哪些能力属于自身独有、且对手短期无法通过资源投入复刻的壁垒，可能是组织能力、数据资产、独家技术专利，或是长期积累的用户情感心智。将核心资源集中投入到这类壁垒的构建中，逐步建立对手无法逾越的竞争护城河，才是存量竞争下的长期增长路径。最终你会发现，竞争的终极价值不仅是抢夺市场份额，更是在持续博弈中倒逼自身完成能力迭代，进化为更具竞争力的市场主体。
Over the past three decades, China’s consumer market has stayed in an incremental expansion cycle with numerous untapped tracks and unmet demands. Enterprises could easily capture market shares merely through scaled expansion and land-grabbing channel coverage strategies. Currently, industrial incremental dividends have been fully exhausted, which has become a widely acknowledged consensus among all market entities.
The penetration rate of online traffic has hit the ceiling, while offline physical outlets are in substantial oversupply. Industries are plagued by intensified homogeneous competition. The phenomenon that inferior products crowd out superior ones caused by predatory pricing occurs frequently, bringing shrinking order volume and a declining profit margin center, which have become common operational dilemmas for most domestic enterprises. Under such circumstances, corporate growth essentially derives only from market share transfer within the stock market.
Commercial competition runs through the entire industrial development cycle. During the incremental growth phase, enterprises are less sensitive to competition thanks to natural market expansion. In the stock market era, rising survival pressure drives enterprises to attach greater importance to strategic planning and growth system building. Formulating strategies based on competitive games serves as an essential foundation for consolidating core business fundamentals.
There is a prevalent misconception in the market that competition is equivalent to price wars and other homogeneous confrontations. Such low-level competitive tactics will trap enterprises in a negative cycle. Low prices directly squeeze profit margins, resulting in insufficient investment in product R&D and service systems. Eventually, competition is narrowed down to price alone, which means giving up multi-dimensional competitive advantages and falling into vicious involution within a single track.
High-level competition centers on asymmetric strikes. Based on its own core competencies, an enterprise targets rivals’ capability blind spots and adopts competitive methods that competitors cannot follow swiftly in their dominant fields to achieve dimensionality reduction strikes. For instance, in the early e-commerce competition era, targeting the quality control and fulfillment pain points of Taobao’s C2C model, JD.com focused on the B2C self-operated model and highlighted core advantages including genuine product guarantee, self-built warehousing & delivery and controllable delivery efficiency. Essentially, it stepped out of rivals’ dominant battlefields and reshaped competition rules.
New consumer brands also achieve breakthroughs following this logic. In the traditional carbonated beverage sector, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have built formidable entry barriers via solid brand cognition and extensive channel networks. Genki Forest avoided head-on competition over classic flavors, targeted health-oriented segmented demands for zero-sugar, zero-fat and zero-calorie products, and took sparkling water as a differentiated breakthrough to carve out market space, which is a typical flanking strategy.
During the transformation of the automotive industry, traditional luxury brands represented by BBA take handling performance, brand heritage and premium configurations as core value anchors. After entering the market, Tesla completely broke away from this evaluation system and established brand-new value criteria focusing on intelligent cockpits, autonomous driving, acceleration performance and usage costs. It drew century-old established automakers into the competition track where it holds technological advantages and fundamentally reshaped user cognition, rendering rivals’ century-old traditional strengths strategically valueless under the new evaluation system.
Competitive games involve not only user acquisition, but also the control of scarce resources across the entire industrial chain. Site resource competition stands at the core of the final-phase rivalry in the freshly-made tea industry. Premium store locations in core business districts are rigidly scarce resources; securing more such locations directly curtails rivals’ expansion space. The same applies to the supply chain. Signing exclusive supply agreements with core upstream raw material suppliers means gaining direct control over competitors’ supply sources. Therefore, competitive games are systematic confrontations covering the whole industrial chain, and the party that takes charge of scarce resources gains the initiative in competition.
It is a major taboo in strategy formulation to blindly follow competitors. Excessive focus on rivals’ moves will make one’s own strategy passive and make it hard to stick to established strategies and development rhythm. The right approach is to refocus on identifying inherent core capabilities, and define exclusive barriers that rivals cannot replicate in the short term simply by increasing investment, such as organizational capabilities, data assets, proprietary technical patents and long-established user brand perception. Concentrating core resources on building such barriers to form insurmountable competitive moats is the long-term growth path amid stock market competition. Ultimately, you will find that the ultimate value of competition lies not merely in seizing market shares, but in driving internal capability iteration through continuous rivalry and evolving into more competitive market players.