Competitive Strategy and Market Positioning

Competitive Strategy and Market Positioning is a 5-day senior commercial strategy course delivered by Mars Training Centre UK in London, Paris, Dubai, Madrid and Chicago — designed for directors, general managers and senior commercial leaders responsible for the position their organisation holds in its markets.

Competitive position is the foundation of profitability. Where you sit in your industry, what you stand for in the customer's mind, and what you do that the next competitor cannot easily copy — these are the questions that determine whether margins compound or erode. They are also the questions most senior teams discuss less rigorously than they should. This programme is built for senior leaders who want to put real analytical discipline back into the question of where they compete, how they win, and what their position is actually worth.

Across five focused days, you will work through the major frameworks of competitive strategy — Porter's generic strategies, the resource-based view, Blue Ocean, positioning theory, jobs-to-be-done — apply them to real cases drawn from British, European, Gulf and Asian markets, and build a competitive strategy for an area of your own business. The programme is delivered by senior practitioners with executive and commercial-strategy experience.

What You Will Learn

• Diagnose your industry structure and your firm's position within it.
• Apply Porter's generic strategies, the resource-based view and Blue Ocean thinking with discipline.
• Map competitors in a way that drives decisions, not just slides.
• Define a credible source of competitive advantage and stress-test its durability.
• Design a market positioning that is sharp, defensible and consistent with the operating model.
• Build a coherent value proposition for chosen customer segments.
• Set pricing in line with the chosen position rather than against the cost base.
• Detect commoditisation signals early and respond to them deliberately.
• Lead the organisational change required when competitive position must shift.

How You Will Benefit

You will leave with a working competitive strategy for an area of your business, a structured way of thinking about position and advantage, and a Mars Certificate of Completion.

Your organisation will gain a senior leader who can lead disciplined competitive-strategy conversations at executive level, challenge slack assumptions about advantage, and produce strategies that are commercially coherent rather than aspirational.

Who This Programme Is For

This programme is designed for senior leaders responsible for commercial position, including:

• Chief Commercial Officers and Chief Strategy Officers
• Directors of business units, product and customer
• General managers and country managers
• Heads of marketing, pricing and customer insight
• Heads of sales and key-account management at senior level
• Family-business principals shaping commercial direction
• Senior public-sector executives responsible for service positioning

The seniority floor is senior manager and above. The course is delivered in person over five consecutive days and carries a fee of £4,950.