The Foreign Invasion of the American Sporting Goods Market

Abstract

American trade policies initiated after the Second World War opened American sporting goods markets to foreign competitors during the 1960s and 1970s. Foreign competitors from Japan, the European Economic Community, Britain, and the Soviet Bloc countries emphasized competitive strategies that manipulated elements of the marketing mix to achieve a competitive advantage. American sporting goods manufacturers felt the sting of this foreign competition when off-shore competitors captured large shares of specific segments within the sporting goods market during the 1960s and early 1970s. American sporting goods manufacturers retaliated by adopting similar strategies to manipulate marketing mix. Using key examples from baseball, tennis, golf, and track and field, we trace the development of the foreign invasion into American sporting goods markets as a way of gaining an understanding of the important competitive concepts that derive from it. We show how the responses of American sporting goods firms to the foreign invasion followed the same competitive strategy of market-mix manipulation as a way of demonstrating how the foreign invasion influenced contemporary competitive strategies. The analysis ends by emphasizing the importance of market analysis as the basis for the development of competitive strategies that seek to manipulate marketing mix to gain a competitive advantage.