Differentiating between Marketing Structure

Differentiating between Marketing Structure

Introduction

This assignment is principally formulated to study the differences between market structures that are being used by an organization, operating in an industry. The market structure is primarily an economic jargon, which states about the competition strategies in the business environment. A market structure can be defined as a particular nature and characteristic of a market. However, in this context, this term mostly refers to the nature of competition and pricing by various players operating in the market. The most important characteristics of market structure are the number of players operating in the market, the market share of each player, difference between the market share percentages of major players, the nature of cost, the nature of production and the nature of buyers in the marker (Toth, A. 2012). These are considerably some of the aspects, which are needed to be measured while studying market structure of a particular industry.

Primarily there are four major types of market structure, which will be studied in this paper. The four types include Monopolistic Competition, Oligopoly, Monopoly and Perfect Competition (Kenneth, W. G., et al. 2005). The company, which is chosen to be scrutinized, is Apple. Inc. The company is considerably amongst the biggest organizations in world in the industry of consumer electronics, software and personal computers. However, we are considering Apple as a computer manufacturing company. There are almost hundred computer manufacturers operating across the globe, and so as in the United States. Within United States, there are around thirty computer manufacturers are operating (Toth, A. 2012). Amongst them the leading players include Apple, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. In the industry of personal computers in United States, Hewlett-Packard is leading the market with Dell as the second largest market share holder. Whereas, Acer is at number three, Apple stands at number four and Toshiba is leading at fifth position.

Different types of Market Structure

The brief description of four different types of market structure is given as follows.

Monopoly

In this kind of structure, there is only one player leading the market, with no competition at any level can challenge its sales (Kenneth, W. G., et al. 2005).

Oligopoly

In this type of market structure, the market is ruled by few players, which controls the major chunk of the marker share (Kenneth, W. G., et al. 2005).

Monopolistic Competition

This is a kind of structure in which there are numerous producers operating in the marketplace, and each owns a small chunk of market share, simply because of the minor difference in the product that each producer produce (Toth, A. 2012).

Perfect Competition

It is a theoretical approach to market structure in which no player would have any difficulty in entering into marketplace (Kenneth, W. G., et al. 2005). This approach features no barrier to entry, where no limitations have been imposed over the number of producers and customers, however, the demand curve remain perfectly elastic.

Compare the four market structures by filling in the table.

Perfect competition

Oligopoly

Monopoly

Monopolistic competition

Example organization

Best Buy

Aircraft manufacturing

Intel

Apparel Industry

Goods or services produced by the organization

Homogenous

Differentiated

Limited

Limited Differentiated

Barriers to ...