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Scenarios/Market Disruption

The Scenario

A well-funded startup enters your market with prices 40% below yours.

4 Archetype Responses

The Fortress

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We have seen challengers before. Our instinct is not to panic — it is to protect. We are conducting a detailed analysis of where this new entrant is actually winning business and where our moat remains intact. Until we understand whether this is a real structural threat or a cash-burning land grab, we are not changing our pricing. We protect the core, we reinforce relationships with our most loyal customers, and we watch.

The Pirate Ship

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Good. This is going to shake out the incumbents who have been sleepwalking. We are already mapping the customers they will win on price alone and working out which of those we actually want back. We are also looking at whether there is a segment we can cede entirely and redeploy those resources into an aggressive push somewhere they are not. Forty percent below us means they are burning money. We need to outlast them in the segments that matter and eat their best people while they are distracted.

The Cathedral

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We are not going to win a price war and we are not going to try. Our customers do not buy from us because we are cheap — they buy from us because what we build is genuinely better, and most of them know the difference. The risk here is not the entrant itself; the risk is that we respond by compromising our quality standards in a cost-cutting exercise that destroys the very thing that protects us. We are investing in making the quality gap wider, not closing the price gap.

The Insurgent

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Finally. This is exactly the pressure we have been arguing internally we needed to respond to first. We are not defending our current position — we are using this moment to accelerate the transformation we have been planning. We will let the market shift, and we will be waiting on the other side of it with something the new entrant cannot match. The question is how fast we can move before the board gets nervous and starts trying to protect the wrong things.

What this reveals

Price disruption reveals the fault line between preservation and transformation instincts. Conservative Flavours focus on protecting what exists; aggressive Flavours scan for counter-offensive opportunity; culture-led Flavours double down on differentiation rather than competing on the attacker's terms. The response tells you far more about identity than about competitive strategy.