Fantastic topic, is it @muganda thread starter?
I think to better understand this you need to look at once-upon-a time dominant companies and see how they were overome such as
1. Elliots bread
2. Unilever(East African Industries)Treetop/Kimbo/Lux soap/Rexona
3. Kilimanjaro water
4. Isuzu (especially matatu)
5. Barclays bank
6. Kencell
7. Brookside

Juxtapose this against
1. Super loaf/Festive bread
2. Bidco
3. Keringet
4. Second hand matatus
5. Equity
6. Safaricom
7. limuru fresh/Fresha
Other than corrupt management, if you study the above you will find a lot of it has to to with pricing and "snobbery" when one finds themselves dominant. When the dominant player adopts "snobbish" ideas,(making customers queue for product, failing to deliver on demand, excessive advertising, ignoring complaints, keeping product always higher priced than competition assuming your product is superior, taking customer for a fool with per minute billing etc) the player wanting to cut into the market needs to take advantage of the "snobbed market". I think EABL is about to find itself in the former, they have become arrogant and snobbish. If keroche works with bar owners it will cut down this giant.

>> To unseat a dominant rival its important to segment the market then develop a market mix for each segment. The segment however should be large enough to generate sales that ensure good returns...e.g EB and safaricom started by offering cheaper services than their competitors and achieved a huge market share...it would be more fruitful to for Orange, Yu or Zain to specialize on either data, calls, sms, or mpesa than the price wars. e.g. for Yu to unseat safaricom they may need to segment the market geographicaly and offer 'bei ya slum', 'bei ya campus', 'bei ya coast', 'bei ya nairobi' etc. The idea is to get loyal customers instead of the squatters they have now, ...

I find it interesting that so many people found SCOM cheaper than Kencell, while the truth was that SCOM was charging sh30 per min billed at 50cts per sec and Kencell was sh15 per min [billed per min]

Indeed at one time, a Kencell->SCOM call [sh25] was cheaper than a SCOM->SCOM call [sh30]!!!

SCOM's win in the battled field had little to do with the airtime price...after all they were more expensive!!!!

SCOM won mainly due to the way they managed their distribution...gave retailers a much higher margin [sh1,600 per line sold] than Kencell [sh300].

the retailers really pushed SCOM lines even at the time when the network was collapsing every day!!!

@mukiha - I would say that 'idiot' was smarter than all of us combined...

@Much Know... that list of people who were once dominant gets me thinking... Even when you're on top, watch out! The fall could be just around the corner.