Flawed ways to pursue competitive efforts that will successfully differentiate a company's branded footwear from the branded offerings of rival companies include Copyright @ by Glo-Bus Softivare, Inc. Copying, distributing, or Jrd party website posting isexpressly prohibited arid conslitutes copyright viofation. failing to pursue actions to reduce the reject rates at each of the company's plants. failing to bid aggressively enough to sign more celebrities to contracts than any other company in the industry, failing to offer 500 models/styles of branded footwear, and charging Internet prices and wholesale prices to footwear retailers that are too far above the prices charged by rival companies. concentrating the firm's differentiation efforts on only a single differentiating feature (such as having the highest S/Q rating in the industry or offering the highest number of models/styles). not charging the highest wholesale price for branded footwear in all four geographic regions. failing to outspend rivals on advertising in all four geographic regions and pursuing a strategy to strongly differentiate the company's product offering from the offerings of rivals rather than a strategy to weakly differentiate the company's product offering (which is far less costly). The industry-low, industry-average, and industry-high branded operating benchmarks on p. 7 of each issue of the Footwear Industry Report are only of value to the managers of companies that are losing money in one or more regions. are particularly valuable to company managers who are actively considering adding new production capacity in the upcoming decision round and need to select the region in which this added capacity should be located. desirous of . are of considerable value to the managers of companies pursuing a strategy aimed at achieving a low-cost advantage over rivals but are of very limited value to managers of companies pursuing all other strategies. are worth careful scrutiny by the managers of all companies because they help managers determine the degree to which their company's costs and operating profits for the benchmarked cost and operating profit categories are adequately competitive with those of rival companies. are primarily helpful to the managers of companies whose operating profits per pair sold and/or operating profit margins per pair sold are below the industry average in one or more regions