Porter’s Five Forces Model

Using Porter’s Five Forces Model, analyze MLBAM’s buyer power and supplier power. What could MLBAM do to increase customer loyalty?

Porter’s Five Forces teaches that when the buyer (customer) has increased power in usually drives the prices down of a product or service, and conversely when the supplier has an increase in power, the prices are usually driven up. In the case of the MLBAM buyer power is low. There are only a few avenues that this service is provided through and secondly MLBAM is the only provider of this type of service right now. Knowing that buyer power and supplier power always work opposite of each other; we can determine that in this scenario the supplier power of the MLBAM is high. One of the reasons that contribute to the MLBAM’s supplier power is the unique position it is in by providing information pertaining to a powerful players union, and a fully licensed product. The MLB players union and MLB can dictate and restrict the content to whom and about whomever it wants when it relates to the players or league that it controls.

The information that the MLBAM captures from each game it produces is staggering. Morphing the increase of other sports, baseball has incurred a massive increase in the use of advanced metrics, which is using statistics to determine the best players to fit their philosophies. MLBAM can use the information it is gathering from each game to create similar metrics for their fans. This will give fans the opportunity to analyze current and future players in the same light as the GM’s of MLB players; gaining more loyalty from the fan base.

Additionally, fan loyalty can be increased by giving the fans more access to the product. Not necessarily by allowing other companies to provide the same service, but through expanding the devices it can be accessed though. One example would be creating apps for every mobile device, not just a couple of them.

Which of Porter’s three generic strategies is MLBAM following?...