The Maru-A campaign: meeting Caterpillar on quality alone (1961)

Strategy as narrowing the contest to a single point

The heart of this decision was that, facing a colossal rival, Komatsu narrowed the contest to a single point. Even when the world’s largest maker, Caterpillar, landed in Japan, Komatsu was no weaker in sales network or production capacity; the only thing it lagged in was the reliability and durability of its quality. Management judged that coolly and concentrated its limited capital and people on the one point of quality. It counted its weaknesses not by impression but through user-criticism sessions and field-operation surveys, crushed them with statistics and company-wide management, and where necessary set aside its go-it-alone pride to take in even Cummins engines. Rather than competing head-on across the board, it chose the point on which it could draw closest to its rival — and that design is what carried the campaign.

It is also worth noting that Komatsu used outside pressure not for defence but as an occasion to retemper itself. Capital liberalization, an institutional change that by rights was a threat — the wall protecting domestic makers coming down — was turned by Komatsu into pressure to root a culture of quality across the whole company, and it carried through into the later hydraulic excavator and export-led growth. That said, a strategy of narrowing the contest does not always work: it rested on the weakness being visible as a single point, and on already holding an advantage worth defending in the sales network. When a company with limited capital confronts a giant, where should it concentrate its resources to make a fight of it — the Maru-A campaign remains worth reading as one answer to that question.