Prospectors, are pro-active, and pursue an offensive strategy, aggressively pursuing new market opportunities with a willingness to take

risks. They maintain an entrepreneurial attitude, and explore their competitive environments with the aim of developing new product and market opportunities. Prospectors are companies with fairly broad product lines that focus on product innovation and market opportunities. This sales orientation makes them somewhat inefficient. They tend to emphasize creativity over efficiency. An example is the Miller Brewing Company, which successfully promoted "light" beer and generated aggressive, innovative advertising campaigns, but had to close a brand-new brewery when management overestimated market demand. Defenders, are less pro-active, and can be seen as being protection oriented, seeking stability by maintaining current market positions and defending against encroachment by other firms. Defenders, unlike prospectors, engage in little or no new product or market development. Their strategic actions seek to preserve market share by minimizing the impact of competitor's initiatives. Defenders are companies with a limited product line that focus on improving the efficiency of their existing operations. This cost orientation makes them unlikely to innovate in new areas. An example is the Adolph Coors Company, which for many years emphasized production efficiency in its one Colorado brewery and virtually ignored marketing. Analyzers, are somewhere between prospectors and defenders, balancing the opportunity-seeking nature of prospectors against the risk aversion of defenders. Analyzers seek to maintain their position in the marketplace, waiting for the market's reaction to new product or new entrants into the marketplace. Once the market's reaction is analyzed, they pursue the opportunity, having identified the key success factors. Thus, like prospectors, analyzers seek to exploit new market opportunities, but they will also tend to draw most of their revenue from a stable portfolio of products. Analyzers are corporations that operate in at least two different productmarket areas, one stable and one variable. In the stable areas, efficiency is emphasized. In the variable areas, innovation is emphasized. An example is Anheuser-Busch, which can take a defender orientation to protect its massive market share in U.S. beer and a prospector orientation to generate sales in its amusement parks. While the strategies of prospectors, defenders, and analyzers are all to some extent proactive, the strategies pursued by Reactors is characterized by inconsistencies and a reactionary response to environmental change. Reactors do not have a distinct strategy they merely react to environmental changes. Thus, the reactor strategy is

not considered a viable one, and firms pursuing such a strategy would either have to adopt one of the other three types of strategy or face eventual decline. Reactors are corporations that lack a consistent strategy-structure-culture relationship. Their (often ineffective) responses to environmental pressures tend to be piecemeal strategic changes. An example is the Pabst Brewing Company, which, because of numerous takeover attempts, has been unable to generate a consistent strategy to keep its sales from dropping.