Giddings & Lewis shifted to an intense focus on customer satisfaction to become more competitive in an admittedly less competitive market. Through acquiring Cross and centralizing operations, the company strove to reduce input costs and expand the corporation's output and offerings, particularly into the lucrative European market while producing at greater scale. Forming personalized and exclusive relationships with dealers also made its system of distribution more effective and acted as a kind of advertising strategy. Product differentiation and customization was at the heart of its strategy, although it still used volume sales to keep costs low, if not the lowest in the market.

Rather than expanding, Cincinnati Milacron simplified its product offerings and methods of manufacturing. Instead of focusing on specialized products and growth along the lines of Gidding & Lewis' diversification and distinction strategy, Cincinnati adopted a low-cost market strategy. Simpler, lower-cost tools increased customer traffic. While Gidding & Lewis reduced input costs for the company as well as diversifying its markets and product offerings through international expansion and acquiring Cross, Cincinnati Milacron took a more aggressively low-cost, unilateral strategy and kept expansion at a minimum. All operations were focused on lowering prices.

Question 2: Processes

According to the Focus Paradigm, for Giddings & Lewis, a process strategy of a high focus on product quality, high levels of mechanization and standardization to take advantage of economies of scale and capitalizing upon ability to produce at high volume while still maintaining high quality would be advisable. The ability to tailor products to customer needs, especially in this era of globalization, given the large range of resources available to the newly expanded company would also be desirable. Since low, low cost pricing is not the focus, reforming processes to improve quality and meeting customer demands might be a better process strategy. In contrast, a focus on a large range of customers and meeting customer's low-cost needs at Cincinnati would be desirable and using mechanization to improve processes to reduce costs rather than focusing on improving quality would be advisable. To reduce costs further, some additional standardization might be advisable. In short, Cincinnati takes the low road of quality and cost (without compromising quality entirely) while Gidding takes the high road (while still trying to keep cost down) through focusing on quality and meeting more exact customer specifications.