Cannibalization

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The consumption of individuals by members of the same species occurs alongside a reduction in effectiveness of one entity by another in competition, while companies may transfer resources from one product to enhance another, affecting former sales
2. This involves one species eating its own, the competitive diminishment of an entity by another, and the practice of reallocating resources within a business, often harming prior offerings in terms of market presence
3. The act of one organism consuming another of its type occurs simultaneously with the weakening of an entity's position due to competition, as well as the strategic reallocation of resources within a business, potentially harming previously successful products

Etymology: The noun is built from "cannibal" plus the suffixes "-ize" and "-ation", and its story runs through a far older word. "Cannibal" traces back to Spanish "caníbal", a form of "caríbal" and "caribe", which took the name of the Caribs, an Indigenous people of the Caribbean. The Spanish name was itself tied to the Proto-Cariban word "kariponа" and the wider Caribbean peoples the Spanish encountered, so a term for a group of people became a term for eating one's own kind. The verb-forming suffix "-ize" arrived in English through Middle French "-iser" and Late Latin "-izare", originally borrowed from Ancient Greek "-izein". Attaching "-ation", inherited through Old French from Latin "-ātiō", turns the verb into a noun for the process. The modern economic sense, where a company's own product takes sales from another of its products, is a figurative extension of the older biological meaning of one thing consuming another.

Synonyms: self-consumption, internal competition