Competitive Strategies

 

Introduction

 

Competitive advantage is what sets an organization apart; its competitive edge. But as one organization attempts to develop competitive advantage, other organizations are also doing so. And an organization’s competitive advantage can be eroded easily and quickly by competitors' imitations. Competition is everywhere. Some have described today's business climate as one of hyper competition, which is a situation with very intense and continually increasing levels of competition.

 

Competition is organizations fighting for the same desired object or outcome—typically customers, market share, survey ranking, or needed resources. Among other things, the intensity of competition is going to vary depending on economic supply and demand. 

 

Who are an organization’s competitors? One approach could be to use an industry perspective or a marketing perspective.  The industry perspective identifies competitors as organizations that are making the same product or service. The marketing perspective identifies competitors, as organizations that satisfy the same customer need. Another approach to identifying competitors is to look at strategic group, which is a group of companies essentially following the same strategy in a particular market or industry. Within a single industry, you might find few or several strategic groups depending on which strategic factors are important to different groups of customers. Some possible strategic dimensions for identifying strategic groups include price, quality, level of vertical integration, geographic scope, market share, profits, and so forth.