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Your Competitive Strategies

Basic Requirements

Your entry ticket to the competition game

Your Survival Strategy

How to stay alive

Your Leadership Strategy

How to become a market leader

Winning and Retaining Customers

Customer Value Proposition

Low cost/benefit ratio

Positioning

Marketing Strategy

Mass marketing

Differentiation

Customer Satisfaction

Customer service

Customer partnership

Product/Service Innovation

New attributes & Line extensions

New product categories & New brands

Building Your Competitive Advantage

Strategic Growth Focus

Building resources

Building distinctive capabilities

Technology Innovation

Incremental innovation

Radical innovation & Venture strategies

Process Innovation

Linear innovation

Systemic innovation

Business Innovation

Perfecting traditional business model

Creating new business models

New Realities and New Survival Strategies

In today's tidal wave of global economic, technological, and social change, that name of the game for you and your organization is survival. You are not going to survive in this new economy through technology innovation alone. "Growing numbers at all levels believe that, to have a better chance of success, organizations need to engage the energy, creativity and intelligence of the whole workforce and involve other stakeholders, like customers, suppliers, investors and community."⁹ If you are going to withstand relentless and constantly growing global competition, you need to be different and radically change the way of doing business. You have to give up the old hierarchical, adversarial approach which wastes individual talents and saps energy in unproductive conflict. Instead you need to create a new management model, switch from management to leadership, manage change, build trust, drive out fear of failure and and create productive partnerships in which everyone can offer their unique knowledge and talents. If you know how to help your organization to do this, you can make a decisive difference.

The Art of Competing

Competition is all about value: creating it and capturing it. A fundamental rule in crafting a competitive strategy is to view competition from the other player's viewpoints... More

The Essence of Your Competitive Strategy

To be successful today, your company must become competitor-oriented. You must pursue the right competitive strategy - avoid strengths of your competitors and look for weak points in their positions and then launch marketing attacks against those weak points.³

Your company doesn't need to be the best of class in every category. The object is to achieve true excellence in a few areas, and strength in many.⁷

Your Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Sustainable competitive advantage allows the maintenance and improvement of the enterprise's competitive position in the market. It is an advantage that enables business to survive against its competition over a long period of time...More

Differentiation Strategy

Hypercompetition is a key feature of the new economy. What used to be national markets with local companies competing for business has become a global market with everyone competing for everyone's business everywhere. With the enormous competition markets today are driven by choice: your targeted customers have too many choices, all of which can be fulfilled instantly.

Choosing among multiple options is always based on differences, implicit or explicit, so you ought to differentiate in order to give the customer a reason to chose your product or service. Thus, "differentiation is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must constantly engage. It is not discretionary"⁶...More

Marketing Warfare

To develop effective competing strategy, you must understand the four types of marketing warfare³ and figure out which one applies to your situation. These types are:

1. Defensive warfare

2. Offensive warfare

3. Flanking warfare, and

4. Guerilla warfare

Defensive Warfare is what market leaders wage. "Leadership is reserved for those companies whose customers perceive them as the leader. (Not pretenders to be leaders.)³" As a market leader, you are willing to attack yourself with new ideas and block competitive moves. "It is dangerous to assume that there are strong barriers to entry which will protect you. An innovative smaller company is probably plotting a surprise attack right now! If your business is in a strong position then you risk slipping into all the assumptions which success can engender. We think we must be doing things right because we are successful. One way to stop yourself from this mindset is to think yourself as underdogs."⁸

Offensive Warfare  strategy is for you if you are the Number Two or Three in your category. First, you must avoid the strength of a leader's position. Second, you must find a weakness in the leader's position, attack it, and focus all your efforts at that point. "When you are competing with a strong market leader you should not necessarily attack head on, but try to change the rules of the game: for example by approaching the customer from a new direction. When David fought Goliath he did not use the same weapon as his enemy. If you are facing a giant who has a seven-foot spear then it is no use using a four-foot spear. You need a different approach, and that is what David did with sling and stone."⁸

Flanking Warfare is for smaller or new players that are trying to get a foothold in a category by avoiding the main battle. This strategy usually involves a surprise move into an uncontested area.

Guerilla Warfare is usually the land of smaller companies. You should find a market small enough to defend. No matter how successful you become, never act as a leader and be prepared to bug out at a moment's notice so you can live to fight another day.

War Games & Corporate Strategy Development

Competitive war games can help you simulate the competitive environment, uncover hidden vulnerabilities, and make critical changes that produce a more complete and effective competitive corporate strategy. While preparing your strategic plan, your need to consider competitors' moves as well as competitors' reactions to your own moves before committing to a specific strategy...More

Case in Point: 25 Lessons from Jack Welch

To Jack Welch, the legendary former CEO of General Electric, business leadership is all about knowing what questions to ask of his subordinates. He says, "My job is to understand the strategic issues within each of our businesses where they are going around the five questions:

1. What does your global competitive environment look like?

2. In the last three years, what have your competitors done?

3. In the same period, what have you done to them?

4. How might they attack you in the future?

5. What are your plans to leapfrog over them?