Your Competitive Advantage - Is it Strong Enough? (2024)

Your competitive advantage must be something sustainable, something that would allow you to survive for a more extended time. You must recognize this as the act, not only on the paper in your marketing plan.

Maybe you think your competitive advantage is because you sell your products and services at a lower price. However, this is not an advantage if it is a temporary solution to attract new customers because your business can’t continue to sell at that price.

However, suppose you have an innovation in the manufacturing process and appropriate cost management. In that case, you can have a lower cost than the competition, and therefore, you can sell your products at a lower price. That is a competitive advantage for your business.

Strategy, Tactics, and Actions for Competitive Advantage

As an entrepreneur, you must have a strategy that will enable you to beatyour competition and, at the same time to have tactics that will ensure the execution of this strategy.

In the post titled asThe Quickest Way to Transform Your Small Business Results, we conclude that:

Strategy is a plan of actions for achieving the set of goals that our business have. To implement a strategy it is necessary to have more tactics. For example, if our strategy is to build long-term business relationships with our customers, the tactics that we can use for implementing them can be to provide additional services to regular customers, training, long-term contracts with lower prices, etc. Each tactic has specific activities that must be completed in a specific periodof time, and responsible persons for the completion of those activities.

So, you must prepare a strategy for achieving that competitive advantage. This strategy will have tactics that you will use for the execution of the strategy. Each tactic will contain all necessary actions that you must take.

Your Competitive Advantage - Is it Strong Enough? (1)

Define Tactics to Achieve Competitive Advantage

For example, each business sells some value for its customers. You will have to find out how that value will be better than the competition and how to distribute that value in a better way than your competition. It will be your competitive advantage. For example, your tactics can be:

  • Offer value at a lower price,
  • Provide afaster delivery,
  • Providebetter quality,
  • Or, provide better service.

Define Activities for Each Tactic to Gain Competitive Advantage

For each tactic, you must define and delegate activities that you must implement for those tactics, and through them, you will enable the execution of the strategy. For example, if we take faster delivery tactic activities could be:

  • Analysis of the production process,
  • Analysis of the supply chain,
  • Also, analysis of distribution channels,
  • Detection of all time that doesn’t add value,
  • Elimination of all time that doesn’t add value…

This is just an example. In reality, the list will be much longer and more comprehensive.

Know Your Competition to Gain Competitive Advantage

When it comes to building a competitive advantage, the competition would be your milestone in building such an advantage.

Entrepreneurs must always look at the competition. It would help if you answered the following questions:

  • What are the key competitors?
  • What is the value that they offer?
  • Or, what is their behavior?
  • What do they do?
  • How do they do, what they do?
  • How their customers accept their offers?
  • Is there something that lacks in their offer?
  • Can you add in your offer everything that missing in their offers?
  • What is the comparison between you and them?

This will help you discover whether your competitive advantages are strong enough to overcome the competition and benefit your business.

When it comes to competition, you must prepare yourself that the competition will respond with their strategy, tactics, and actions for your strategy. Their purpose will be to begin reducing your competitive advantage. Because of that, the competition will require constant modification of your strategies, tactics, and activities that you use to ensure your competitive advantage.

Is your competitive advantage strong enough? You will know when you make the analysis. Do you have a strategy for achieving a competitive advantage?

Your Competitive Advantage - Is it Strong Enough? (8)

Posted by Dragan Sutevski

Dragan Sutevski is a founder and CEO of Sutevski Consulting, creating business excellence through innovative thinking. Get more from Dragan on Twitter. Contact Dragan

Your Competitive Advantage - Is it Strong Enough? (2024)

FAQs

How do you answer what is your competitive advantage? ›

Demonstrate a clear understanding of the market and your competitive landscape. Explain how your product or service is different from your competitors, and how you will be able to capture market share. 2. Highlight your team's experience, expertise, and qualifications.

What is a strong competitive advantage? ›

A competitive advantage is anything that gives a company an edge over its competitors, helping it attract more customers and grow its market share. A competitive advantage can take three primary forms: Cost advantage–producing a product or providing a service at a lower cost than competitors.

Do competitive advantages last forever explain your answer? ›

Competitive advantages are not permanent. You need to continually adjust, adapt and evolve your competitive advantages and positioning to respond to changes in customer preference, challenges from competitors, and changes within the company itself.

What are the three 3 strategies for competitive advantage? ›

Porter called the generic strategies "Cost Leadership" (no frills), "Differentiation" (creating uniquely desirable products and services) and "Focus" (offering a specialized service in a niche market).

What is an example of a competitive advantage? ›

For example, if a company advertises a product for a price that's lower than a similar product from a competitor, that company is likely to have a competitive advantage. The same is true if the advertised product costs more but offers unique features that customers are willing to pay for.

What is a sample sentence for competitive advantage? ›

He sought competitive advantage on the field, and at the turnstiles. Paying the public sector over the odds increases wages in cheaper regions, taking away their competitive advantage.

What is the biggest competitive advantage? ›

There are as many competitive advantages as there are markets (even more), but I can name a few: Scale. Particularly in commodity or low-margin businesses, scale is often the biggest competitive advantage, as it gives you bargaining power with suppliers and pricing power in the markets.

Is competitive advantage a strength? ›

A competitive advantage is a strength or capability that enables an organization to meet a customer or market need better than the competition. Competitive advantages are core organizational strengths that are difficult for competitors to recreate or duplicate.

What are the six 6 factors of competitive advantage? ›

The six factors of competitive advantage are selection, quality, service, turnaround, price, and speed.

Why is competitive advantage so important? ›

A competitive advantage is what sets a company apart from its competitors, in the eyes of its consumers. These advantages allow a company to achieve and maintain superior margins, a better growth profile, or greater loyalty among current customers. A competitive advantage is often referred to as a “protective moat.”

Does being competitive help you succeed? ›

Competition is the bedrock of your success. It makes you work smarter and faster, and keeps you on your toes and focused. It forces you be creative, responsive and agile. It's what keeps an eye on the future while paying attention to today.

How does competitive advantage lead to success? ›

It refers to factors allowing a company to produce services or goods better or for less expense than the competition, which may generate more sales or higher profit margins. To be successful, a company's competitive advantage must generate value for its stakeholders and be difficult for others to reproduce.

What are the three main types of competitive strategies? ›

There are three competitive strategies that you can implement across your business: Cost-leadership strategies, differentiation strategies, and focus strategies.

What is Apple's competitive advantage? ›

The iOS on iPhones is different from Google's Android, whereas the MacOS on the Mac computers is significantly different from Microsoft's Windows. The company also designs its own mobile processors in order to order to provide unmatched performance and better optimization with its own software.

What are the key factors for competitive success and why? ›

Important key success factors for operating in competitive markets are:
  • Cost structure of the market.
  • The price sensitivity of the market.
  • Technological structure of the market.
  • The existing distribution system of the market.
  • Is the market mature?

What is your biggest competitive advantage? ›

Competitive advantages include the attributes of your product or service which competitors find difficult to copy. For example, the quality of your staff: their skills, attitudes and relationships with customers; and the innovative features that constitute the intellectual property of the business.

What is the most common way to show competitive advantage? ›

One of the best ways to present your competitive advantage is to use storytelling and testimonials.

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