Competitive Advantage Examples
Competitive advantages are a very important factor in today’s economy. Global market is so filled with so many different companies that you need something that will put you in front of other companies. We have to make sure we have something to offer to our customers that our competition does not. There are many sorts of competitive advantages and I’ll try to give you some examples for you to find which ones are the easiest to implement in your field of work.
I will present you the four main competitive advantages. Remember that even so you can probably be the best only at one of them, you still need to be good enough in all the others. The one that you are the best in is the winning factor and all the others are the qualifying factors. Why qualifying and why winning because the winning factor makes you win on the market and the qualifying factors keep you in the game.
First competitive advantage is of course the costs. Many many companies compete with their competition by lowering the costs and consequently lowering the price. Price is a very important competitive advantage in today’s capitalism because people are always looking to buy something cheaper. But you really have to think about it. Is low price really something you want to be known for? Usually a low price is connected with low-quality and even so this might not be the case in your company people will associate low price with low quality in your company as well.
The second and also very important competitive advantageh is quality. On most economy schools, in course “management of production process” they separate the quality advantage into two different areas. First one are “normal” qualities such as quality materials, long life of a product and similar stuff. While the other is compatibility. This side is becoming more and more important in today’s global connected world. Why you will ask? Because people are traveling a lot and it is very important that they can use their cell phone for example and charge it in every country they go to. Compatibility is a very important competitive advantage also because of the global market. Not so many years ago companies were selling their products in special areas or with other words in their own country. But today there is no such thing as a local market anymore as I wrote in one of the previous articles already. We have one global market and almost every company that produce anything interesting cell their products all around the world. So it’s very important that their product is compatible on all the markets around our beautiful planet Earth.
Another important competitive advantage is flexibility. And here I’m not talking about how flexible your TV is, how much it can bend, but how much your product can adjust the customers needs. For example if you are making boats do you have only three models in your offer or can you make boats specially by customer requests. IBM for example has this on a very high level. They make custom ordered computers on daily basis and that for sure gives them a very big competitive advantage against other computer producers on our planet.
Last but not least of our competitive advantage examples is delivery. This one is also separated into different fields. First one is speed or in other words time of delivery and second one is reliability of the delivery. I don’t think I have to explain this in much more details. First one is of course how much time you need to deliver the product to the customer and the second one is how sure you are or how trustworthy you are to deliver the product on the date you have promised to.
On the end I would like to point out a very important thing that I have mentioned in the first paragraph of this article already. Even so you need to focus on only one of those four advantages and even so you have to be the best in only one of them in order to survive on the market, you still need to qualify for the market in all of those four competitive advantages.
Written by: Matt
We also suggest this relevant article if you have time: Competitive Advantage by Michael Porter
Some other similar articles
Tagged as business planning, business strategies, competitive advantage, management, management theories, market, michael porter, production management + Categorized as Business, Economy articles, Ladership & Management