The Cost Leadership Strategy, Differentiation Strategy And Hybrid Strategies

The organizational strategy is based around a few key factors. The company’s business domain is clearly defined and is focused towards Mature 50+ adults who wish to live an independent lifestyle. The factors that are considered are mainly geographical location, age, retirement lifestyle and medical needs. The strategy is effective as it concentrates on a few key product and services.

The differentiation strategy aims at creating a service that is unique. The key is to be viewed as valuable by the customer. According to Porter corporations should not focus their corporate energy into being better than their competitors, instead, try to be different. Benchmarking the competitor can result in what Porter describes as the competitive convergence, where, to the customer, everyone looks like everyone else. For”Broadway’s Café” to stay competitive in 21st century their strategy should be about performing different activities from rivals or similar activities differently.

Porters Generic Competitive Strategies: The relative position of a company within its industry concludes whether the profitability of the firm is above or below the industry’s average. The above average profitability of the firm is fundamentally showing the sustainable competitive advantage in its long run. According to Michael Porter, competitive advantages originate from the value of a firm and there are two types of competitive advantages, which a company can own. These are low cost or differentiation. For any company, in

Organizations pursuing this type of business strategy try to develop a competitive advantage based on product innovation. The strategy requires employees to continually develop new products and services to create an organization’s advantage in the market. These companies create and maintain an environment that encourages employees to bring new ideas into the company.

The strategy I chose for the simulation is “Niche Cost Leader." First, with the key focus being value, this strategy will challenge me to keep costs at a minimum and force me to streamline overall costs to produce a valuable commodity that, in turn, will generate financial success that can be shared with internal and external stakeholders. Second, as the success of this strategy primarily relies on the existing product line being prosperous, I will be able to practice and hone my forecasting skills based on one product. Though I eventually will produce more than one product, most of the simulation will be conducting under making the primary product as successful as it can be, and reliable forecasts are

A company needs to create a series of programs to differentiate their product from those from its competitors and to appropriately price the product to achieve the maximum demand, in order to set up the dynamics of its competitive strategy (David, 2007). The competitive strategy of a company is also expected to offer better products or services to its customers, at a reasonable cost. Due to the mass influence of the external environmental on the customers’ preference, it is vital for the company to develop an available competitive strategy to be able to solve a series of problems, and ultimately to improve the company’s performance. Those problems include: how to differentiate its products or service from competitors, how to create market segments to maximize demands, and how to offer a wider range of products or services to better meet the customers’ needs at more acceptable costs (David, 2007).

In 1985 Michael Porter surmised that a market can be subjected into different strategies, thus, three variations of competitive advantage were born. The differentiation strategy is the focus for the purpose of this paper. Furthermore, the differentiation strategy in its most exposed form is a strategy that places prominence toward the brand name and advantage is the prestige that follows. This type of angle draws in a specific high-end consumers which in turn sets its corner of the market apart from its competition. Additionally, in this advantage there is a uniqueness perceived by the consumer, industry wide. The differentiation strategy is distinct in attributes indescribable by price but all the same customers are more than willing to pay a premium for the product or service. Firms that are successful in this advantage are fully equipped with a product development team high in creativity and innovation. Additionally, this strategy is only able to be an advantage if a firm is able to access an unlimited amount of research.

According to Porter (1985) a company can apply three generic types of strategies to protect itself while competitive force is a key issue of the management. To achieve this position a strategy based on competency must be accomplished

Fully focused business provides a very limited type of services to a narrow and specific market segment (Palmer, 2011). A market focus firm focus on a narrow market segment but provides wide range of services. Whereas service focus industry provides a narrow range of services to a broad

In this part, this report focuses on Porter’s Generic Strategies to analysis the strategic positioning of the major play in toys and games industry. According to Dess, Lumpkin and Eisner 2010, Porter’s Generic Strategies include three strategies which are Differentiation, Focus and Cost leadership which a company can use for achieve competitive advantage and overcome five force.

There are two schools of thought pertaining to how firms should choose the competitive strategy that best suits them. One is of the opinion that firms should choose one of the generic strategies and commit all resources to making it work. Porter belongs to this category. They believe that the value chain necessary for cost leadership is quite different from that of differentiation strategy and that while differentiation deals with better quality, cost leadership deals with lowering costs wherever possible.(DESS and DAVIES 1984) What porter articulated here is that there is need for strategic clarity.

Competitive strategy is the moves and methods that the firm has taken and is taking to appeal buyers, improve its market position, and to endure competitive pressures. The strategy is about what a firm’s capability to try to knock off competitors and attain competitive advantage, which can be offensive or defensive. There are three approaches to competitive strategy, which are low-cost leadership strategy where struggling to be the overall low-cost manufacturer in the in industry. Moreover, pursuing to distinguish one’s product offering from competitors (differentiation strategy), and the last one is focus or niche strategy where aiming on thin portion of the market rather than the whole market (Porter, 1998).

The manner in which firms are able to compete is most commonly categorized by implementing Michael Porter’s strategic typologies. Porter’s strategic theory has been the most widely accepted strategic approach used by fellow academics (Kim and Lim 1988; Bordean et al 2010). Porter proposed three generic strategies namely: cost leadership, differentiation and focus strategy. Warszawski (1996) later introduced a competitive strategy

The focused low cost strategy purposed to create a price advantage for the company. Usually, a company that use this kind of strategy more focus on a specific market niche, offering products to a narrow market segment instead of a broad one. The company then aims to be the cheapest supplier in the particular niche but not necessarily in the overall market.

Porter’s generic strategies describe how a company attains competitive advantage across its chosen market scope. There are three generic strategies-cost leadership, differentiation and