The Different Types of Business Strategies

The three main competitive strategies are cost leadership, differentiation, and price strategy. Cost leadership focuses on acquiring raw material of the highest quality at the lowest price. In return this company can lower production cost with the goal of being the company with the lowest production cost in the industry. Differentiation strategies allow companies to make their products stand out from the others. Differentiation can be actual or perceived. Actual differentiation occurs when the company creates products that are not available elsewhere. Perceived differentiation takes a lot of marketing and advertisement to convince the consumer that this company’s product is superior. Price strategy includes a variety of strategies that cause a particular product to be marketed at the lowest price possible. Price strategy includes skimming where companies set a high initial price only to turn around and lower it. Bundle pricing occurs when several products are offered for one price. Promotional pricing allows other incentives to buy such as buy one get one half off. Using the pricing strategies causes many consumers to actually purchase more believing that they are receiving a “deal” while the company is still profiting. Competitive strategies are always used by companies and are often used together. Companies that understand how to combine competitive strategies fare much

Differentiation strategy is generally reserved for companies with a clear competitive advantage. Companies such as Mercedes and Apple employ this strategy. Differentiation strategy is demonstrated when a company provides value to customers through unique unique features and characteristics of a company's products rather than by the lowest price (Open Learning World 2010).

A business strategy is how a company intends to accomplish the corporate level strategy it does this by highlighting key objectives and appointing these objective to different divisions in the company, now that we understand what a business strategy is we can examine how Hudson bay inaugurates this into their business strategy. They prioritize accommodating the demands of Canadians and providing quality service to their customers. In addition, they put great importance on

Having a generic business strategy will cover a vast amount of products or services, but in the end will not stand out due to it being so broad. With this type of strategy businesses will find themselves in an undesirable predicament because the consumers of the organization will not have an understanding of the firms core competencies. Incorporating to many strategies as seen from a cost perspective, is not a sound solution for any organization to engage upon. That’s due to the rise in cost will negatively impact value created, by suddenly limiting it. Also, not differentiating between products will cause a

Hentry Mintzberg and James A Waters give various types of strategies to improve business and business organizations. Their strategies can be summaries into eight. They are planned strategy, Entrepreneurial strategy, Ideological Strategy, Umbrella strategy, Process Strategy, Unconnected Strategy, Consensus Strategy and Imposed Strategy. The strategies can be briefly explained below.

Analyze the business-level strategies for the corporation you chose to determine the businesslevel strategy you think is most important to the long-term success of the firm and whether or

A competitive strategy, or business-level strategy, is the way a business used to successfully enter and penetrate into a market (Eastwood et al, 2006), and also, to succeed in this chosen market against its competitors (Johnson et al, 2014). A company needs to develop and apply appropriate strategy to help the company to generate distinctive competences (David, 2007). Compared with the strategies implemented in other levels of operation, competitive strategy is more focused on the competition against other competitors and strategic choices to better attain market share (Harrison and St. John, 2009). According to

Strategy formulation has been acknowledged as one of the most crucial factors of ensuring the long-term growth of the business. However, the manner in which strategy is formulated, and most importantly, the nature of the strategy chosen for the company determines its future position in the marketplace (Grant, 2005).

In order for a business or corporation to grow and expand at a calculated pace, they must be able to strategize the proper business plan to get there. A strategy is a set of analytic techniques for understanding and influencing the firm 's position in the marketplace (Raimundo, 2001). Having a business

In differentiation strategies, the emphasis is on creating value through sustainable uniqueness. This can be achieved through product innovations, superior quality, or superior service, which is then sustained and leveraged through creative advertising; brand-building and strong supply chain relationships. Another requirement for a successful differentiation strategy is that customers must be willing to pay more for the uniqueness of a product or service than the firm paid to create it. A differentiation strategy will lead to higher firm performance only if buyers value the attributes that make a product or service unique enough to pay a higher price for it or if they choose to buy from that firm preferentially. If

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.

Strategy can be defined as being different from one’s competitors, finding the race to operate and accomplished it. According to Michael Porter (1996), while becoming better at what you do is desirable, it will not benefit you in the long run because it is something other competitors can also do. Strategies for organizations are originally developed by Michael E. Porter in 1979 by introducing the five forces model. A company can identify the industry profitability and attractiveness by analyzing the five forces of Porter (Johnson et al., 2008). And then a reasonable strategy can be set up in line with the strengths and the weakness of an organization is able to create a plan for a stronger position for the organization within its

There are also some risks for each strategy. Upholding cost leadership can be risky because of the requirement of frequent capital investment to sustain cost advantage, then cost surges narrow price differentials and diminish ability to compete with other’s brand royalty. Differentiation strategy has some threats, such as imitation decreases alleged differentiation, buyers need for differentiation falls. Meanwhile, the risks for focus or niche strategy are the differences in preferred products or services between the strategic market and target as a whole narrows, the cost discrepancy between wide ranged competitors and the focused firms broadens to eradicate the cost advantages of allocating a narrow target or to offset the

Another generic competitive strategy is broad differentiation strategies. According to Thompson, Strickland, and Gamble, in “Crafting and Executing Strategy”, broad differentiation strategy is seeking to differentiate the company’s product offering from rivals in ways that will appear to a brad spectrum of buyers. A company attempting to succeed through differentiation must study buyers’ needs and behavior carefully to learn what buyers consider important, what they think has value, and what they are willing to pay for. Then the company has to incorporate buyer-desired attributes into its product or service offering

Chapter Five describes the five basic competitive strategy options – which of the five to employ is a company’s first and foremost choice in crafting overall strategy and beginning its quest for competitive advantage.