competitive strategy

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

This article was really interesting as it discussed a matrix developed for creating strategies by a professor at Harvard. Michael Porter the creator, discussed the notion of how powerful this tool is because companies or organizations look at competition too narrowly. The five competitive forces include:

In other words, customers are willing to purchase low-tech products as long as their prices are relatively low. As a result, Niche Cost Leadership seems to be the most appropriate strategy for these two segments.

"Bluebeard's Egg" is Margaret Atwood's short fairy tale retelling of the Bluebeard tales. Atwood is a writer who reveals an awareness of women's identity. In her fairy tale, she introduces the theme of heroine's identity struggling in her relationships between her and Ed, Sally's husband. Sally is a woman who attends a college for taking night courses and to keep her busy, and she thinks her husband, Ed is dull and stupid. However, Ed is always in the center of her life, and so she is described to be insecure in her marriage. Later, in the main part of the story, Sally's identity becomes more uncertain after she witnessed an affair between Ed and her best friend, Marylynn. Unlike she used to think Ed as idiotic, the story seems to represent

Our team decided to choose the “Broad Differentiation” strategy as the basic strategy for our company. We will attempt to differentiate our product line in several distinct dimensions. By providing products that are vastly superior and unique from our competitors and pricing the products with an affordable price, we can gain something that is beneficial for the company in the future, which is customers’ loyalty and awareness. We may change or modify our strategy for the next round depending how it performs against our competitors.

In Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, a speaker states his proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country (Swift 1). The author carefully constructs his argument before leading into his absurd proposal supporting the consummation of one-year old children. The speaker first addresses the problem in the opening paragraph, then goes into discussing why other solutions have fallen short, and then until why his solution is the only option.

Managers generally consider the rivalry among competitors as a major source for deriving strategy. As explained by the Michael Porter it is a narrow view of competition. A set of other parameters should be evaluated, mentioned in article as five competitive forces, along with industry

In order to be competitive, companies have to satisfy customers’ requirements. They have to provide a fast and dependable service at reasonable price. There are five performance objectives that lead companies to competitiveness. They are:

To attain competitive gain, organisations can differentiate their merchandise and services from their competitors they can also choose to lower their costs in order to compete with other contenders. By aiming their produces to a wide-ranging target, they are essentially covering most of the marketplace or if they choose, they can decide to concentrate on a narrower target within the market (Lynch 2003). While doing so may reduce their market range it essentially reduces their other competitors. Porter stated that there are three generic strategies that an organisation can follow to achieve competitive gain over other organisations. These are:

While playing the BSG I found the best strategy was the best-cost provider strategy. Using the best-cost strategy allowed me to continue using a decent amount of superior material while also offering prices that were below or around the same price as my competitors. My shoes where not the highest quality or most expensive, but it was also made with a small amount of superior material so it was also not the cheapest made shoe available. This strategy worked best because it attracted buyers who wanted a good quality shoe but did not want to pay high quality prices. Since there were so many companies offering the same product, offering a medium-quality product at a lower price helped my company to gain more customers and market share. A focused differentiation strategy worked least well. Concentrating on one niche results in a company missing out on potential customers. Competitors working outside of the niche will eventually find ways to match the firm’s capabilities in serving the target niche. If the wants and needs of the target market start to switch over time, entry into the focused market can become easier for competitors as people look for different products and services.

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.

According to Porter, strategies allow organizations to gain competitive advantage from three different bases: cost leadership, differentiation and focus. Porter calls these bases as generic strategies.

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.

The five generic competitive strategies are low-cost provider, broad differentiation, focused low-cost, focused differentiation strategy, and best-cost provider strategy. According to the textbook, “a company’s competitive strategy deals exclusively with the specifics of management’s game plan for competing successfully” (Gamble, 93).

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