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Competitive Advantage, Product Leadership, And Customer Intimacy

Decent Essays

Competitive advantage can be derived by analyzing the organization’s strengths and opportunities not yet tapped into that competitors are already using to their benefit (Ferrell, 2011). Moreover, competitive advantage can also be a direct result of customers’ impression or lack of knowledge about the organization’s products (Bethel, 2015). Realistically, competitive advantage is in the hands of the customers and comes with some stiff practices to entice them to covet the organization’s product (Dawar, 2013). How does an organization identify their competitive advantage? Positional advantage identifies the necessity and correlation between structure, conduct, and performance (Bradley, 2011). Whereas, special capabilities are important to a company’s profits, but tend to be specific in nature such as patents or innovation (Bradley, 2011). Still, other identify competitive advantage by evaluating three specific strategies, which are: operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy (Ferrell, 2011). Operational Excellence focuses on offering the customer a quality product at a good price without the extravagance or gimmicks (Ferrell, 2011). Theoretically, to complete operational excellence an organization must promote operating standards and processes, which are extremely efficient and inexpensive (Bethel, 2015). Further, operational excellence has been dubbed the “secret weapon” of an organization based upon its ability to focus on its resources

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