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Competitive Advantage
Improving your competitive advantage is the art of business. Unless everyone in the marketplace is growing - which is a rare and temporary situation - positioning for growth means you must beat the competition. This means you must understand your competitive advantage and play to your strengths.
Growth comes from your strengths - which are your market advantages. Advantages make you stand out from others. It's why your customers buy from you. Sometimes, it's special skills or services. Sometimes, it's price.
Here are some common advantages. Keep in mind that most companies compete in several ways, but no one competes on every point:
- Unique product not available elsewhere
- Lowest prices
- Quick delivery
- Customization for specific needs
- Pre-sale service
- Highly trained staff with technical expertise
- Product durability and dependability
- Hours of service
- Convenient location or other access (could be Web-based)
- Reliable and stable suppliers.
Note that different products may have different selling features. The key is knowing how all your products' and services' strengths fit together to create an overall market advantage.
Keep in mind also that competitive advantages must be sustainable. That is, you must be able to defend those advantages against attack by competitors. Here are some characteristics of sustainable advantages:
- Supportable: You must have the human skills and technological assets - and therefore the capital - to support the approach you are taking. You can't promise a high-quality product with inferior talent and equipment.
- Flexible: Sometimes, customers' needs change. You may have to re-focus and re-position yourself for changing expectations.
- Valuable: The advantage needs to make a difference to customers. A small price discount, for example, may not do the job.
- Visible: Whether the customer perceives the value in your product is actually more important than the value itself. Beautiful shopping bags, for instance, are important only if customers want other people to notice them.
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