Winning the game of Competitive Advantage
Competitive advantage in business can come from a plethora of avenues, such as for example; unique product attributes, brand image, dealer networks or customer service experience. Barney (2002 p.9) offers that, “a firm experiences competitive advantages when its actions in an industry or market create economic value and when competing firms are engaging in similar actions”.
Whether you are in the niche business of metal and tin bespoke packaging or trying to sell a commodity product on a global scale, the most important part of achieving a competitive advantage is of course keeping that advantage over your competitors, the advantage will be short lived if it is easy to emulate or built on unsustainable foundations. Barney (1991) puts forth that a sustained competitive advantage is accomplished when a business is following a ‘value creating'tactic that not only is unique to that business, but is not able to be replicated by the industry competitors. Furthermore O’Shannassy (2008: 2) notes that “the concept of competitive advantage relates to a firm maintaining a sustainable edge over rivals in a particular industry setting that cannot be eroded over time”. In essence, sustained competitive advantage will be realized by organisations that are able to accomplish this, in a superior manner to their competitors, in forms that are too challenging to emulate. As it is apparent that the goal of strategy is to achieve superior business performance and competitive advantage over the industry and market competitors, thought should be turned to how a company can seek to achieve this, how it has been accomplished in the past and how sustainable competitive advantage will be realized in the future.
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