According to Michael Porter, a competitive advantage in a given industry could be pursued in two key ways: low cost (cost leadership) or differentiation. A third generic strategy is a focus. According to Porter, a failure to do so would end up stuck in the middle scenario, where the company will not retain a long-term competitive advantage.
Porter’s five forces
In his book, “Competitive Advantage,” in 1985, Porter tried to conceptualize and break down what determined a competitive advantage for companies within specific marketplaces.
As he explained in the book, “competition is at the core of the success or failure of firms.”
The whole point for Porter was, through competitive strategy, “to establish a profitable and sustainable position against the forces that determine industry competition.”
For Porter, the whole matter of competition lay in understanding what industries carried long-term profitability and what factors determined it.
The company able, through competitive strategy, to grasp those two factors would be able to build a competitive advantage (sustained long-term high profits).
At the same time, in order for a firm to create this competitive advantage, it needed to pick its competitive position.
According to Porter, then, the world of business strategy could be addressed according to two core, dynamic elements:
Industry attractiveness.
Competitive position change.
In that, the competitive strategy will answer two core questions:
What does the business environment look like? And,
How can this environment be shaped in the firm’s favor?
Determine the industry’s attractiveness
Porter’s Five Forces is a model that helps organizations to gain a better understanding of their industries and competition. Published for the first time by Professor Michael Porter in his book “Competitive Strategy” in the 1980s. The model breaks down industries and markets by analyzing them through five forces
The first step, for Porter, was the analysis of the industry attractiveness. This could be analyzed and understood through Porter’s five forces.
In short:
Porter’s five forces helped analyze the industry attractiveness at a broader level.
Porter’s generic strategies helped determine its competitive position within that industry.
Competitive positioning and Porter’s generic strategies
For Michael Porter, a competitive advantage would be created as a firm exceeds its costs
There are two basic types of competitive advantage: cost leadership and differentiation. A third one is a focus.
Let’s break them down.
Cost leadership
According to Porter, there are three core strategies for competitive positioning: cost leadership, differentiation, and focus.
Cost leadership is straightforward, as the player rolling this out will become the lost-cost producer in the industry.
As Porter highlighted, a cost leader has to have a broad scope (and scale). Indeed, the broad scope is a key element of cost leadership in the first place.
A cost leader will simply be able to offer among the lowest-priced products in the industry because it achieves cost leadership.
Therefore, the cost leader isn’t such because it started a price war.
Quite the opposite, the cost leader is such because, thanks to its broad industry reach, efficiency, and scale can sell its products at a lower price and yet make margins.
In short, the low-priced product is the effect of cost leadership.
The cost leader has to keep an eye on differentiation as well. Thus, there isn’t a pure cost leader meant able to be such without differentiation.
A cost leader has to be at least comparable or perceived as such to enable the cost leader to have enough margins for long-term sustained advantage.
Cost leadership can be achieved through things like:
In a differentiation strategy, companies work on being perceived as unique in their industries for buyers.
As the company is able to be perceived as unique, it will be able to charge a premium price.
Porter highlights that differentiation can be different in any industry, and it can be based on the following:
Product.
Delivery system.
Marketing approach.
Or other factors combined.
Differentiation will be achieved as a firm will attract buyers based on its unique features or perhaps by how the firm is perceived in the marketplace and industry.
Focus Strategies
Where the cost leadership and differentiation seek a competitive advantage “in a broad range of industry segments,” focus strategies aim at a narrow segment, either through a cost advantage (cost focus) or differentiation (differentiation focus).
The focus strategy can be broken down into two sub-categories:
Cost focus.
Differentiation focus.
The focuser ‘selects a segment or group of segments in the industry and tailors its strategy to serving them to the exclusion of others. By optimizing its strategy for the target seg· ments, the foeuser seeks to achieve a competitive advantage in its target segments even though it does not possess a competitive advantage overaLL
Stuck in the middle
Where a company fails in achieving one of the three generic strategies, it falls in a scenario that Porter calls “stuck in the middle.”
In this scenario, the company failed to achieve any competitive advantage, as such it will experience a below-average performance.
That’s because, according to Porter, the companies implementing one of the three generic strategies, will have a competitive advantage, and the company stuck in the middle, therefore, will experience a disadvantage.
Key takeaways
According to Porter, competitive advantage can be achieved by understanding the industry’s attractiveness and based on that, by applying a competitive positioning.
The industry attractiveness can be evaluated, according to Porter, through five forces, which determine the structural anatomy of that industry.
Once the industry attractiveness is evaluated, a company will need to apply one of the three generic strategies (cost leadership, differentiation, focus).
In cost leadership, the cost leader will create, for instance, through economies of scale, a cost structure able to sustain lower prices within the same industry, and yet be profitable in the long-term.
The differentiator, instead, will be able to grab premium prices, thanks to the fact that it is perceived as unique by industry buyers (through product features, marketing, distribution, or a mix of those factors).
Contrary to cost leaders and differentiation, which aim at broad markets, the focuser will target a narrow segment of the industry, either by targeting cost or differentiation.
In the scenario, a company fails to choose a generic strategy it will fall in a “stuck in the middle scenario,” where according to Porter, it will lose its long-term competitiveness, as it will run at disadvantage.
In his book, “Competitive Advantage,” in 1985, Porter conceptualized the concept of competitive advantage, by looking at two key aspects. Industry attractiveness, and the company’s strategic positioning. The latter, according to Porter, can be achieved either via cost leadership, differentiation, or focus.
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Porter’s Five Forces is a model that helps organizations to gain a better understanding of their industries and competition. Published for the first time by Professor Michael Porter in his book “Competitive Strategy” in the 1980s. The model breaks down industries and markets by analyzing them through five forces
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Porter’s Five Forces is a model that helps organizations to gain a better understanding of their industries and competition. Published for the first time by Professor Michael Porter in his book “Competitive Strategy” in the 1980s. The model breaks down industries and markets by analyzing them through five forces.
According to Michael Porter, a competitive advantage, in a given industry could be pursued in two key ways: low cost (cost leadership), or differentiation. A third generic strategy is focus. According to Porter a failure to do so would end up stuck in the middle scenario, where the company will not retain a long-term competitive advantage.
In his 1985 book Competitive Advantage, Porter explains that a value chain is a collection of processes that a company performs to create value for its consumers. As a result, he asserts that value chain analysis is directly linked to competitive advantage. Porter’s Value Chain Model is a strategic management tool developed by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter. The tool analyses a company’s value chain – defined as the combination of processes that the company uses to make money.
Porter’s Diamond Model is a diamond-shaped framework that explains why specific industries in a nation become internationally competitive while those in other nations do not. The model was first published in Michael Porter’s 1990 book The Competitive Advantage of Nations. This framework looks at the firm strategy, structure/rivalry, factor conditions, demand conditions, related and supporting industries.
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Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
