Uniqueness And Uniqueness Strategy

Compared to twenty years ago, the market environment has shifted from static to dynamic. This has led to more rapid changes in technology and has increased the intensity of competition. Many managers then believe strategic positioning may not be as effective as it used to be, due to the fact that companies imitate each other’s competencies so fast. Porter considers this view is not completely correct because the real problem is that people failed to distinguish operational effectiveness and strategy. By definition, operational effectiveness (OE) means performing similar activities better than rivals perform them (Porter, 1996). The ultimate goal of achieving OE is to enhance profitability. And two major ways are mentioned in the article, delivering …show more content…
Uniqueness is important because competitive strategy is essentially about being different in doing business activities, compared to rivals. In order to define strategy, it is critical to understand how positioning is emerged. According to Porter, the first type of positioning is variety-based positioning. This means a firm focuses on producing a subset of an industry’s products or services. Variety-based positioning usually only satisfies certain needs of customers, and this is economically efficient when the firm can reduce cost and provide distinctive activities. As oppose to variety-based positioning, needs-based positioning targets on customers rather than the choice of varieties of product or service. This type of positioning strives to meet all needs of customers. However, it is unwise to simply meet the different needs but neglects the significance of meeting those needs in different or unique ways. The last type of basis is access-based positioning which means access customers from different geographic locations or different customer scale. A very good example would be accessing rural or urban customers. To answer the question what is strategy, the author states that strategy is the creation of unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities (Porter, …show more content…
This method is focused on drawing information and experience out of current employees of the company rather than trying to increase the quality and quantity of talented employees. Increasing is costly and time consuming. The following quote from the article further explains this. “The smaller a company’s relative experience base, the more systematic its managers must be in searching for clues to where and how improvements might be made.” (Hamel and Prahalad, 1993) Some examples of this include employees who works the closest with customers being in an environment where they would feel comfortable challenging traditions or long-standing processes. Another component to accumulating resources is borrowing from other companies. This is done by taking advantage of the work done by others and using it to create new