Corporate Strategy

To succeed, every business needs a competitive advantage. What’s yours?

What will be the impact on your business if your firm could achieve a 5%, 10%, or 50% gain in competitive advantage over your nearest rivals? How much more valuable will your business be through gaining and sustaining competitive advantage over competing offerings? What additional resources and investment opportunities will result through building an unassailable advantage over rivals?

Our competitive advantage diagnostic identifies the key drivers of competitive advantage in your market space and assesses the sensitivity of relative advantage to the potential to create and capture value. Our diagnostic identifies the gap (or advantage), the underlying factors driving this, and quantifies the benefits to gaining and sustaining a competitive edge.

Gaining competitive advantage in complex and disruptive business environments is the biggest challenge facing firms.

A practical approach to managing change needs to work with the realities of a disruptive environment and the changing needs of your business.

Our research has identified the seven (7) different types of competitive strategy that can lead to value creation and capture. The seven different competitive strategies all involve delivering customer value, at different price points, in ways that are coherent and lead to capturing market share over rivals and substitute offerings.

Every firm is different in terms of the path taken, challenges faced, and overall context. Our projects help clients gain competitive advantage building off the insights from our competitive strategy diagnostic, delve further in underlying issues and opportunities, and prescribe changes to structures, systems and culture to close gaps or secure further gains.

Sustaining competitive advantage requires a high degree of alertness and adaptability to anticipate and/or react accordingly and protect against the processes of imitation and substitution.

Critical to sustaining advantage is continuous scanning and sensing market changes of strategic significance. Monitoring for major events and trends in the external and internal environment is a pre-requisite to identifying major issues and threats at the point when they arise.

Our projects help to establish processes and systems to identify and make sense of market changes. By being clear on the important factors underpinning competitive advantage, it is possible to monitor and identify market changes that are strategically significant.

An essential capability for leading firms is a sensing and strategic assessment capability. We work with clients to design and develop these capabilities and to provide C-suite reporting on the impact on relative competitive advantage. Forewarned is forearmed.