Competitive advantage: Lesson
Thursday, September 14, 2006
I've always wanted to create a business but it seems that almost everything that you can think of has either been done or too costly to begin with. How to find a competitive edge then?
"Differentiate your products. No, nothing's unique anymore; just slash your costs. Sorry, everyone's doing that. Invent new markets instead. Hug your customers, that's the ticket! Get real, you wuss -- it all comes down to squashing your competitors like bugs."
How now then to create an edge for your business? Several pointers brought to my attention by BusinessWeek online and John Moore of Brand Autopsy.1. Experiment fearlessly
It's true that some of the worlds greatest inventions were discovered by accident. Be bold be confident! Look at what the Koreans and Japanese are doing with the auto industry. Sometimes I feel it pays to be confidently wrong then to be not confident at all.
2. Don't just get bigger, get unique
Michael Porter, business strategy clairvoyant from Harvard Business School, adds the following money quote in the article. “There is no best auto company, there is not best car. You’re really competing to be unique.”
3. Why compete? Create new markets!
Niches are nice, but inventing a new market is a whole lot better.
4. Obsess about customers, not rivals
It's true when it's said to stop looking at your competition but focus on your customers instead. Let them worry about you then you worrying about them.
5. Give as good as you get
"More than a decade ago, James F. Moore noted in his book The Death of Competition that huge, cooperative networks of companies such as the IBM, Intel, and Microsoft troika in computing, or Toyota and its close-knit supplier network, were overtaking individual companies as new competitive forces. Now a lot of companies are taking an even bigger leap forward. They're tapping into the cooperative crowds that create things like open-source software, eBay's massive marketplace, and Skype's peer-to-peer Net phone network."
6 Get personal
"With personalization, you have infinite ways to differentiate" says Prahalad, whose 2004 book The Future of Competition, co-authored with Venkat Ramaswamy, urged companies to "co-create" products with customers.
7. Stay hungry
Competition never ends.
posted by sam @ 1:29 AM,
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The Author
Samuel Yau
How do you truly know someone? The truth is, you can't. Each person that you come across have a perspective of you that differs from another. So it's entirely up to you on how I am perceived to be
About This Blog
Initially this blog was birthed out of curiosity, on what it would be like to have a blog. To explore the world of entrepreneurship, business, marketing, etc and to jot down my learnings/experience here. As time passes on, the purpose change, the passion change, the person change.