Chalana Williams, First Federal of Lakewood
It takes extensive research and strategic planning to gain a competitive advantage. Every advantage is significant and counts for establishing your business as the leader in your industry, especially in today’s economy and this aggressive business world.
You’ve differentiated your target market by demographic, socioeconomic, and common needs or characteristics that turn them into the perfect sales audience. However, your competition is also focusing on this target market as well. By uncovering certain characteristics, you can find and gain a competitive advantage over your competitors.
Cost Leadership
Typically, many businesses often try to differential themselves by offering the lowest costs. Successful cost leadership happens when a business figures out a way to yield products at a lower cost through perfecting production methods or through using resources in a far better and more efficient manner than the competition.
Quality
Often, customers will pay more for better quality products or services. If you have more expertise, superior design or access to higher-quality materials, product quality could be your competitive advantage. If this is the case, you would need to find market sectors that will purchase your higher-priced products.
Brand
If promoting a well-known brand is your competitive advantage, you’ll need to reach consumers who see the brand in a positive way, who need it, and can buy it. While some brands can cut across multiple market sectors, like detergents, others like sports-related brands, will need more focus.
Service
By placing an emphasis on customer satisfaction, you can compete on service. Customer service that focuses on creating higher levels of customer satisfaction implies employees have good people skills, are trained in customer relations as well as the products they support. Since customer service can get costly, businesses whose competitive advantage is customer service avoid the lower-cost market sectors and do better in the high-value sectors.
Even after you gain a competitive advantage, you are far from done. You will have to maintain your competitive advantage continuously to be successful.
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