Competitive Advantage

Definition

In a saving in competition one calls favors competitive any element allowing a Entreprise on a Marché given, to sell products or services having an aspect at least which will encourage the customer to choose his product rather than that of the competitor.

A favors competitive (or competitive advantage) can relate to a country, a locality, a company, even a person very in sight in her sphere of activity. It is known as competitive advantage durable when its owner is able to preserve the competitive advantage durably, whereas its competitors will be tried to imitate it, or to establish a new competitive advantage which potentially makes null and void that which carried it at a given time.

It is thus an advantage which it or it holds, in a system of Libre-échange compared to its competitor. In the best of the cases, this advantage goes until conferring on that or that which holds it, a dominant position of a market. This leadership gets strong a Rentabilité to him, according to the principle of the “winner takes all” ( gaining it raid all ).

How to profit from such an advantage

This Secure income normally results from a distinctive competence or Cœur of competence. To be really effective, the advantage must be single , difficult to imitate , definitely higher , and adaptable to various situations.

For example:

  • a mark known and inspiring confidence;
  • a Patent giving exclusiveness on the use of a particular technique;
  • a To know to make particular good controlled in the company;
  • capacity to attract the candidates with the most talented recruitment;
  • the privileged access with a Distribution network particularly effective or present near the customers concerned;
  • etc

Within the framework of the development of its Strategy, in order to optimize its present and to prepare its future, a company must seek to exploit its competitive advantages as well as possible, and to develop durable competitive advantages allowing a durable Différenciation with its competitors.

For a few years, certain strategists have shown that the companies which have competitive advantages are rather those which adopted stragégies of Croissance by adjacency.

The controversy

Some fear that a competitive too Net and too durable advantage supports the dominant positions, Monopole S and Oligopole S, which limits the Concurrence and ends up weighing on the Consommateur.

However an advantage of this kind never is definitively acquired, and can be threatened in particular by dryings up of Ressource S, technological Ruptures, shocks economic and political, upheavals in the practices of Consommation, and of course of the legal changes of provisions, often intended to restore the Concurrence (anti-monopoly acts).

Moreover, even if group of individuals, territory, country, has advantage competitive durable, or even of several advantages cométitifs durable in different fields, theory of comparative advantage watch that all the parts (i.e. as well those which have the advantages as those which do not have which it) always find an advantage to trade the ones with the others, so that the existence of competitive advantages could not justify the introduction of protectionist measurements to preserve the interest of the consumers.

See too

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