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To get things startedConsider the market leaders in your industry. Make a list of who they are and estimate their market share. Can you identify their positioning and core competencies, their competitive advantage? Describe these advantages. Can their advantages be easily duplicated? Examine which strengths can be duplicated and which cannot. Do they dominate the entire industry or just certain segments? Diagram the segments and the competitors share for each. Is there a supply gap or something missing that customers want or need? What are competitor’s strengths versus yours? Assess your strengths internally and externally. You may want to ask your customers to help you. Keep in mind, your strategic options will be severely limited if you cannot decide how you want to be perceived in your markets and how you measure up against your competitors. Competitive advantages can be created.Mark Norige – Principal, Consultant and Chief Catalyst of The Board Forum®. Mark is a present and former CEO, business leader and lecturer. He writes and consults on leadership and business improvement topics. ©January 2019 In the Board Forum®, trusted peers, in a confidential environment, create dynamic discussions to solve problems and learn from each other discovering new opportunities along the way. Members are business owners, CEOs and C-level leaders. They meet regularly to help each other to think through and tackle the many challenges they face. Contact us to lean how you can benefit from joining the Board Forum® The Board Forum® | 508.728.8516 | | www.theboardforum.com What is the key to sustaining a competitive advantage?Overall, a sustainable competitive advantage requires value-creating products, processes, and services that cannot be matched by competitors now, and plan content to maintain that position as you scale.
What are the 4 sustainable competitive advantages?The idea here is that if a firm is to maintain sustainable competitive advantage, it must control a set of exploitable resources that have four critical characteristics. These resources must be (1) valuable, (2) rare, (3) imperfectly imitable (tough to imitate), and (4) nonsubstitutable.
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