Know: ‘timing is everything.’

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Marketing Insights from A to Z

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trategy
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Strategy is the glue that aims to build and deliver a consistent and
distinctive value proposition to your target market. Bruce Hender-
son, founder of the Boston Consulting Group, warned: “Unless a
business has a unique advantage over its rivals, it has no reason
to exist.”
If you have the same strategy as your competitors, you don’t
have a strategy. If the strategy is different, but easily copied, it is a
weak strategy. If the strategy is uniquely different and difficult to
copy, you have a strong and sustainable strategy.
Harvard’s Michael Porter drew a clear distinction between op-
erational excellence and strategic positioning.
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Too many companies
think they have a strategy by pursuing operational excellence. They
work hard at “benchmarking” the “best-of-class performers” to stay
ahead of their competition. But if they are running the same race as
their competitors, their competitors may catch up. Their real need is
to run a different race. Companies that target a specific group of cus-
tomers and needs and deliver a different bundle of benefits can be
said to have a strategy.
Several companies can be cited as having distinctive strategies.

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• Southwest Airlines, the most profitable U.S. airline, is run dif-
ferently than other airlines in dozens of ways: It targets price-
sensitive, short-trip passengers; it flies point-to-point rather
than through hubs; it uses only 737s, thus reducing spare