Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Operational excellence – providing middle-of-market products at the best price with the 
least inconvenience. Examples include no-frills mass-market retailers such as Aldi and 
Lidl in the retail sector in the UK, and fast food outlets such as McDonald’s, Burger King 

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CHAPTER 6 UNDERSTANDING THE ORGANISATIONAL RESOURCE BASE
and KFC. This strategy requires an organisation to achieve, or at the very least strive for, 
excellence in the core processes of order fulfilment, supply-chain management, logistics, 
service delivery and transaction processing.
● 
Product leadership – offering products that push the boundaries of product and service 
performance: Intel is a product leader in computer chips, as is Nike in athletic clothing 
and footwear. A prime example is Hewlett-Packard’s computer printer business that 
once achieved market dominance through major technology advances, rapid product 
variations, continuous price reductions and a willingness to attack competitors. The core 
processes that underpin this strategy include market sensing (of latent customer needs), 
openness to new ideas, fast product development and launch, technology integration 
and flexible manufacturing. Management and structure will probably be decentralised, 
team-orientated and loose-knit.
● 
Customer intimacy – delivering what specific customers want in cultivated relationships. 
The core requirements are flexibility, a ‘have it your way’ mindset, mastery of ‘mass 
customisation’ to meet the distinct needs of micro-segments of the market and the ability 
to sustain long-term customer relationships.
Hamel (1996) notes that, in an effective strategy-making process, ‘you can’t see the end 
from the beginning’. Organisations need to be flexible enough to change established beliefs 
about corporate capabilities, as marketing strategy options emerge from analysis (and vice 
versa); if necessary, they need to be able to rethink the attractiveness of strategy options 
as a result.
In seeking to define key resources, however, Porter (1996) points to the dangers of the 
‘competitive convergence trap’. Porter argues that the danger inherent in the pressure on 
companies to improve operational efficiency is not simply that we substitute operational 
efficiency for strategy, but that competing companies become more and more similar: ‘The 
more benchmarking companies do, the more they look alike . . . Continuous improvement 
has been etched on managers’ brains. But its tools unwittingly draw companies towards 
imitation and homogeneity.’ When we attempt to assess corporate capabilities, our search 
should be for sources of competitive differentiation and advantage in activities and areas 
that matter to customers, not simply sources of operational efficiency.
We should also be aware that how we group, categorise or label what we see as an 
organisation’s resources can be critical. Strategy does not consist of mere operational 
improvement, neither does it consist of focusing simply on a few core competencies (espe-
cially if they are the same things our competitors would claim as their own competencies). 
Real sustainable advantage comes from the way the various resources fit together, creating