Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

CHAPTER 10 CREATING SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
‘Colour Studios’ as a service to its customers and potential customers to enable them to 
experiment with different colours and combinations. Volvo, the Swedish auto manufacturer, 
used the service in researching alternative colours to use on farm tractors and found that red 
(the colour used to date) was a poor colour choice as it jarred, for many farmers, with the 
colours of the landscape. Changing the colour scheme resulted in increased sales.
In domestic paints, too, there has been an attempt to add service, this time provided by 
the customers themselves. Matchpots were introduced by a leading domestic paint supplier 
to allow customers, for a small outlay, to try different colours at home before selecting the 
final colour to use. In this case, however, unlike Becker’s Colour Studios, copy by competi-
tors was relatively easy and the advantage quickly eroded.
Service need not always be an addition to the product – in some circumstances a reduc-
tion can add value. The growth in home meal kits, where all the ingredients are provided 
together with a recipe, allows the customer to gain satisfaction through self-completion 
of the cooking process and in serving their families fresh, home-cooked food. Thus, the 
customer provides the service and becomes part of the production process (co-creation).
Providing superior service as a way of creating a stronger link between supplier and 
customer can have wide-reaching consequences. In particular, it makes it less likely that 
the customer will look for alternative supply sources and hence acts as a barrier to com-
petitor entry.
To ensure and enhance customer service, it is recommended that each company regularly 
conducts customer satisfaction studies to gauge how well it is meeting customers’ expecta-
tions and to seek ways in which it can improve on customer service.
Further elements of the augmented product that can be used to differentiate the product 
include installation, credit availability, delivery (speedy and on time, when promised) and 
warranty. All can add to the differentiation of the product from that of competitors.