A Practical Approach for Determining the Competitive Advantages of a Business

Abstract

If a business is to enjoy a competitive advantage over the long-term it must be one which competitors find that expensive to copy. What will be offered to the marketplace that is unique and valuable is the competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is helping businesses to answer the questions of “where are we?” and “what are our differential advantages?” in an effective way. This requires using practical and beneficial techniques during the comprehensive internal and comparison analysis. Internal analysis begins with a history of the business and assesses its conformity to overall goals, target groups and general strategies, etc. After identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the business, we then compare them with the key factors in the market development phases (early development, growth, maturity and decline stages), capacities of main competitors (their objectives, strengths and weaknesses, and strategic approaches), and the industry’s success factors (such as costs, relationships, knowledge and structure sources of success determinants), for identifying competitive advantages. For determination of the competitive advantages and so through comparison, using comparison worksheets would be very practical and beneficial. In short, this paper helps businesses to find out their competitive advantages by offering them totally new practical and effective analysis techniques.