sales manager
I. How Do Businesses Compete? （Q1,Q2)
1. Business strategies are primarily concerned with allocating resources across functional activities and product-markets to give the unit a sustainable advantage over its competitors.
2. The unit’s core competencies and resources, together with the customer and competitive characteristics of its industry, determine the viability of any particular competitive strategy.
3. Most SBUs pursue a single competitive strategy—one that best fits their market environments and competitive strengths—across all or most of the product-markets in which they compete.
A. Generic Business-Level Competitive Strategies
1. Michael Porter distinguishes three strategies that businesses pursue to gain and maintain competitive advantages in their various product-markets:
i. overall cost leadership; ii. differentiation—building customer perceptions of superior product quality, design, or service; and iii. focus, in which the business avoids direct confrontation with its major competitors by concentrating on narrowly defined market niches.
2. Robert Miles and Charles Snow identified another set of business strategies based on a business’s intended rate of product-market development (Exhibit 9.1). They classify business units into four strategic types:
i. Prospectors focus on growth through the development of new products and markets. ii. Defender businesses concentrate on maintaining their positions in established product-markets while paying less attention to new product development. iii. Analyzers attempt to maintain a strong position in their core product-market(s) and also seek to expand into new—usually closely related—product-markets. iv. Reactors are businesses with no clearly defined strategy.
3. Even though both the Porter and Miles and Snow typologies have received popular acceptance and research support, neither is complete by itself.
4. Exhibit 9.2 combines the two typologies to provide a more comprehensive overview of
1. Business strategies are primarily concerned with allocating resources across functional activities and product-markets to give the unit a sustainable advantage over its competitors.
2. The unit’s core competencies and resources, together with the customer and competitive characteristics of its industry, determine the viability of any particular competitive strategy.
3. Most SBUs pursue a single competitive strategy—one that best fits their market environments and competitive strengths—across all or most of the product-markets in which they compete.
A. Generic Business-Level Competitive Strategies
1. Michael Porter distinguishes three strategies that businesses pursue to gain and maintain competitive advantages in their various product-markets:
i. overall cost leadership; ii. differentiation—building customer perceptions of superior product quality, design, or service; and iii. focus, in which the business avoids direct confrontation with its major competitors by concentrating on narrowly defined market niches.
2. Robert Miles and Charles Snow identified another set of business strategies based on a business’s intended rate of product-market development (Exhibit 9.1). They classify business units into four strategic types:
i. Prospectors focus on growth through the development of new products and markets. ii. Defender businesses concentrate on maintaining their positions in established product-markets while paying less attention to new product development. iii. Analyzers attempt to maintain a strong position in their core product-market(s) and also seek to expand into new—usually closely related—product-markets. iv. Reactors are businesses with no clearly defined strategy.
3. Even though both the Porter and Miles and Snow typologies have received popular acceptance and research support, neither is complete by itself.
4. Exhibit 9.2 combines the two typologies to provide a more comprehensive overview of