In today’s highly competitive business landscape, organisations having a competitive advantage is essential for driving growth and achieving success.
This is a unique attribute or set of attributes that sets an organisation apart from the competition and gives it an edge in the market.
Company identifying its competitive advantage and leveraging it effectively is critical for driving growth and staying ahead of the competition. Competitive advantage refers to the ways that a company can produce goods or deliver services better than its competitors. It allows a company to achieve superior margins and generate value for the company and its shareholders.
A competitive advantage is something that cannot be easily replicated and is exclusive to a company or business. This value is created internally and is what sets the business apart from its competition.
Speaking, an entrepreneur and business management expert, Dr Timi Olubiyi said that “in the highly competitive business landscape, organisations are constantly striving to gain an edge over their rivals. This is where the concept of competitive advantage comes into play. It is crucial for businesses to understand and harness competitive advantage in order to thrive in their respective markets.”
He added that “in today’s highly competitive business landscape, having a competitive advantage is essential for long-term success. Companies that fail to differentiate themselves from their competitors often struggle to survive in the market. Therefore, understanding and leveraging competitive advantage is crucial for organizations seeking sustainable growth and profitability.”
Ways To Differentiate Organisation In Marketplace For Long-Term Growth, Success
Know Your Greater Purpose: A higher purpose is a particularly powerful competitive advantage, especially when combined with stakeholder capitalism. Stakeholder-focused companies drive growth through their ability to engage customers who share their values.
Collect And Analyse Metrics: Collect metrics and analyse them to identify competitive strengths, whether it be customer feedback, sales information or surveys.
Listen To Your Team: Part of knowing who you are is listening to your team. Listen to your team, read between the lines, ask them questions and get them to engage.
Convey Your Unique Advantage To Customers: Leaders must be clear about market needs, how their business addresses those needs and how they rank against other offerings.
Invest In Leadership Training: This is the first step to better identifying your team members’ strengths and understanding their motivations. This will also help you build an effective team. Leverage your competitive advantage by building a diverse team with complementary skills to drive growth.
Ensure A Feedback-Driven Culture: Create a feedback-driven culture, pushing for people to ‘spike’ or excel in a few areas rather than every area.
Prioritise How You Make Your Customers Feel: Everything gets copied eventually. But, to borrow from Maya Angelou, the real competitive advantage is how you make people feel. Distill what your most loyal customers feel and why. Make this feeling the objective for all you say and do.
Enhance The Customer Experience: Analyse unique strengths, understand customer needs and preferences and monitor market trends.
Conduct A SWOT Analysis: One way to identify your competitive advantage is to conduct a SWOT analysis. This involves assessing your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Develop Innovative Products Or Services: Leaders can look at ways that they consistently develop cutting-edge and innovative products or services. Once they identify these areas, they can develop new products or services that can attract even more customers and gain a larger market share.
In conclusion, gaining a competitive advantage is all about having better products and services, attracting more customers, making more profits, and returning more value to shareholders than your competitors. It is often achieved by leveraging low-price and differentiated products/services strategies. Organisations with robust manufacturing capabilities, superior technical know-how, and more can efficiently use these to transform them into competitive advantages.
