Hello Everyone
Today I would like to talk about strategy and specially what is strategy and how you should be using strategic planning in your marketing to help improve your strategy and strategic thinking. I will touch on a framework that may help you understand this better.
What Is Strategy:
The goal of strategic planning is to gain a sustainable edge over your competitors. It’s all about competitive advantage. So strategy is what you plan to do to gain a sustainable or short term advantage over your competitors. Strategy is the way a company tries to differentiate itself from competitors using it relative to competitors corporate or marketing strengths.
Differences in function and other strengths to better satisfy customers objectives and functions. When thinking about what is strategy, we should use strategy when we talk about how to make an organization stronger versus competitors. It’s about achieving and maintaining a position of relative superiority versus competitors.
Good business strategy helps a company strengthen its positron relative to competitors, at an acceptable cost. But how can companies gain competitive advantage over their companions. There are a number of frameworks we can us to think about competitor advantage.
Inside The Mind Of The Strategist:
One I would like to talk about today is by a well known strategist called Kenichi Ohmae in his book “Mind Of The Strategist”. He talks about 4 ways companies can gain competitor advantage and I would like to talk about them.
- Reallocation of Resources to areas most crucial for success in the industry
this is business strategy based on key factors for success. Basically finding key factors for success in business operations that are most needed. - Focus on products that do not compete directly with target competitors.
exploit the differences in composition of assets between Organization and its competitors. Kenichi Ohmae refers to as business strategy based on relative superiority. - Challenge assumptions of how industry operates with a goal of changing the rules of the game. Kenichi Ohmae refers to this as business strategy based on aggressive initiative.
- Exploiting markets that are untouched by competitors. (Also known as the blue ocean strategy) In other words going where your competitor can not or do not have the freedom do.
That’s all for today until next time this has been Jack Thomson