What sets you apart from the competition is known as a competitive advantage. You need to offer customers a compelling reason to work with you instead of your competitors.
Finding your niche is crucial. When there are lots of other businesses that are identical to yours, you have to work that much harder to set yourself apart. Here are some ways through which you’ll be able to get a competitive advantage.
Find Different Ways to Develop Competitive Advantages
Superb Team Members
Your employees can be a huge asset or a fatal weakness in the marketplace. It’s impossible to overstate the value of a helpful, informed, and proactive team. Maintaining a highly motivated, competent, and productive workforce is essential.
Accomplish this by:
- Setting unambiguous goals and expectations for performance.
- Checking the norms using agents.
- The introduction of reward systems.
- By enrolling them in educational programs.
- Helping people learn more about the products or services you offer.
- Having sales training once a year.
Location
In the retail industry, this benefit is paramount to develop competitive advantages. What other options do you have for reaching clients if your storefront isn’t ideal? Do you provide business-to-business accounts, complimentary pick-up and distribution, drop-off spots, or wholesale through other stores that are more conveniently situated?
Technological Advancement
One definition is a technology that is intentionally incorporated into existing products, services, or processes with the express purpose of increasing their speed and efficiency.
Competitors of supermarkets that don’t provide self-checkout stations lose ground to those that do. Or, you can use a self-service check-out kiosk to place your order at a fast food establishment like Burger King (Gregory, 2022).
Specialty Items that are Hard to Get
If you can obtain goods or provide services that your rivals cannot, you have a competitive edge. Is it possible to distinguish your company from competitors by offering goods and services that customers cannot get from other stores?
Originality
Businesses that put money into R&D will always be ahead of the pack. Imagine Amazon Go or the first supermarket that doesn’t have you wait in line to check out. Simply walk in, select your items, and proceed to the checkout counter.
Airbnb is another excellent illustration of innovative thinking (Tatevosian, 2022). They utilized a service that has been around for a while, in this case, lodging for tourists. And came up with an entirely new strategy!
Also, you should be aware that creating a truly novel product is not the same thing as innovating. Sometimes all it takes is a new perspective or a straightforward modification of an existing idea.
In the end, success depends on providing the greatest possible solution to a problem faced by your target audience.
Connect with Your Vendors
The competitive advantage of having solid relationships with suppliers and their sales reps is often undervalued. Benefits from a healthy partnership include:
More helpful service and support. There is a chance that you will receive advertising collateral, including displays and signs, as well as instructions for your staff.
- Supply and delivery times have improved.
- Refund and assistance policies need to be improved.
- Discounts and deals will be announced in advance.
Having a connection to a large, well-known supplier is a significant benefit in the marketplace. It’s possible that they’ll handle the bulk of your market analysis, product development, consumer feedback collection, and national advertising and branding. If you’re on your own, it’s going to be tougher for the competition to keep up with you.
Expertise
Experience is a prime example of great competitive advantage. Furthermore, I am not referring to the number of years spent working in or studying a particular area.
Nowadays, clients want more than simply a product or a service. What they really desire are new and exciting experiences. Imagine how Starbucks has changed the coffee industry forever. On their way to work, people used to stop at a coffee shop and grab a cup of joe.
Nowadays, customers visit Starbucks in order to get a personalized cup of coffee. They’re going to snap a pic in the relaxing space the company’s set up for them. And they’ll naturally tell their friends and followers about it on social media (Internal Analysis of Starbucks’ Competitive Advantage, 2022).
Promote your Other Offerings by Displaying them.
Gain an edge over the competition by providing services or products that they don’t. Sometimes this can be as simple as advertising the services you already offer to clients, most of whom may be completely unaware of them. Don’t assume that consumers will appreciate your company’s advantages simply because you exist. You need to get the word out about them.
Unique Touch
This may seem like a repetition of the prior point, and that’s because it is. However, I felt the need to make the distinction because we are not referring to products that are tailored to the specific tastes of the target market.
This is not a circumstance where a different variation of the product would be required. The company, however, adds a personal touch that makes the audience feel like they are the only ones receiving the service.
Coca-Cola, for one, is famous for its marketing effort that featured personalized cans. It was a huge hit with customers and helped the business stand out from the crowd (Hughes, 2022).
Cooperation and Partnership in Strategic Endeavors
Alliances and joint ventures are great methods for smaller companies to compete with their larger counterparts. Group discounts from suppliers are often more advantageous than individual discounts, therefore it might be beneficial to form alliances with other businesses in your field.
One alternative method of dividing up the price of advertising is through joint ventures. Several stores in the same area (a mall, for instance) can pool resources to publish an ad supplement. However, you and your team can come up with countless additional variations on this topic. Successful businesses are increasingly characterized by their ability to successfully build partnerships and joint ventures.
Magnitude
Using economies of scale as a competitive advantage is a next example we’ll look at. To put it another way, as output increases, so do savings per unit. This means you can raise company profit margins while keeping your prices low.
One can consider IKEA and the massive quantity of identical things they manufacture. When compared to a conventional furniture store, their production expenses are drastically reduced by this method (Dudovskiy, 2022).
Pace
Everyone appreciates prompt assistance, so if you can get their order to them quickly, that will go a long way. Maintain regular employee meetings to discuss ways to streamline operations and meet or exceed client expectations without compromising on the quality of service provided.
Bottom Line
These are some of the ways through which you’ll be able to gain a competitive advantage. Besides them, you’ll find many unique strategies applied by different companies to gain that edge.
Nishat Tarannum Mridula is a contributing writer at The Strategy Watch. She has been contributing for last two years.
Nishat is currently studying at the University of Dhaka. Even though her major is in Banking, she enjoys writing on diverse topics, starting from appliances to blogposts. She is in the middle of completing her BBA from University of Dhaka. Alongside that, she writes different types of business articles for The Strategy Watch.