How to Differentiate Your Business Successfully

  We all know that successful differentiation is the key to higher profits.  Unless you offer something that a competitor doesn’t offer, you will almost always get sucked into a game of “who can charge the lowest price”.  Unfortunately a lot of competitors know this, and are trying to differentiate in exactly the same way […]

How to Profit when Your Competitors Consolidate

Disruptive Innovation

Real Differentiation

How can you tell when your distinction is real? This question comes up often in strategic planning meetings because real differentiation is extremely important in almost all markets.  It’s also an important question because we tend towards a kind of self-delusion that comes up in strategic planning.  By making ourselves think we are better than […]

The High Margin Strategy

As you may know from Simplified Strategic Planning, we tend to counsel companies to pursue either the low cost/price strategy (think Henry Ford or Sam Walton) or one of the two specialty strategies, differentiation or niche strategies.  All three are good, but we tend to favor the specialty strategies because the profit margins are higher.  […]

Why We Aren’t Bold

Pursuing a competitive advantage strategy One of the biggest struggles in strategy is pushing a bold, distinctive identity for your company and brand.  This is so common that we start the strategic planning process assuming that we haven’t pushed the envelope.  We need solid reasons to venture out into (sometimes uncomfortable) new territory. There are […]