The investment in the fight to make your business the best should be replaced by the fight to make your company unique. This is the proposal of Joan Magretta, a researcher affiliated with Harvard Business School, according to a report by the portal Época Negócios. The expert is the author of a book that, in a way, revises the concepts of Michael Porter, considered the guru of corporate strategy.
Titled “Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy,” Joan Magretta's work advises companies to invest in differentiation from the competition. According to Época Negócios.Com, although the “being the best” mentality still prevails in the corporate world, for the researcher, it is an almost certain guarantee of mediocre performance.
In Joan Magretta's analysis presented in the report, this strategy clashes with the client's own preferences, in addition to ignoring cultural differences and not taking into account the peculiarity of the business world. “In war and sports, there can only be one winner. In business, it's not like that. In the world of business competition, rival companies can coexist and thrive. Walmart and Target each offer a differentiated and unique value proposition to their customers. Imagining competition as a straight-line race track, where only the best ascends to the podium, is misleading. Competition for the ‘best’ position would, on the contrary, be a route of convergence and inevitable collision, in which the various competitors, pursuing a single ‘best way,’ would end up bumping into each other, falling into the self-destructive trap of zero-sum,” states the specialist, in a statement present in the Época Negócios.Com article.
Therefore, the writer assures that what actually works is seeking exclusivity and differentiation. With this business strategy, in Magretta's defense, her company offers the consumer a real, unique proposition, and whose price ends up being just one of the variables in the market's power play.
With information from Época Negócios Portal
