resumen MappingYour Cornpetitive Position

Resumen

MappingYour Cornpetitive Position



Most companies have to build fresh competitive advantages and destroyothers' advantages faster than they used to. As innovation pervades the value chain, they must migrate quickly from one competitive position to another, creating new ones, depreciating old ones, andmatching rivals" The process is disorderly and unstable. Senior executives desperately need new tools to help them systematically analyze their own and other players' competitive positions in hyper-competitive markets.

One way to do that is to track the relationship between prices and a product's key benefit over time. However, it isn't easy to come to grips with eitherbenefits or prices. Most customers are unable to identify the features that determine the prices they are willing to pay for products or services.If customers don't know what they're paying for, andmanagers don’t know what they're charging for, it's almost impossible for companies to identify their competitive positions.

The lack of understanding about competitive positionsis palpable in industries such as consumer electronics, where the number of features makes comparisons complicated; markets like computer hardware, where technologies and strategies change all thetime; and when products, such as insurance policies, are intangible.

Choose the price and determine the primary benefit. Once you've defined the market, you need to specify the scope ofyour analysis of prices. You have implicitly decided whether to study retail or wholesale prices when you chose which market to focus on, but you must also consider other pricing parameters. You mustchoose whether to compare initial prices or prices that include life cycle costs' prices with transaction costs or without them,
And the prices of unbundled or bundled offers. These...