Here’s a tip for simplifying your competitive strategy. Like all efforts at making things easier, it ignores a lot of considerations and it downright belies the detail we go through in deriving a breakthrough strategy.

But it does give you a quick and insightful tool for looking freshly at your strategy, and in as little as 30 seconds.

It poaches from the ‘value disciplines’ model of Treacy and Wiersema. It says there are just 3 core strategies you can choose from…

Three Strategies

You can have the best product or service; you can have the cheapest product or service; or your product or service can best adapt to match what your customer wants.

The names for these strategies are product leadership, operational excellence and customer intimacy.

A lot of companies unconsciously try to be great at all three, which might sound like a good strategy but it’s not.

This is because you can only really excel in one category, and you can only really be known for one of them.

By trying to be all three of them, your message becomes blunt and you weaken your delivery.

What Does Your Market Want?

The strategy you want to use is the one your customers want the most and that your competitors are meeting least.

And to implement this strategy, begin by asking your customers what they like, do not like and what they wish they could get that hasn’t previously been offered to them.

For example, if your customers want their problems, needs and issues understood better and catered to more precisely, that says they want customer intimacy. It says you could forego having the best product or the best price. Instead, you may just need to concentrate on having the best ‘fit’.

Or perhaps they are tired of product failures and want a better outcome, even if it means paying more for it. This suggests they want product leadership. It says you may not need to pursue cost-cutting exercises and you don’t need to lose margin.You might be free to invest more in quality and innovation and less in efficiency and relationship marketing.

Or perhaps they want consistency and value from you every time they buy from you, which says they seek operational excellence. This means you may only need to worry about economies and efficiencies. You may not need to put as much into depth of account relationship or into radical innovations.

These are great indications. You already have hints of the right strategy to adopt.But to be sure, you need to look a little further…

What Are Your Competitors Promising?

The next step is to look at your competitors’ materials and search for signals that reveal their competitive strategy. In their headlines and home page, their brochures and in their supporting materials lie countless clues about how they see their strengths.

Perhaps they talk about price more than quality, or they talk about how flexible they are rather than being affordable? They’ll back these up with explanations, specifications, prices, case studies, a social media presence and other materials that give substance to the strategy they’re consciously or unconsciously adopting.

So now you have market feedback and competitor feedback. Now you can put these together. You can spot what need your market has above others and what needs your competitors might not be adequately focussing on.

This means that not only can you refine your strategy choices to focus on real needs but that you’ll even see gaps emerging.

For instance, if your market seeks a strategy that most of your competitors are not claiming loudly (whether or not they’re filling the need) then that’s a great strategy to choose. You’ve a real chance at getting to a ‘breakthrough strategy’.

But what’s more, once you know what strategy you want to adopt, you have clues on how to achieve it. Let’s take a look…

30-Second Rules Of Thumb

To be a customer intimate company, you should grow your database and use it by communicating regularly with your market. Avoid price-competing and instead build your work around meeting individual client needs. Compete against cheaper competitors and innovators by being the company to understand your customer better and the one to set their expectations to what you provide. Your advantage is what you know about them.

To be a product leader, devote more to innovation and get fanatical about quality.You also need to take feedback seriously and protect your reputation as the best.Compete by changing the rules and the benchmarks on your competitors. Your advantage is your ability to go to market faster with a better product or service.

And to be an operationally excellent company, you need to ensure that you always manage pricing and suppliers tightly. Do not market yourself as the best; try instead to be lean, consistent and competitive in value. Compete by being identified, always, as the very best in value. Consider price guarantees. Your advantage is in your reliability, efficiencies and systems.

If you get the strategy right, you will not need to pursue ‘Excellence’ in all areas. It ‘s a nearly impossible objective, anyway. Instead, you will only need to be ‘adequate’ in all areas and ‘excellent’ in the one thing your customers want most… Good Strategy Is Good Decision Making…