You’ve invested much to create and strengthen your competitive advantage; it’s a combination of your offerings and your culture. Leveraging it to productively drive your growth, in an increasingly dynamic market, compels you to consider how best to invest your precious time and resources going forward.
Your customers, your competitors, and you are simultaneously experiencing the same evolving market trends, so what is valued, and what creates value, is changing more rapidly.
Staying abreast of your competitors’ offerings and strategies will always be essential, but given the rate of change, investing too much time protecting an advantage against competitors can turn out to be wasted time.
Your growth is more likely to be the result of pursuing new opportunities which leverage your advantage to create strategic value for your customers. That value is different for every customer, derived from the quantifiable benefits your advantage produces for them. Remaining proactively curious about their perceptions of changing market trends, and their evolving needs and goals, will reveal the next value creating opportunity on which to leverage your advantage. You’ll recognize it because it will resolve a customer’s short-term need while also contributing to their longer term strategic goals.
Stimulate inquiry, initiative, and innovation within your culture to sustain an opportunistic, value-creating mindset that best leverages your advantage. Encourage your people to contribute their experience and energy to these discovery efforts so that novel, value-creating offerings emerge to drive your growth. And when these new concepts succeed, remember to appreciate those who made them possible, including customers as well as employees. Your competitive advantage is strengthened by this strategy, sustaining it to be ready for when it must be leveraged again.
How well does your business sustain and leverage your competitive advantage?
