Winning Types of Business Strategies to Achieve your Goals
Copyright : Jrg Schiemann (Follow)
Two Main Types of Business Strategies
There are two types of business strategies
- a Deliberate Strategy (Outlined below)
- and an Emergent Strategy
Using a deliberate strategy you first determine what your goals or objectives will be you need to make decisions on what types of business strategies you will use to achieve them. Strategy setting is about decision making and really answers the question - how? - while the goals and objectives answer the questions what and when?
Goals and objectives sometimes get confused. An objective is a broad statement of intent e.g. 'Diversify the business profitably' while a goal is more specific and measurable see ( SMART ) e.g. 'Increase sales and marketing efforts into the preferred market segments by 20% over the next two years.
Choice of Strategies
There are many options or choices (strategies) on how how you can achieve the objective and goals.
- Gain Competitive advantage - do something that gives you advantage over your rivals
- Diversification - New product Development
- Geographical expansion
- Contraction Expansion
- Pricing - e.g.low price or high price
- Seek Cost advatage - seek out and secure lower costs
- Market segmentation - e.g. large institutions or small institutions
- Sell off parts of business
- Restructuring
Value Disciplines
Here are other types of business strategies developed by consultants Treacy an Wiersema. They call them value disciplines and they are:
- Product leader - have the best most advanced products -like Sony and Apple
- Operationally Excellent - be reliable, dependable, efficient and low cost - like Walmart, Adsa, FedEx and McDonalds
- Customer Intimate - live with customer - address their specific needs like IBM
The idea is to become best in one of these disciplines and good in the others. Learn more about customer intimacy and others
Sometimes, depending on the product/service life-cycle you need to change over you strategies. e.g. become customer intimate to begin to learn the needs and then move to Operationally Excellent as the market grows,
Porter's Competitive Strategy
Professor Michael Porter in his 'Competitive Strategy' theory has a similar classification
- Product Differentiator
- Low Cost leader
- Nicher
Positioning
Here are more strategies, competitive advantages or positionings you could use to achieve you objectives
- Most Reliable
- Most Durable
- Safest
- Fastest
- Easiest to use
- Most prestigious
- Most Conventient
- Best Designed
- Best Value for Money
Once you have worked out your strategies come tactics - short term initiatives to make the strategy happen e.g. 'Run 10 sales seminars in the next 12 months'.'Hire two additional sales staff by end of year 1'
A word of warning though - selecting a strategy and persuing it always holds a level of risk. It is important that you access the risk carefully and the strategic decision should always be backed with thorough market research and the use of business intelligence data if you take the deliberate strategy approach
Go To 'Top of Types of Business Strategies'