Porter’s Value Chain

If you want to increase your profits, Porter’s Value Chain can identify where your small business creates value.

In his book ‘Competitive Advantage’, Michael Porter proposed the Value Chain as a way of understanding that competitive advantage is not created by a business but by each of the distinct value adding activities that it performs in designing, producing, marketing, delivering and supporting a product.

The value chain is the sequence of activities that a business performs in order to create and deliver a valuable product.

The model considers each activity as having inputs, transformation processes and outputs. Resources are consumed by each activity as value […]

Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Does your small business have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? Do you understand why customers buy from you and not the competition? If you want to maximise your sales you need to know your USP!

The marketing concept of the Unique Selling Proposition has been around since the 1940’s when it was recognised that TV adverts which made unique claims of their products were more successful. These days the phrase is applied to other areas of business to mean a differentiation from similar alternatives.

What is a Unique Selling Proposition?

A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is the reason that you give for why people should buy […]

Your Small Business Competitive Advantage

What makes your small business different from your competitors? Why should people buy your product or service instead of another?

Porter’s Generic Strategies

In his book ‘Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance’, Michael Porter identified three strategies for gaining a competitive advantage over your competition. These strategies are ‘Cost Leadership’, ‘Differentiation’ and ‘Focus’.  Porter further split the ‘Focus’ strategy between ‘Cost Focus’ and ‘Differentiation Focus’.

Competitive Advantage - Porter's Generic Strategies

Cost Leadership

The Cost Leadership strategy is being the producer with the lowest costs in a market where competing products are indistinguishable. […]

5 Competitive Pressures on your Small Business

Competitive forces have the power to break or make your small business almost overnight. Do you know what competitive forces your small business and it’s industry are under?

In 1979 Michael Porter identified 5 forces, or sources of pressure, that influence competition in an industry and which ‘determine the ultimate profit potential of an industry’. Not only was the model he proposed widely accepted but it is still at the centre of competitive strategy thirty years later.

Competitor Forces in Small Business

Potential Entrants

How attractive is your market or industry to potential entrants?

What […]

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