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What Is Strategy?

by Michael E. Porter

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Article Summary

What Is Strategy?

A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further exploration of the article’s ideas and applications

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What Is Strategy?

The Idea in Brief The Idea in Practice

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The myriad activities that go into creating, producing, selling, and delivering a product or service are the basic units of competitive advantage.

Operational effectiveness

means performing these activities better— that is, faster, or with fewer inputs and defects—than rivals. Companies can reap enormous advantages from operational ef- fectiveness, as Japanese firms demon- strated in the 1970s and 1980s with such practices as total quality management and continuous improvement. But from a com- petitive standpoint, the problem with oper- ational effectiveness is that best practices are easily emulated. As all competitors in an industry adopt them, the

productivity frontier

—the maximum value a company can deliver at a given cost, given the best available technology, skills, and manage- ment techniques—shifts outward, lowering costs and improving value at the same time. Such competition produces absolute improvement in operational effectiveness, but relative improvement for no one. And the more benchmarking that companies do, the more

competitive convergence

you have—that is, the more indistinguish- able companies are from one another.

Strategic positioning

attempts to achieve sustainable competitive advantage by preserving what is distinctive about a com- pany. It means performing

different

activi- ties from rivals, or performing

similar

activi- ties in different ways.

Three key principles underlie strategic positioning.

1. Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities.

Strategic position emerges from three distinct sources:

•

serving few needs of many customers (Jiffy Lube provides only auto lubricants)

•

serving broad needs of few customers (Bessemer Trust targets only very high- wealth clients)

•

serving broad needs of many customers in a narrow market (Carmike Cinemas op- erates only in cities with a population under 200,000)

2. Strategy requires you to make trade-offs in competing—to choose what

not

to do.

Some competitive activities are incompatible; thus, gains in one area can be achieved only at the expense of another area. For example, Neutrogena soap is positioned more as a me- dicinal product than as a cleansing agent. The company says “no” to sales based on deodor- izing, gives up large volume, and sacrifices manufacturing efficiencies. By contrast, Maytag’s decision to extend its product line and ac- quire other brands represented a failure to make difficult trade-offs: the boost in reve- nues came at the expense of return on sales.

3. Strategy involves creating “fit” among a company’s activities.

Fit has to do with the ways a company’s activities interact and rein- force one another. For example, Vanguard Group aligns all of its activities with a low-cost strategy; it distributes funds directly to con- sumers and minimizes portfolio turnover. Fit drives both competitive advantage and sus- tainability: when activities mutually reinforce each other, competitors can’t easily imitate them. When Continental Lite tried to match a few of Southwest Airlines’ activities, but not the whole interlocking system, the results were disastrous.

Employees need guidance about how to deepen a strategic position rather than broaden or compromise it. About how to ex- tend the company’s uniqueness while strengthening the fit among its activities. This work of deciding which target group of cus- tomers and needs to serve requires discipline, the ability to set limits, and forthright commu- nication. Clearly, strategy and leadership are inextricably linked.

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What Is Strategy?

by Michael E. Porter

harvard business review • november–december 1996

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I. Operational Effectiveness Is Not Strategy

For almost two decades, managers have been learning to play by a new set of rules. Compa- nies must be flexible to respond rapidly to competitive and market changes. They must benchmark continuously to achieve best prac- tice. They must outsource aggressively to gain efficiencies. And they must nurture a few core competencies in race to stay ahead of rivals.

Positioning—once the heart of strategy—is rejected as too static for today’s dynamic mar- kets and changing technologies. According to the new dogma, rivals can quickly copy any market position, and competitive advantage is, at best, temporary.

But those beliefs are dangerous half-truths, and they are leading more and more companies down the path of mutually destructive compe- tition. True, some barriers to competition are falling as regulation eases and markets become global. True, companies have properly invested energy in becoming leaner and more nimble. In many industries, however, what some call

hypercompetition

is a self-inflicted wound, not the inevitable outcome of a changing paradigm of competition.

The root of the problem is the failure to dis- tinguish between operational effectiveness and strategy. The quest for productivity, quality, and speed has spawned a remarkable number of management tools and techniques: total quality management, benchmarking, time-based com- petition, outsourcing, partnering, reengineering, change management. Although the resulting operational improvements have often been dramatic, many companies have been frustrated by their inability to translate those gains into sustainable profitability. And bit by bit, almost imperceptibly, management tools have taken the place of strategy. As managers push to im- prove on all fronts, they move farther away from viable competitive positions.

Operational Effectiveness: Necessary but Not Sufficient.

Operational effectiveness and strategy are both essential to superior performance, which, after all, is the primary goal of any en- terprise. But they work in very different ways.

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A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve. It must deliver greater value to customers or create comparable value at a lower cost, or do both. The arithmetic of superior profitability then fol- lows: delivering greater value allows a company to charge higher average unit prices; greater efficiency results in lower average unit costs.

Ultimately, all differences between companies in cost or price derive from the hundreds of ac- tivities required to create, produce, sell, and de- liver their products or services, such as calling on customers, assembling final products, and training employees. Cost is generated by per- forming activities, and cost advantage arises from performing particular activities more effi- ciently than competitors. Similarly, differentia- tion arises from both the choice of activities and how they are performed. Activities, then are the basic units of competitive advantage. Overall ad- vantage or disadvantage results from all a com- pany’s activities, not only a few.

1

Operational effectiveness (OE) means per- forming similar activities

better

than rivals per- form them. Operational effectiveness includes but is not limited to efficiency. It refers to any number of practices that allow a company to bet- ter utilize its inputs by, for example, reducing de- fects in products or developing better products faster. In contrast, strategic positioning means performing

different

activities from rivals’ or per- forming similar activities in

different

ways. Differences in operational effectiveness among

companies are pervasive. Some companies are able to get more out of their inputs than others because they eliminate wasted effort, employ more advanced technology, motivate employees better, or have greater insight into managing particular activities or sets of activ- ities. Such differences in operational effective- ness are an important source of differences in profitability among competitors because they directly affect relative cost positions and levels of differentiation.

Differences in operational effectiveness were at the heart of the Japanese challenge to Western companies in the 1980s. The Japa- nese were so far ahead of rivals in operational effectiveness that they could offer lower cost and superior quality at the same time. It is worth dwelling on this point, because so much recent thinking about competition depends on it. Imagine for a moment a

productivity frontier

that constitutes the sum of all existing

best practices at any given time. Think of it as the maximum value that a company deliver- ing a particular product or service can create at a given cost, using the best available tech- nologies, skills, management techniques, and purchased inputs. The productivity frontier can apply to individual activities, to groups of linked activities such as order processing and manufacturing, and to an entire com- pany’s activities. When a company improves its operational effectiveness, it moves toward the frontier. Doing so may require capital in- vestment, different personnel, or simply new ways of managing.

The productivity frontier is constantly shift- ing outward as new technologies and man- agement approaches are developed and as new inputs become available. Laptop com- puters, mobile communications, the Internet, and software such as Lotus Notes, for exam- ple, have redefined the productivity frontier for sales-force operations and created rich possibilities for linking sales with such activi- ties as order processing and after-sales sup- port. Similarly, lean production, which involves a family of activities, has allowed substantial improvements in manufacturing productivity and asset utilization.

For at least the past decade, managers have been preoccupied with improving operational effectiveness. Through programs such as TQM, time-based competition, and benchmarking, they have changed how they perform activities in order to eliminate inefficiencies, improve customer satisfaction, and achieve best practice. Hoping to keep up with shifts in the produc- tivity frontier, managers have embraced con- tinuous improvement, empowerment, change management, and the so-called learning orga- nization. The popularity of outsourcing and the virtual corporation reflect the growing recognition that it is difficult to perform all activities as productively as specialists.

As companies move to the frontier, they can often improve on multiple dimensions of per- formance at the same time. For example, manu- facturers that adopted the Japanese practice of rapid changeovers in the 1980s were able to lower cost and improve differentiation simul- taneously. What were once believed to be real trade-offs—between defects and costs, for example—turned out to be illusions created by poor operational effectiveness. Managers have learned to reject such false trade-offs.

Michael E. Porter

is the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts.

This article has benefited greatly from the assistance of many individuals and companies. The author gives spe- cial thanks to Jan Rivkin, the coauthor of a related paper. Substantial research contributions have been made by Nicolaj Siggelkow, Dawn Sylvester, and Lucia Marshall. Tarun Khanna, Roger Martin, and Anita McGahan have pro- vided especially extensive comments.

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harvard business review • november–december 1996

Constant improvement in operational ef- fectiveness is necessary to achieve superior profitability. However, it is not usually suffi- cient. Few companies have competed success- fully on the basis of operational effectiveness over an extended period, and staying ahead of rivals gets harder every day. The most obvious reason for that is the rapid diffusion of best practices. Competitors can quickly imitate management techniques, new technologies, input improvements, and superior ways of meeting customers’ needs. The most generic solutions—those that can be used in multiple settings—diffuse the fastest. Witness the pro- liferation of OE techniques accelerated by support from consultants.

OE competition shifts the productivity fron- tier outward, effectively raising the bar for everyone. But although such competition pro- duces absolute improvement in operational ef- fectiveness, it leads to relative improvement for no one. Consider the $5 billion-plus U.S. commercial-printing industry. The major players— R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Quebecor, World Color Press, and Big Flower Press—are competing head to head, serving all types of customers, offering the same array of printing technologies (gravure and web offset), in- vesting heavily in the same new equipment, running their presses faster, and reducing crew sizes. But the resulting major productivity

gains are being captured by customers and equipment suppliers, not retained in superior profitability. Even industry-leader Donnelley’s profit margin, consistently higher than 7% in the 1980s, fell to less than 4.6% in 1995. This pattern is playing itself out in industry after industry. Even the Japanese, pioneers of the new competition, suffer from persistently low profits. (See the insert “Japanese Companies Rarely Have Strategies.”)

The second reason that improved opera- tional effectiveness is insufficient—competitive convergence—is more subtle and insidious. The more benchmarking companies do, the more they look alike. The more that rivals out- source activities to efficient third parties, often the same ones, the more generic those activities become. As rivals imitate one an- other’s improvements in quality, cycle times, or supplier partnerships, strategies converge and competition becomes a series of races down identical paths that no one can win. Competition based on operational effective- ness alone is mutually destructive, leading to wars of attrition that can be arrested only by limiting competition.

The recent wave of industry consolidation through mergers makes sense in the context of OE competition. Driven by performance pres- sures but lacking strategic vision, company after company has had no better idea than to buy up its rivals. The competitors left standing are often those that outlasted others, not com- panies with real advantage.

After a decade of impressive gains in opera- tional effectiveness, many companies are facing diminishing returns. Continuous improvement has been etched on managers’ brains. But its tools unwittingly draw companies toward imi- tation and homogeneity. Gradually, managers have let operational effectiveness supplant strat- egy. The result is zero-sum competition, static or declining prices, and pressures on costs that compromise companies’ ability to invest in the business for the long term.

II. Strategy Rests on Unique Activities

Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.

Southwest Airlines Company, for example, offers short-haul, low-cost, point-to-point service between midsize cities and secondary airports

Operational Effectiveness Versus Strategic Positioning

dereviled eulav reyub ecirpno N

Relative cost position

low lowhigh

high Productivity Frontier (state of best practice)

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What Is Strategy?

harvard business review • november–december 1996

in large cities. Southwest avoids large airports and does not fly great distances. Its customers include business travelers, families, and stu- dents. Southwest’s frequent departures and low fares attract price-sensitive customers who otherwise would travel by bus or car, and convenience-oriented travelers who would choose a full-service airline on other routes.

Most managers describe strategic position- ing in terms of their customers: “Southwest Airlines serves price- and convenience-sensitive travelers,” for example. But the essence of strat- egy is in the activities—choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different ac- tivities than rivals. Otherwise, a strategy is nothing more than a marketing slogan that will not withstand competition.

A full-service airline is configured to get passengers from almost any point A to any point B. To reach a large number of destinations and serve passengers with connecting flights, full-

service airlines employ a hub-and-spoke system centered on major airports. To attract passengers who desire more comfort, they offer first-class or business-class service. To accommodate passengers who must change planes, they co- ordinate schedules and check and transfer baggage. Because some passengers will be traveling for many hours, full-service airlines serve meals.

Southwest, in contrast, tailors all its activities to deliver low-cost, convenient service on its par- ticular type of route. Through fast turnarounds at the gate of only 15 minutes, Southwest is able to keep planes flying longer hours than rivals and provide frequent departures with fewer aircraft. Southwest does not offer meals, assigned seats, interline baggage checking, or premium classes of service. Automated ticketing at the gate encourages customers to bypass travel agents, al- lowing Southwest to avoid their commissions. A standardized fleet of 737 aircraft boosts the efficiency of maintenance.

Southwest has staked out a unique and valu- able strategic position based on a tailored set of activities. On the routes served by South- west, a full-service airline could never be as convenient or as low cost.

Ikea, the global furniture retailer based in Sweden, also has a clear strategic positioning. Ikea targets young furniture buyers who want style at low cost. What turns this marketing concept into a strategic positioning is the tai- lored set of activities that make it work. Like Southwest, Ikea has chosen to perform activi- ties differently from its rivals.

Consider the typical furniture store. Show- rooms display samples of the merchandise. One area might contain 25 sofas; another will display five dining tables. But those items rep- resent only a fraction of the choices available to customers. Dozens of books displaying fabric swatches or wood samples or alternate styles offer customers thousands of product varieties to choose from. Salespeople often escort cus- tomers through the store, answering questions and helping them navigate this maze of choices. Once a customer makes a selection, the order is relayed to a third-party manufacturer. With luck, the furniture will be delivered to the cus- tomer’s home within six to eight weeks. This is a value chain that maximizes customization and service but does so at high cost.

In contrast, Ikea serves customers who are happy to trade off service for cost. Instead of

Japanese Companies Rarely Have Strategies

The Japanese triggered a global revolu- tion in operational effectiveness in the 1970s and 1980s, pioneering practices such as total quality management and continuous improvement. As a result, Japanese manufacturers enjoyed sub- stantial cost and quality advantages for many years.

But Japanese companies rarely de- veloped distinct strategic positions of the kind discussed in this article. Those that did—Sony, Canon, and Sega, for example—were the exception rather than the rule. Most Japanese compa- nies imitate and emulate one another. All rivals offer most if not all product varieties, features, and services; they employ all channels and match one anothers’ plant configurations.

The dangers of Japanese-style compe- tition are now becoming easier to rec- ognize. In the 1980s, with rivals operat- ing far from the productivity frontier, it seemed possible to win on both cost and quality indefinitely. Japanese com- panies were all able to grow in an ex- panding domestic economy and by penetrating global markets. They ap-

peared unstoppable. But as the gap in operational effectiveness narrows, Jap- anese companies are increasingly caught in a trap of their own making. If they are to escape the mutually destruc- tive battles now ravaging their perfor- mance, Japanese companies will have to learn strategy.

To do so, they may have to overcome strong cultural barriers. Japan is noto- riously consensus oriented, and com- panies have a strong tendency to medi- ate differences among individuals rather than accentuate them. Strategy, on the other hand, requires hard choices. The Japanese also have a deeply ingrained service tradition that predisposes them to go to great lengths to satisfy any need a customer expresses. Companies that compete in that way end up blurring their distinct positioning, becoming all things to all customers.

This discussion of Japan is drawn from the author’s research with Hirotaka Takeuchi, with help from Mariko Sakakibara.

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harvard business review • november–december 1996

having a sales associate trail customers around the store, Ikea uses a self-service model based on clear, in-store displays. Rather than rely solely on third-party manufacturers, Ikea designs its own low-cost, modular, ready-to-assemble furniture to fit its positioning. In huge stores, Ikea displays every product it sells in room-like settings, so customers don’t need a decorator to help them imagine how to put the pieces to- gether. Adjacent to the furnished showrooms is a warehouse section with the products in boxes on pallets. Customers are expected to do their own pickup and delivery, and Ikea will even sell you a roof rack for your car that you can return for a refund on your next visit.

Although much of its low-cost position comes from having customers “do it themselves,” Ikea offers a number of extra services that its com- petitors do not. In-store child care is one. Ex- tended hours are another. Those services are uniquely aligned with the needs of its custom- ers, who are young, not wealthy, likely to have children (but no nanny), and, because they work for a living, have a need to shop at odd hours.

The Origins of Strategic Positions.

Strategic positions emerge from three distinct sources, which are not mutually exclusive and often overlap. First, positioning can be based on pro- ducing a subset of an industry’s products or services. I call this

variety-based positioning

because it is based on the choice of product

or service varieties rather than customer segments. Variety-based positioning makes economic sense when a company can best produce particular products or services using distinctive sets of activities.

Jiffy Lube International, for instance, spe- cializes in automotive lubricants and does not offer other car repair or maintenance services. Its value chain produces faster service at a lower cost than broader line repair shops, a combination so attractive that many customers subdivide their purchases, buying oil changes from the focused competitor, Jiffy Lube, and going to rivals for other services.

The Vanguard Group, a leader in the mutual fund industry, is another example of variety- based positioning. Vanguard provides an array of common stock, bond, and money market funds that offer predictable perfor- mance and rock-bottom expenses. The com- pany’s investment approach deliberately sacrifices the possibility of extraordinary per- formance in any one year for good relative performance in every year. Vanguard is known, for example, for its index funds. It avoids mak- ing bets on interest rates and steers clear of narrow stock groups. Fund managers keep trading levels low, which holds expenses down; in addition, the company discourages customers from rapid buying and selling be- cause doing so drives up costs and can force a fund manager to trade in order to deploy new

Finding New Positions: The Entrepreneurial Edge

Strategic competition can be thought of as the process of perceiving new positions that woo customers from established positions or draw new customers into the market. For ex- ample, superstores offering depth of mer- chandise in a single product category take market share from broad-line department stores offering a more limited selection in many categories. Mail-order catalogs pick off customers who crave convenience. In princi- ple, incumbents and entrepreneurs face the same challenges in finding new strategic po- sitions. In practice, new entrants often have the edge.

Strategic positionings are often not obvi- ous, and finding them requires creativity and insight. New entrants often discover unique

positions that have been available but simply overlooked by established competitors. Ikea, for example, recognized a customer group that had been ignored or served poorly. Cir- cuit City Stores’ entry into used cars, CarMax, is based on a new way of performing activities— extensive refurbishing of cars, product guaran- tees, no-haggle pricing, sophisticated use of in- house customer financing—that has long been open to incumbents.

New entrants can prosper by occupying a position that a competitor once held but has ceded through years of imitation and strad- dling. And entrants coming from other indus- tries can create new positions because of dis- tinctive activities drawn from their other businesses. CarMax borrows heavily from

Circuit City’s expertise in inventory manage- ment, credit, and other activities in consumer electronics retailing.

Most commonly, however, new positions open up because of change. New customer groups or purchase occasions arise; new needs emerge as societies evolve; new distri- bution channels appear; new technologies are developed; new machinery or informa- tion systems become available. When such changes happen, new entrants, unencum- bered by a long history in the industry, can often more easily perceive the potential for a new way of competing. Unlike incum- bents, newcomers can be more flexible be- cause they face no trade-offs with their existing activities.

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harvard business review • november–december 1996

capital and raise cash for redemptions. Vanguard also takes a consistent low-cost ap- proach to managing distribution, customer service, and marketing. Many investors in- clude one or more Vanguard funds in their portfolio, while buying aggressively managed or specialized funds from competitors.

The people who use Vanguard or Jiffy Lube are responding to a superior value chain for a particular type of service. A variety-based positioning can serve a wide array of custom- ers, but for most it will meet only a subset of their needs.

A second basis for positioning is that of serv- ing most or all the needs of a particular group of customers. I call this

needs-based positioning,

which comes closer to traditional thinking about targeting a segment of customers. It arises when there are groups of customers with dif- fering needs, and when a tailored set of activi- ties can serve those needs best. Some groups of customers are more price sensitive than others, demand different product features, and need varying amounts of information, support, and services. Ikea’s customers are a good example of such a group. Ikea seeks to meet all the home furnishing needs of its target customers, not just a subset of them.

A variant of needs-based positioning arises when the same customer has different needs on different occasions or for different types of transactions. The same person, for example, may have different needs when traveling on business than when traveling for pleasure with the family. Buyers of cans—beverage compa- nies, for example—will likely have different needs from their primary supplier than from their secondary source.

It is intuitive for most managers to conceive of their business in terms of the customers’ needs they are meeting. But a critical element of needs-based positioning is not at all intuitive and is often overlooked. Differences in needs will not translate into meaningful positions unless the best set of activities to satisfy them

also

differs. If that were not the case, every competitor could meet those same needs, and there would be nothing unique or valuable about the positioning.

In private banking, for example, Bessemer Trust Company targets families with a mini- mum of $5 million in investable assets who want capital preservation combined with wealth accumulation. By assigning one sophis-

ticated account officer for every 14 families, Bessemer has configured its activities for per- sonalized service. Meetings, for example, are more likely to be held at a client’s ranch or yacht than in the office. Bessemer offers a wide array of customized services, including invest- ment management and estate administration, oversight of oil and gas investments, and ac- counting for racehorses and aircraft. Loans, a staple of most private banks, are rarely needed by Bessemer’s clients and make up a tiny frac- tion of its client balances and income. Despite the most generous compensation of account officers and the highest personnel cost as a per- centage of operating expenses, Bessemer’s dif- ferentiation with its target families produces a return on equity estimated to be the highest of any private banking competitor.

Citibank’s private bank, on the other hand, serves clients with minimum assets of about $250,000 who, in contrast to Bessemer’s clients, want convenient access to loans—from jumbo mortgages to deal financing. Citibank’s account managers are primarily lenders. When clients need other services, their account manager re- fers them to other Citibank specialists, each of whom handles prepackaged products. Citibank’s system is less customized than Bessemer’s and allows it to have a lower manager-to-client ratio of 1:125. Biannual office meetings are of- fered only for the largest clients. Both Bessemer and Citibank have tailored their activities to meet the needs of a different group of private banking customers. The same value chain can- not profitably meet the needs of both groups.

The third basis for positioning is that of seg- menting customers who are accessible in dif- ferent ways. Although their needs are similar to those of other customers, the best configu- ration of activities to reach them is different. I call this

access-based positioning

. Access can be a function of customer geography or cus- tomer scale—or of anything that requires a different set of activities to reach customers in the best way.

Segmenting by access is less common and less well understood than the other two bases. Carmike Cinemas, for example, operates movie theaters exclusively in cities and towns with populations under 200,000. How does Car- mike make money in markets that are not only small but also won’t support big-city ticket prices? It does so through a set of activities that result in a lean cost structure. Carmike’s

A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve.

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small-town customers can be served through standardized, low-cost theater complexes re- quiring fewer screens and less sophisticated projection technology than big-city theaters. The company’s proprietary information system and management process eliminate the need for local administrative staff beyond a single theater manager. Carmike also reaps advan- tages from centralized purchasing, lower rent and payroll costs (because of its locations), and rock-bottom corporate overhead of 2% (the in- dustry average is 5%). Operating in small com- munities also allows Carmike to practice a highly personal form of marketing in which the theater manager knows patrons and pro- motes attendance through personal contacts. By being the dominant if not the only theater in its markets—the main competition is often the high school football team—Carmike is also able to get its pick of films and negotiate better terms with distributors.

Rural versus urban-based customers are one example of access driving differences in activities. Serving small rather than large cus- tomers or densely rather than sparsely situ- ated customers are other examples in which the best way to configure marketing, order processing, logistics, and after-sale service ac- tivities to meet the similar needs of distinct groups will often differ.

Positioning is not only about carving out a niche. A position emerging from any of the sources can be broad or narrow. A focused

competitor, such as Ikea, targets the special needs of a subset of customers and designs its activities accordingly. Focused competitors thrive on groups of customers who are over- served (and hence overpriced) by more broadly targeted competitors, or underserved (and hence underpriced). A broadly targeted com- petitor—for example, Vanguard or Delta Air Lines—serves a wide array of customers, per- forming a set of activities designed to meet their common needs. It ignores or meets only partially the more idiosyncratic needs of par- ticular customer customer groups.

Whatever the basis—variety, needs, access, or some combination of the three—positioning requires a tailored set of activities because it is always a function of differences on the supply side; that is, of differences in activities. How- ever, positioning is not always a function of differences on the demand, or customer, side. Variety and access positionings, in partic- ular, do not rely on

any

customer differences. In practice, however, variety or access differ- ences often accompany needs differences. The tastes—that is, the needs—of Carmike’s small- town customers, for instance, run more toward comedies, Westerns, action films, and family entertainment. Carmike does not run any films rated NC-17.

Having defined positioning, we can now begin to answer the question, “What is strategy?” Strategy is the creation of a unique and valu- able position, involving a different set of activi- ties. If there were only one ideal position, there would be no need for strategy. Compa- nies would face a simple imperative—win the race to discover and preempt it. The essence of strategic positioning is to choose activities that are different from rivals’. If the same set of ac- tivities were best to produce all varieties, meet all needs, and access all customers, companies could easily shift among them and operational effectiveness would determine performance.

III. A Sustainable Strategic Position Requires Trade-offs

Choosing a unique position, however, is not enough to guarantee a sustainable advantage. A valuable position will attract imitation by in- cumbents, who are likely to copy it in one of two ways.

First, a competitor can reposition itself to match the superior performer. J.C. Penney, for instance, has been repositioning itself

The Connection with Generic Strategies

In

Competitive Strategy

(The Free Press, 1985), I introduced the concept of ge- neric strategies—cost leadership, differ- entiation, and focus—to represent the alternative strategic positions in an in- dustry. The generic strategies remain useful to characterize strategic positions at the simplest and broadest level. Van- guard, for instance, is an example of a cost leadership strategy, whereas Ikea, with its narrow customer group, is an ex- ample of cost-based focus. Neutrogena is a focused differentiator. The bases for positioning—varieties, needs, and access— carry the understanding of those generic strategies to a greater level of specificity.

Ikea and Southwest are both cost-based focusers, for example, but Ikea’s focus is based on the needs of a customer group, and Southwest’s is based on offering a particular service variety.

The generic strategies framework in- troduced the need to choose in order to avoid becoming caught between what I then described as the inherent contradictions of different strategies. Trade-offs between the activities of in- compatible positions explain those contradictions. Witness Continental Lite, which tried and failed to compete in two ways at once.

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from a Sears clone to a more upscale, fashion- oriented, soft-goods retailer. A second and far more common type of imitation is strad- dling. The straddler seeks to match the benefits of a successful position while maintaining its existing position. It grafts new features, ser- vices, or technologies onto the activities it already performs.

For those who argue that competitors can copy any market position, the airline industry is a perfect test case. It would seem that nearly any competitor could imitate any other air- line’s activities. Any airline can buy the same planes, lease the gates, and match the menus and ticketing and baggage handling services offered by other airlines.

Continental Airlines saw how well South- west was doing and decided to straddle. While maintaining its position as a full-service air- line, Continental also set out to match South- west on a number of point-to-point routes. The airline dubbed the new service Conti- nental Lite. It eliminated meals and first- class service, increased departure frequency, lowered fares, and shortened turnaround time at the gate. Because Continental remained a full-service airline on other routes, it contin- ued to use travel agents and its mixed fleet of planes and to provide baggage checking and seat assignments.

But a strategic position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other positions. Trade-offs occur when activities are incom- patible. Simply put, a trade-off means that more of one thing necessitates less of another. An airline can choose to serve meals—adding cost and slowing turnaround time at the gate— or it can choose not to, but it cannot do both without bearing major inefficiencies.

Trade-offs create the need for choice and protect against repositioners and straddlers. Consider Neutrogena soap. Neutrogena Cor- poration’s variety-based positioning is built on a “kind to the skin,” residue-free soap formu- lated for pH balance. With a large detail force calling on dermatologists, Neutrogena’s mar- keting strategy looks more like a drug com- pany’s than a soap maker’s. It advertises in medical journals, sends direct mail to doctors, attends medical conferences, and performs re- search at its own Skincare Institute. To rein- force its positioning, Neutrogena originally focused its distribution on drugstores and avoided price promotions. Neutrogena uses a

slow, more expensive manufacturing process to mold its fragile soap.

In choosing this position, Neutrogena said no to the deodorants and skin softeners that many customers desire in their soap. It gave up the large-volume potential of selling through supermarkets and using price promotions. It sacrificed manufacturing efficiencies to achieve the soap’s desired attributes. In its original po- sitioning, Neutrogena made a whole raft of trade-offs like those, trade-offs that protected the company from imitators.

Trade-offs arise for three reasons. The first is inconsistencies in image or reputation. A com- pany known for delivering one kind of value may lack credibility and confuse customers—or even undermine its reputation—if it delivers an- other kind of value or attempts to deliver two inconsistent things at the same time. For exam- ple, Ivory soap, with its position as a basic, inex- pensive everyday soap, would have a hard time reshaping its image to match Neutrogena’s pre- mium “medical” reputation. Efforts to create a new image typically cost tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in a major industry—a powerful barrier to imitation.

Second, and more important, trade-offs arise from activities themselves. Different positions (with their tailored activities) require different product configurations, different equipment, different employee behavior, different skills, and different management systems. Many trade-offs reflect inflexibilities in machinery, people, or systems. The more Ikea has config- ured its activities to lower costs by having its customers do their own assembly and delivery, the less able it is to satisfy customers who re- quire higher levels of service.

However, trade-offs can be even more basic. In general, value is destroyed if an activity is overdesigned or underdesigned for its use. For example, even if a given salesperson were capa- ble of providing a high level of assistance to one customer and none to another, the sales- person’s talent (and some of his or her cost) would be wasted on the second customer. Moreover, productivity can improve when vari- ation of an activity is limited. By providing a high level of assistance all the time, the sales- person and the entire sales activity can often achieve efficiencies of learning and scale.

Finally, trade-offs arise from limits on inter- nal coordination and control. By clearly choos- ing to compete in one way and not another,

The essence of strategy is choosing to perform activities differently than rivals do.

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senior management makes organizational priorities clear. Companies that try to be all things to all customers, in contrast, risk confu- sion in the trenches as employees attempt to make day-to-day operating decisions without a clear framework.

Positioning trade-offs are pervasive in competition and essential to strategy. They create the need for choice and purposefully limit what a company offers. They deter straddling or repositioning, because competi- tors that engage in those approaches under- mine their strategies and degrade the value of their existing activities.

Trade-offs ultimately grounded Continental Lite. The airline lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the CEO lost his job. Its planes were delayed leaving congested hub cities or slowed at the gate by baggage transfers. Late flights and cancellations generated a thousand complaints a day. Continental Lite could not afford to compete on price and still pay stan- dard travel-agent commissions, but neither could it do without agents for its full-service business. The airline compromised by cutting commissions for all Continental flights across the board. Similarly, it could not afford to offer the same frequent-flier benefits to travelers paying the much lower ticket prices for Lite service. It compromised again by lowering the rewards of Continental’s entire frequent-flier program. The results: angry travel agents and full-service customers.

Continental tried to compete in two ways at once. In trying to be low cost on some routes and full service on others, Continental paid an enormous straddling penalty. If there were no trade-offs between the two positions, Conti- nental could have succeeded. But the absence of trade-offs is a dangerous half-truth that managers must unlearn. Quality is not always free. Southwest’s convenience, one kind of high quality, happens to be consistent with low costs because its frequent departures are facili- tated by a number of low-cost practices—fast gate turnarounds and automated ticketing, for example. However, other dimensions of air- line quality—an assigned seat, a meal, or bag- gage transfer—require costs to provide.

In general, false trade-offs between cost and quality occur primarily when there is redun- dant or wasted effort, poor control or accuracy, or weak coordination. Simultaneous improve- ment of cost and differentiation is possible

only when a company begins far behind the productivity frontier or when the frontier shifts outward. At the frontier, where compa- nies have achieved current best practice, the trade-off between cost and differentiation is very real indeed.

After a decade of enjoying productivity ad- vantages, Honda Motor Company and Toyota Motor Corporation recently bumped up against the frontier. In 1995, faced with in- creasing customer resistance to higher auto- mobile prices, Honda found that the only way to produce a less-expensive car was to skimp on features. In the United States, it replaced the rear disk brakes on the Civic with lower- cost drum brakes and used cheaper fabric for the back seat, hoping customers would not notice. Toyota tried to sell a version of its best- selling Corolla in Japan with unpainted bumpers and cheaper seats. In Toyota’s case, customers rebelled, and the company quickly dropped the new model.

For the past decade, as managers have im- proved operational effectiveness greatly, they have internalized the idea that eliminating trade-offs is a good thing. But if there are no trade-offs companies will never achieve a sus- tainable advantage. They will have to run faster and faster just to stay in place.

As we return to the question, What is strategy? we see that trade-offs add a new di- mension to the answer. Strategy is making trade-offs in competing. The essence of strat- egy is choosing what

not

to do. Without trade- offs, there would be no need for choice and thus no need for strategy. Any good idea could and would be quickly imitated. Again, performance would once again depend wholly on operational effectiveness.

IV. Fit Drives Both Competitive Advantage and Sustainability

Positioning choices determine not only which activities a company will perform and how it will configure individual activities but also how activities relate to one another. While op- erational effectiveness is about achieving ex- cellence in individual activities, or functions, strategy is about

combining

activities. Southwest’s rapid gate turnaround, which

allows frequent departures and greater use of aircraft, is essential to its high-convenience, low-cost positioning. But how does Southwest achieve it? Part of the answer lies in the com-

Strategic positions can be based on customers’ needs, customers’ accessibility, or the variety of a company’s products or services.