Exploring for competitive advantages in business markets

In hypercompetitive business markets, the ability to develop unique competitive advantages often spells the difference between corporate success and failure. Overlaying segmentation with multiattribute analysis yields a competitive advantage matrix that provides perspectives for uncovering new competitive advantages. The scheme accomplishes this by systematically assessing variances among ideal, perceived, and actual ratings on key attributes for the company's own brand and for each major competitive brand. Flowing directly from this analysis is a set of seven potential strategic alternatives for building competitive advantage. Guidelines for developing and prioritizing the strategies are included. Regularly applying the approach over time cart also yield built-in measures for evaluating the success of previously implemented competitive advantage strategies. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Inc.