Advantages Of Pure Business Strategy

The purpose of this research project is to identify and evaluate the strategic advantages obtained and maintained by Pure Lifestyle. To effectively identify the Pure Lifestyle’s activities and processes that create a strategic, it is important to first gain an understanding of ‘strategic advantages’ in business terms.

Johnson, Scholes and Whittington define strategy as, “the direction and scope of an organisation over the long term which achieves advantage in a changing environment, through its configuration of resources and competencies with the aims of fulfilling stakeholder expectations” (Johnson et al, 2006).

It is therefore clear that for a business to maintain an effective long term strategy, it will be necessary for them to constantly

The factors that lead to competitive advantages generally comprise of core competencies and strategic resources, leveraged by a business through key suppliers and relationships. These valuable business conditions thus enable a business to perform in a more favourable or superior position than competitors and evolve fundamentally out of the value that a firm is able to create for their customers. (Porter, 1985)

The question is then: How do competitive advantages relate to strategic advantages?

According to the Baldrige Glossary, strategic advantages refer to those “marketplace benefits that exert a decisive influence on an organization’s likelihood of future success” (Steel, 2008). Strategic advantages encompass the most fundamental qualities that a business possesses over their competitors over the very long term. In essence, by strengthening a business’s unique internal capabilities and sustaining their competitive advantage over the long term, a business can achieve a strategic advantage.

Sustainable competitive advantages have a central place in strategic thinking and competitive strategy (Coyne, 1986) and can be the root of successes or failures in a

In order to maximise this advantage a business should exploit the learning curve effect as well as exploit all sources of cost advantages by identifying their cost drivers. By becoming the cost leader in an industry, a business will be able to control their selling prices and set them either strategically above, or below competitors while still generating a profit.

Differentiation is the second strategy that enables businesses to remain competitive. By following a differentiation strategy a business can achieve competitive advantages by offering a product that has particular characteristics or features that are unique within the industry. A business can place itself in a superior position in relation to its competitors by conducting market research in order to identify the key attributes or features of a product, that the majority of the market consider important, and then supplying those in a differentiated manner.

Differentiation can be achieved based on:

• The products features; The system by which the product is delivered; The way in which the product is marketed; The business’s