For the successful operation of the enterprise in the market, it needs to have an advantage over organizations that produce similar products or provide similar services. Competitive advantage is a concentrated manifestation of superiority over competitors in various fields of work of a particular organization, measured by economic as well as financial indicators. It should not be understood as a potential opportunity for the enterprise. This is not an opportunity, but a fact that takes place as a result of the real preferences of a certain circle of customers. In business, competitive advantage is one of the main, main goals and the result of the economic activity of the enterprise. To achieve this goal, the efforts of the entire team of the organization are necessary.
A competitive advantage may arise if your company has a low cost of goods or services, a high level of product differentiation, optimal market segmentation, innovation is introduced, and a fairly quick response to market needs is carried out. It includes labor productivity and staff qualifications, product quality, high professionalism of managers, a high level of strategic management.
The competitive advantage is comparative in nature, since it can be revealed only by comparing the characteristics that affect the economic indicators of sales efficiency.
The number of preferred choices on the part of respondents may reflect the rating of a product resulting from a marketing analysis.
In a special position are products that have unique characteristics that have no analogues. Such products, having absolute competitive advantages, possess (in addition to unique value) the fact that they overcome the boundaries of competition for some time and are monopolists in the market. But this type of monopoly, supported by the state, is fixed by the method of patenting new characteristics of the goods. These absolute advantages will create an additional incentive for scientific and technological development, which will help develop and competition.
The competitive advantage of any economic object cannot be universal, it can only be relative.
To achieve it, a whole range of measures is necessary, however, and they may turn out to be insufficient, since external factors may turn out to be stronger.
It is Porter's theory of competitive advantages that is devoted to the analysis of the influence of various factors on the organization. In the work “International Competition” (1990), he came to the following conclusion: the global competitive advantages of national enterprises depend most of all on the macroeconomic and social environment in which they operate in the country. The macroenvironment is determined not only by production factors, but also by such as demand in the domestic market; development of related industries; level of management in the country; level of competition; government economic policy; random events (war, unexpected discoveries and others). The presence of these six factors largely determines the competitive advantages of organizations, industries and countries in the global market.
M. Porter includes as determinants random events that either strengthen or weaken the competitive advantages of countries. He includes new discoveries, technologies, sharp fluctuations in energy prices, exchange rates, significant changes in global stock markets, important political decisions, military conflicts and other unforeseen circumstances.