What do you consider as, potentially, the most important elements when working to improve an organization’s competitive advantage and create value for all stakeholders?
There are many different ways to get a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and many businesses will focus on a few tried and true methods of gaining a leg up on the competition. These methods can be classified into four different categories which form the basis for understanding how businesses try to compete. The four primary methods of gaining a competitive advantage are cost leadership, differentiation, defensive strategies and strategic alliances. The advantage gained by defensive strategy is that it allows the business to further distance itself from its competition by, in some sense, maintaining a competitive advantage it has gained. Therefore, this strategy is closely related to differentiation and cost leadership because it is a method used by businesses to keep those advantages in place once they have been attained.
Obviously with design’s changing face and new brands and business taking over the lead, it is crucial to innovate and change on the strategy. Innovation goes hand with hand with the design strategy as well. In fact, as stated by Lockwood (2008), “innovation is dependent upon design”. It is simply invention plus design. Through years the designers gained the need to give the functioning invention an aesthetic look. Now days the design makes the product tangible and usable and gives it a bigger value. It is safe to say that sales, business growth, brands reputation do rely on the design directly. Through collected immense data from multiple researchers, the data tells us how impactful can a smart visual and strategical thinking be and what difference can these points make in the future. If you take all this points to consideration, it only tells how design is important. Stop and think about it. When we step into a bakery shop to buy something to eat and you have no idea how everything tastes, you decide on the looks. Or if you are buying a bicycle and you have two options with same price, without hesitation you pick the brand you like look wise more or is known to you already. It is simple as that. A good design matters.
Let’s be honest. All the great strategies or in our case designs start with a broad research. So many variables a designer needs to consider before coming up with ideas. Little details that non-designer wouldn’t have an idea about. It is the perception of the customer that we are adapting to. Earlier in the essay, I mentioned an advert from a technology company. So, I researched deeper. Huawei Technologies Co., is the world’s largest telecommunication maker. Recently beating another global company, Apple. As stated in article of Business Standard (Strumpf, 2018), after launching the new model of Huawei P20, “the company’s revenue increased by 30 percent”. After failing to succeed in previous years, the company just simply applied a new strategy. Engineers came up with triple lens cameras and designers applied a simply genius design to the smartphone and voila. Customers and audience are left impressed. On both design and user perspective. Invention plus design equals innovation. From once an ugly duckling, you have a beautiful swan, that has beaten a worldwide technological company Apple in less than a half year.