(Solved Homework): Describe the four Competitive Priorities. Discuss the need for trade-offs in the implementation of…

Competitive priorities represent different areas of focus by which a firm can achieve competitive advantage. In general, organizations can compete on four key competitive priorities:

1. Quality: Better quality leads to better price for products, more customer loyalty and hence higher selling of products. Quality could be in terms of service or product. Better price is achieved through lesser rejections, losses and wastage leading to better cost for products.
2. Cost: Lesser cost with consistent margin can lead to better price of the product attracting more customers and sustained business for the company. Lesser cost can be achieved through better priced of raw material with better quality.
3. Delivery/ Time: On time delivery is essential for better service to customers. This ensures loyalty. At the same time the productivity of the process increases with reduced time for operation. On time delivery reduces the wait time. When delivery is in time, customers are willing to pay more, thus benefitting the producer or service provider.
4. Innovation: If you don’t improve continually you will become obsolete, similarly if you don’t innovate you’ll be replaced by competitors. Thus every organization tends to keep innovating so that they keep on maintaining and growing its own market share.

At any point in time some trade-off has to be made while implementing any business strategy. But these are necessary trade-offs that has to be made when the existing one has to be replaced by a new one. These trade-off can be in the form of, job cuts, extra cost, losses and wastage etc. Let us take an example, when a new product has to be introduced in the market with the existing workforce, you have to make decision to choose between man-hour losses that will be faced while deploying some people from the existing workforce to the new product development and the benefit that will be derived if the new product is a success. Without these trade-off you can’t create a new product and hence you can’t grow. Hence these trade-offs are the most needed ones.