Exam 5: Building Competitive Advantage Through Business-Level Strategy

Standardization describes what happens when innovation pushes out the efficiency frontier in an industry, allowing for greater value to be offered through superior differentiation at a lower cost than was previously thought possible.

In which of the following situations is a differentiation strategy used?

List the features that need to be included in functional strategies to improve differentiation.

Which of the following generic competitive strategies is a producer of commodity steel most likely to pursue?

Mike's Eatery, a fast food chain, neither customizes its product offerings nor sells new products based on market segments.Mike's Eatery is pursuing standardization strategy.

Info Tech, Inc.makes complex telecommunications products, such as cellular telephones.Since this company has a distinctive competency in research and development, it should try to differentiate its product through:

Functional strategies to improve differentiation should include:

Which of the following generic business-level strategies is based on the intent to lower costs so that a company can lower prices and still make a profit?

A low-cost position is most appropriate when:

When a company offers a wide variety of products at lower prices than its rivals, it is most likely:

The efficiency frontier is not static; it is continually being pushed outwards by the efforts of managers to improve their firm's performance through innovation.

Differentiation leads to high brand loyalty, which in tum significantly increases the threat of new firms entering the industry.

When a company is able to pioneer process innovations that lead to value innovation, it effectively changes the game in an industry and may be able to outperform its rivals for a long period of time.

The advantage that focused companies have over their broad market rivals is that they:

Market segmentation refers to the process of subdividing a market into clearly identifiable groups of customers with similar needs, desires, and demand characteristics.

Which of the following allows a company to lower cost through functional strategy and organization?

Jordan's Ice Creams is strategically located near a university.After realizing that most of its customers, who are mostly students, prefer a wide range of flavors, it started offering different combinations of premium flavors, cones, and toppings to create hundreds of extravagant, customized products.Which generic strategy is Jordan pursuing?

A disadvantage of pursuing a low-cost strategy is that:

A finn's bnsiness model shonld contain three components: what is to be satisfied, who is to be satisfied, and how they will be satisfied.

In commodity markets, competitive advantage goes to the company that has the lowest costs.