Competitive Advantage

Competitive advantages are strengths and strategies that keep a company ahead of its competitors. It is hard to measure competitive advantage and harder to maintain it. Some competitive advantages are fleeting. The successful companies are those that leverage their competitive advantage successfully and repeatedly.

As understood by us in the above example the competitive advantage that the cyrptoses enjoy is a direct outcome of its natural habitat and hence the circumstantial gain over its rivals. Cryptoses has strategically positioned and tactically planned its competitive advantage that even though its fleeting, its competitive advantage is repetitive and successful. The other name for this sort of competitive advantage could be opportunistic competitive advantage. In the case of business firms also it cannot be denied that there are many opportunistic organizations that ride piggyback on a more powerful organization and enjoy many advantages merely because they are in some way associated with the parent firm. However many times if such firms adhere to the crpytoses methodology, then they endanger their tenacity to maintain their profile if the parent firm fails. A classic example to this could be of Saturn and GM. Saturn has a competitive advantage over others cars by being associated with GM, this gives Saturn the opportunity to rely on only one source (GM) for its resources (Suppliers, Technology, Management) and hence it is the only American car which has fixed price. Years of repetitive and successful competitive advantage of this partnership may stand a threat to Saturn’s existence on failure of GM. Contradictory the competitive advantage, enjoyed by cryptoses by affiliating with sloth does not seem to create any threat for survival or existence on extinction of sloth. It is one of the best