Strategy
Build a competitive advantage
When your profitability separates from your rivals', crack the source of the advantage with value logic; widen the wedge between willingness to pay and cost through activity analysis, and build a defensible value proposition.
Your learning route
The program order
Complete the programs in order to finish the route. Each one brings short lessons, applied practice and a realistic business case together.
Plus and Pro members can create a verifiable Stratify certificate when the route is complete.
- Program 01
Value creation and added value
Foundational: you learn the value logic behind competitive advantage. By the end of this program you can calculate the value created from willingness to pay and supplier opportunity cost, work out a company's added value, and tell differentiation and low-cost strategies apart.
- Industry or company?
- Willingness to pay and value created
- Added value: what vanishes without you?
Apply it: Case: Osprey Crane Systems
5 lessons · ≈3 hours
- Program 02
Activity analysis: cost and willingness to pay
Intermediate: you learn to break competitive advantage down to the level of activities. By the end of this program you can build a value chain that highlights distinctive activities, decompose unit cost into activities and estimate competitors' positions with cost drivers, and analyze relative willingness to pay with the four buyer questions.
- The tension and the value chain
- Relative cost analysis: the snack cake wars
- Cost drivers, five lessons, and pitfalls
Apply it: Case: Ferndale Baking
5 lessons · ≈3 hours
- Program 03
Strategy options and the value proposition
Advanced: you learn to move from analysis to strategic choice. By the end of this program you can generate strategy options with seven patterns, judge the coherence of the whole with the rugged-landscape metaphor, and draw a value proposition diagram that exposes danger signs and deliberately trailing attributes.
- Seven patterns for generating options
- Dual advantage
- The rugged landscape: the whole versus the parts
Apply it: Case: Lakeshore Coaches
5 lessons · ≈3 hours