Sustainable Strategies Require Clear Positioning

Sustainability is an often-used buzzword these days. Whether it is food, fashion, or mobility: “sustainable” has become a quality feature and is often used to improve the image of companies. Whenever possible, corporations switch their production to sustainable products or processes. But what about their strategy? How sustainable are companies in their strategic direction? Entrepreneurs and top managers should reflect on this question and check the company’s strategy in terms of sustainability.

An essential aspect of a sustainable strategy is the unique positioning of the company in the market.

Three Key Questions

In order to understand why uniqueness is important for every company and how it works, this blog answers the following three decisive questions:

Why should your company strive for uniqueness?

Success is not any more a question of offering a unique product or service or having the best resources or sales channels. Even if the company’s customer orientation and particular key success factors ensure today market leadership, these factors can lose relevance short term due to unexpected changes in the market. In order to develop a sustainable strategy, it is important to put together the individual pieces of the puzzle that make up the business model in a way that guarantees that the overall image of the company is coherent and distinctive. Comparable to the swarm theory, it is not important that every single member in the swarm is perfect or unique, but that the big picture, the swarm, is recognizable as something exceptional and unique. Similarly, it is not important for companies to be perfect in the individual parts of the business model, but to be coherent and distinctive in its totally.

What does a company have to do to achieve uniqueness?

In order to achieve the perfect overall concept, it is essential that the company is prepared to accept tradeoffs. The right tradeoffs in the choice of performed activities can turn weaknesses into strengths. However, in extreme cases this means to give up certain activities or market segments or rethinking the product or service portfolio. The advantages and disadvantages of decisions related to each individual compromise should be weighed very carefully with regard to the fit of the whole. In return, these difficult decisions can make the company unique and lead to a sustainable overall direction in the long term.

It is not always obvious when companies should part from currently apparent successful and long-lasting practices. Traditional models assume that only one company in an industry can occupy the ideal competitive position and benchmarking is often used to gain competitive advantages. However, benchmarking dilutes the own strategy and leads to similar processes in companies in the same industry, which ends up in undifferentiated customer promises. The consequence: customers cannot distinguish your companies offer from others. Best practices have their justification in operational field. However, when it comes to strategy, the introduction of such methods is rather harmful, as it will trigger the loss of uniqueness of the business model.

After all, what does uniqueness bring to the company?

The optimized business model on uniqueness gives the company a sustainable competitive advantage, and that is what ultimately matters.