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Some examples of companies using focus as their strategy is the British car manufacturer TVR employs a differentiation focus strategy targeting the market for high performance cars. Whereas BMW and Mercedes target several segments of the market for motor vehicles, TVR currently target only one segment, selling their products on the basis of their exceptional performance rather than particularly on the basis of reliability or comfort.
Ferrari and Rolls-Royce are also classic examples of niche players in the automobile industry. Both these companies have a niche of premium products available at a premium price. Moreover, they have a small percentage of the worldwide market, which is a trait characteristic of niche players.
进退两难——Stuck in the middle
According to Porter (1980), a company’s failure to make a choice between cost leadership and differentiation essentially implies that the company is “stuck in the middle”. There is no competitive advantage for a company that is stuck in the middle and the result is often poor financial performance (Porter, 1980). Its customers may find more value in competitors with strong defined position.
If a firm attempts to achieve an advantage on all fronts, in this attempt it may achieve no advantage at all. For example, if a firm differentiates itself by supplying very high quality products, it risks undermining that quality if it seeks to become a cost leader. Even if the quality did not suffer, the firm would risk projecting a confusing image. For this reason, Michael Porter argued that to be successful over the long-term, a firm must select only one of these three generic strategies. Otherwise, with more than one single generic strategy the firm will be "stuck in the middle" and will not achieve a competitive advantage.
Porter also argued that firms that are able to succeed at multiple strategies often do so by creating separate business units for each strategy. By separating the strategies into different units having different policies and even different cultures, a corporation is less likely to become "stuck in the middle."
However, there exists a viewpoint that a single generic strategy is not always best because within the same product customers often seek multidimensional satisfactions such as a combination of quality, style, convenience, and price
In some industries, there were companies able to have a cost leadership and would choose to compete at prices comparables to the industry. This situation, according to Porter would be classified as stuck in the middle, but actually the financial situation of those companies were superior to the average, showing that even if a company can lower the prices there is no reason to do it when a customer will buy at a price of the industry, not entering a price war, and keeping profits in the hands of the company whose revenues will be higher, rather than in the hands of customers that were able to pay more for the same.
Successful companies like Toyota and Benetton, which have adopted more than one generic strategy. Both these companies used the generic strategies of differentiation and low cost simultaneously, which led to the success of the companies.
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