Quality leadership
As a quality leader one is competitive strategy called, from the perspective of when consumers the product quality or service quality of a company on a market compared to its competitors is perceived as a leader.
General
The competitive strategies are cost , price , quality and technology leadership . What these corporate strategies have in common is that a company in a specific entrepreneurial sector ( costs , market price , product quality / service quality or technology ) has a greater lead or advantages over its competitors in the same market segment . Quality leadership is geared towards the fact that a company offers a higher product quality than the competition.
The core of this strategy is the product or service quality. Quality is made up of functional benefits and additional benefits . Functional benefits include durability , speed , failure safety , universal applicability and health and environmental factors. The additional benefit consists of the product design and the linking of a product with additional services ( English value added services ). The latter are secondary services that complement the actual product (such as the free shuttle service to the airport included in the flight ticket ). The quality leader clearly stands out from other competitors who offer the same product due to its outstanding product quality and can therefore become the market leader . Even when branding the product and service quality play a central role.
Today this is no longer a coincidence, but is part of a company's strategic planning . If it achieves cost advantages through cost reduction , it can - with constant market price - achieve more profits than the competition or it lowers prices and attracts more demand. There is price leadership, for example, in the partial monopoly , a market with one large and many small providers. Here the large company has a certain leeway in setting its prices, for example through economies of scale . The smaller companies will base their price decisions on the market leader . Quality leadership requires a head start in product quality or service quality and forces competitors to follow suit.
history
In 1911, in his work Theory of Economic Development, the economist Joseph Schumpeter described a dynamic entrepreneur (pioneer entrepreneur ) who became a monopoly through his innovation . It stays that way until imitators appear or its innovation fades due to further developments. The introduction of new production methods , the development of new markets or the conquest of new sources of supply for raw materials , consumables and supplies ( english low-cost country sourcing ) could bring a profit the monopolist, the Erich Preiser 1955 the name of pioneering advantage was.
In 1980, the US economist Michael E. Porter brought a highly regarded book onto the market, which triggered a wave of reactions in the specialist literature and was widely accepted in practice. Then there are three competitive strategies, the differentiation strategy ( quality leadership ), cost and price leadership and the niche strategy (“focus”). According to Porter, a company can only position itself successfully in competition with others if it pursues one of these strategies. A quality advantage is suitable to reduce the price sensitivity of the customers, whereby higher prices can be achieved. According to Porter, if the price differences are too high, quality leadership can lead to customers consciously accepting quality losses and dropping out as buyers or imitators trying to compensate for the difference in quality.
Business prerequisites
Quality management , quality control and quality assurance are essential prerequisites for achieving quality leadership. It requires consistent total quality management . It should be noted, however, that these control tasks are performed by organizational units of the same company; Companies control their quality themselves. Experience shows that self -control is not as efficient as external control and can be associated with conflicts of interest , but it does at least implement the four-eyes principle . Efficient total quality management causes higher fixed costs that reduce profits. However, if a company attracts more demand due to the status of quality leadership, the fixed costs are acceptable if the marginal revenues exceed them.
Quality leadership requires progressive production technology , product innovation and product development as part of a quality policy . This requires a highly qualified workforce and organizational precautions such as a functioning quality management system. The main operational function is research and development , which entails increased research and development costs . If the share of research and development costs ( research intensity ) in a company increases disproportionately to the total costs , the probability increases that it will become the quality leader in the market. The position of technology leader is often associated with this. The quality leader is therefore whoever has the highest research intensity in an economic sector. The quality leader can use his differentiating advantage when costs are par with the competition. If all companies produce with identical quality, a company can differentiate itself from its competitors as a quality leader through product innovation. Any quality followers are faced with market barriers that are characterized by high market entry costs. These market entry costs deter quality followers if the fixed market entry costs are higher than the expected profit .
consequences
Given market prices , the quality leader can increase its sales. He can often enforce a higher price with which the additional research and development costs incurred for the higher product quality can be amortized. The competitiveness increases by quality or technology leadership, because the products factual preferences create with customers and will therefore buy preferred. If quality followers appear and accept the market entry costs, the price war begins and the quality leader has to accept a price reduction.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Torsten Schlüter, Strategic Marketing for Materials , 2000, p. 155
- ^ Rainald Kasprik, Rationale Unternehmens- und Marketingplanung , 2002, p. 165
- ↑ Joseph Schumpeter, Theory of Economic Development , 1911, p. 78
- ↑ Erich Preiser, Multiplicator Process and Dynamic Entrepreneurship , in: Yearbooks for Economics and Statistics , Volume 167, 1955, pp. 127–140
- ↑ Michael Eugene Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for analyzing industries and competitors , 1980, p. 62 ff.
- ↑ Michael Eugene Porter, Competitive Strategy: Methods for Analyzing Sectors and Competitors , 2008, pp. 74 ff.
- ↑ Torsten Schlüter, Strategic Marketing for Materials , 2000, p. 155
- ↑ Torsten Schlüter, Strategic Marketing for Materials , 2000, p. 155
- ↑ Michael Bitz / Michel Domsch / Ralf Ewert / Franz W. Wagner, Vahlens Kompendium der Betriebswirtschaftslehre , Volume 2, 2014, p. 218
- ↑ Fred Wagner, Gabler Insurance Lexicon , 2011, p. 507
- ^ Wilhelm Pfähler / Harald Wiese, Corporate Strategies in Competition , 1998, p. 355