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Management & Leadership vocabulary · Strategy and Planning

Competitive advantage

Meaning in management & leadership, with examples

nounCommon term

In management & leadership, competitive advantage means: Something that allows a company to do better than its competitors, such as lower costs, a stronger brand, better technology or more skilled people.

In Turkish: rekabet avantajı, rekabet üstünlüğü

How it is used

A central idea in strategy, made widely known by Michael Porter's work in the 1980s. Companies gain, build, keep or lose a competitive advantage, and a lasting one is called a sustainable competitive advantage.

Example sentences

  1. Our main competitive advantage is next-day delivery across the country.

  2. Low prices are not a sustainable competitive advantage if others can easily copy them.

Common collocations

  • gain a competitive advantage
  • sustainable competitive advantage
  • key competitive advantage
  • lose a competitive advantage
  • strategyA long-term plan that sets out where an organisation wants to go and the main choices it will make to get there, such as which markets to enter and what to stop doing.
  • SWOT analysisA planning tool that lists an organisation's internal strengths and weaknesses and the external opportunities and threats it faces, used before making strategic choices.
  • benchmarkA standard or reference point used to compare performance, such as a competitor's results or an industry average; as a verb, to make that comparison.
  • visionA clear picture of what an organisation or team wants to become in the future, used to give people direction and a reason to work towards the same aim.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Strategy and Planning

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