Competitive strategy and strategic agendas. Introduction. Porter’s five forces and strategic analysis

area for future research.

Copyright  2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Introduction

Has competitive strategy now become a mature industry or are there still further frontiers to be explored? This is an intriguing question for strategy theorists who might otherwise face a future of playing their old strategy records over and over again or like the pop singer Madonna, seeking to reinvent themselves. Anyone reading Mintzberg et al.’s Strategy Safari (1998) might well conclude that twentieth-century strategic management has run its course as anything that could be said about strategy has already been said.

The argument advanced here is that with a small dose of imagination and inspiration there may still be further avenues for innovation in competitive strategy that have not been worked through previously. As with innovation in industry generally, new ideas

are often borne out of new combinations of existing ideas and this paper is an example of this. More specifically, by examining the role that strategic agendas play in the minds of key stakeholders, we can develop new perspectives for both understanding how competitive strategies actually operate and

By examining the role that strategic agendas play we can develop new perspectives for understanding

competitive strategies

also how to manage them more effectively in practice.

This argument is developed by examining how these agendas impact on competitive strategy and how they first shape industry level strategic issues. Second, their

Figure 1. Levels of strategic agendas.

impact on Porter’s (1980) five competitive forces is examined. Agendas will also influence how managers evolve their organization’s competitive positions. While we do not focus specifically in this paper upon strategic agendas at the organisational or managementlevel(see,forexample,Grundy, 1999), these latter two levels are linked to the four levels of analysis depicted in Figure 1.

The core argument suggested here is that without a rich understanding of strategic agendas, Porter’s five forces give only a limited account of real-life patterns of behaviour in the competitive market (Level 2 of Figure 1). Industry-level strategic agendas are first examined.

Industry-level strategic agendas

This section briefly explores the strategic agendas (and stakeholder positioning) at industry level. Within each industry there are invariably a number of areas of innovation and change. Some of these might be related to defining industry standards or generally recognized ways of doing things or other issues. For example, if the retail grocery supermarket industry is examined, there are a number of players who might have an influence on controlling the level of margin in the industry. Using a technique derived from Piercey (1989); the approximate positions of key players in the industry can be plotted towards tighter control of margin levels, prior to the recent review of the market by government regulatory bodies.

Figure 2. Industry stakeholder analysis.

In Figure 2 the attitude of the various players against their perceived relative influence is plotted. The government appears to be highly influential and previously advocating stronger controls, although by early 2000 this positioning had lapsed to a neutral position. The major supermarkets, Tesco and Sainsbury, were shown as also highly influential and vigorously against this move while ASDA (pursuing a policy of even more aggressively low prices) would appear to be moderately against/neutral.

Newer entrants, like Aldi, Netto and new e-commerce companies, exert considerably lower influence. In one sense they might be in favour of more controls (to move the market in their direction) but in another sense they might be against it, as it would force the major players to lower their prices too.