Gurus On Marketing

Value chains and their relevance to marketing
• They reflect organisational capabilities to undertake effective
marketing.
• They can be used to analyse costs.
• They can be benchmarked against competitors’ value chains.
• Market segments served affect the configuration of value
chains.
• Outsourcing decisions can be made depending on the weaknesses
of the value chain.
• They reinforce decisions to form strategic alliances and partnerships
to enter new markets or gain specific capabilities to
satisfy consumer needs.
• Value chains enable analysis of adding value to the customers.
Porter’s generic strategies
In order to achieve an appropriate competitive positioning and aboveaverage
performance, Porter has proposed the following strategies
which are termed as generic strategies:
Cost leadership
In this situation an organisation sets out to be the low-cost producer
in its industry. It caters for many industry segments. If an organisation
can achieve and sustain overall cost leadership then it will achieve
superior performance. Cost leadership can be obtained by focusing
on key accounts, reaping economies of scale, controlling costs.
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GURUS ON MARKETING