Review of Articles: Investigating Advantage Using Porter's Five Forces Model - Book Report/Review Example

Download file to see previous pages There are various ways or strategies in which a company can achieve competitive advantage such as cutting costs to bring prices down, variety of products offered, or the effectiveness of the distribution chain and consumer service, especially in the service industry. However, it is important for organizations to understand the strengths and opportunities the competitive edge brings with it in order to benefit from the situation. Therefore, they need to position their businesses appropriately and be able to sustain the competitive advantage they have achieved. As other companies constantly strive to become the market leader, they are adopting various competitive advantage strategies that enable them to either, take advantage of their business environment resources or counteract the other firm’s competitive advantage through differentiation and innovation Porter’s Five Forces Competitive Model In recent times, various theories have emerged providing organizations systems and techniques for achieving Competitive Advantage in the contemporary economic environment. ...
e explains how to measure the attractiveness of an industry through focusing an organization’s efforts on these five forces: rivalry among existing competitors, threat of new entrants, bargaining power of buyers, threat of substitute products or services, and bargaining power of suppliers (Porter 2008). Michael Porter explains that all industries appear to differ in, for example, operation of business of an aircraft manufacturer is very different from that of a small-scale restaurant. Similarly, the product or service offered in these industries but the principal business factors remain the same in all industries. He identifies these five market forces as coherent drivers of profitability and aims to achieve competitive advantage through exploiting them. However, he realizes that these underlying structural forces are influenced by various factors and strategists must study these forces to comprehend how they can achieve profitability by successfully foreseeing and manipulating competition. Now we will review five journal articles on competitive advantage that used Porter’s five forces. Article 1 The first article is titled “Fathoming Porter's Five Forces Model in the Internet Era”, which is written by Karagiannopoulos, Georgopoulos and Nikolopoulos (2005). The purpose of the article is to use Porter’s five forces to examine the effect of Internet in the contemporary business environment compared with the old economy. It also studies whether Porter’s model lead to innovation through exploitation of the surroundings in which the business is operating (Karagiannopoulos, Georgopoulos and Nikolopoulos 2005). In the introduction of the article, the authors highlight the scope and aims of their research. They discuss how difficult it is to compare an ...Download file to see next pagesRead More