Abstract

BONIFACE, O. Using customer-product-competitor analysis as drivers for a business' reconfiguration and market re-positioning. JCMAN [online]. 2017, vol.14, n.1, pp.385-415. ISSN 1815-7440.

As businesses strive to reconfigure and modify their capabilities to remain sustainable, lack of clear strategic business platforms against which relevant strategic analysis can be based often affect the strategic decisions to reconfigure and modify their capabilities to respond to the emerging industry and market changes. This study seeks to deal with such a challenge by using confirmatory factor analysis to test and validate the null hypothesis that customer-product-competitor analysis offers critical interactive strategic business platforms that instigate a firm's decision to reconfigure, innovate and re-position itself to withstand all unfolding discontinuities. As customer-product-competitor analysis aids assessment of the complexities of the existing, prospective and unbothered customers' needs, confirmatory factor analysis revealed improved understanding of customer-product-competitor dynamics to enable a firm assess its capabilities vis-á-vis rivals' capabilities to respond to the identified gaps. In case of imbalances offering rivals with superior advantages, such analysis spurs capabilities' reconfiguration and modifications to leverage a firm's market re-positioning to respond to such imbalances. Subsequently, this bolsters a firm's overall competitiveness and improved market performance. In contrast to the approach in Kim and Mauborgne's new value innovation logic and Teece's dynamic capabilities theories in which such critical platforms are not clearly identified and explained, this study enriches the existing theories by suggesting customer-product-competitor analysis model that determines decisions to reconfigure and modify or not to do so to create new values that in turn spawn a firm's market re-positioning, continuity and sustainability.

Keywords : business' reconfiguration; CFA - confirmatory factor analysis; CPC - customer-product-competitor analysis; market re-positioning.

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