🟢 Business strategy is only about one thing: avoiding becoming a commodity
Business strategy is often seen it seems as a convoluted field dealing with tons of tools, frameworks, and intricate concepts. I'd argue that if you care to streamline all the fluff, it's only about one thing: making sure a business doesn't fall into the commodity trap.
A tier-one automotive supplier once asked us to help redesign its go-to-market strategy after losing a contract it had held for eleven years: an East European competitor had quoted two per cent lower, with a part that passed every test it had to, and a clear supply chain process. By that point the buyer's procurement team had no reason left to care about anything else.
That's what strategy is all about, told in miniature.
Underneath pricing frameworks, portfolio reviews, SWOTs, Porter's five forces diagrams, competitive advantage analysis, de-risking strategies, value pricing, balanced scorecards, innovation cycles, market entry decks, and other exotic positioning exercises sits only one question... Are you a commodity business?
And your whole company either answers Yes or No.
This brutal question is everything. It's whether you have built something a customer cannot walk away from overnight or has, without quite meaning to, built something anyone can replace with an email or two.
Commodity businesses and the rest
Don't get me wrong: a commodity business isn't, in essence, a bad business. What it does is sell something functionally identical to what three, ten, or a thousand competitors sell, which leaves the customer with one simple ask: can it be cheaper?
Price.
