or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
More Buying Choices
19 used & new from £7.36

Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
 
 

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (Hardcover)

by Michael E. Porter (Author) "The essence of formulating competitive strategy is relating a company to its environment ..." (more)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
RRP: £27.95
Price: £21.62 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £6.33 (23%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In stock but may require up to 2 additional days to deliver.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

Only 4 left in stock--order soon.

18 used from £7.36

Frequently Bought Together

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors + Competitive Advantage + Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
Price For All Three: £46.91

Some of these items ship sooner than the others. Show details


Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Competitive Advantage

Competitive Advantage

by Michael E. Porter
4.9 out of 5 stars (13)  £10.89
Harvard Business Essentials: Strategy

Harvard Business Essentials: Strategy

by Harvard Business Essentials
4.7 out of 5 stars (3)  £7.77
Competing for the Future

Competing for the Future

by Gary Hamel
4.5 out of 5 stars (20)  £7.91
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

by W. Chan Kim
4.2 out of 5 stars (13)  £14.40
On Competition, Updated Edition (Harvard Business Review)

On Competition, Updated Edition (Harvard Business Review)

by Michael E Porter
£14.97
Explore similar items

Product details

  • Hardcover: 397 pages
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd; New edition edition (4 Aug 1998)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0684841487
  • ISBN-13: 978-0684841489
  • Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 15.2 x 3.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 100,358 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #3 in  Books > Business, Finance & Law > Reference & Education > Competition
    #67 in  Books > Business, Finance & Law > Management > Strategy
  • See Complete Table of Contents

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in These Sponsored Links

  (What is this?)
   Competitive Industries opens new browser window
www.MarketResearch.com  -  Find Market Research & Analysis from Over 220,000 Reports 
   Competitive Strategy opens new browser window
www.Simon-Kucher.com  -  Expert Pricing Strategy & Marketing Consultants. Contact Us Today! 
  
 

Product Description

Product Description

This text unravels the rules that govern competition in business and turns them into powerful analytical tools to help management interpret market signals, forecast the direction of industry development, and position a company to compete more successfully.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
First Sentence
The essence of formulating competitive strategy is relating a company to its environment. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

 (What's this?)
Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
 
strategy
business strategy
management
business
professional
org development
marketing
industry analysis
competition
textbook
joe guse

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
77% buy the item featured on this page:
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors 4.3 out of 5 stars (20)
£21.62
Competitive Advantage
11% buy
Competitive Advantage 4.9 out of 5 stars (13)
£10.89
Strategy Safari: The Complete Guide Through the Wilds of Strategic Management
5% buy
Strategy Safari: The Complete Guide Through the Wilds of Strategic Management 4.6 out of 5 stars (16)
£12.49
Contemporary Strategy Analysis
4% buy
Contemporary Strategy Analysis 4.6 out of 5 stars (14)
£27.43

 

Customer Reviews

20 Reviews
5 star:
 (11)
4 star:
 (7)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.3 out of 5 stars (20 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Starting point for business strategy, 29 Nov 2001
By A Customer
Michael Porter is a Harvard Business School professor and a leading authority on competition and strategy. This book is a landmark in the field of strategy/strategic management, which later has become known as the positioning school. The book provides a great framework.

The book consists of three parts - General Analytical Techniques, Generic Industry Environments, and Strategic Decisions. In addition, the two appendices - Portfolio Techniques in Competitor Analysis, and How to Conduct an Industry Analysis - should also be mentioned as they are very useful.

In Part I, Porter discussess the structural analysis of industries (with the world-famous five forces), the three generic competitive strategies (overall cost leadership, focus, and differentiation), an excellent framework for competitor analysis, competitive moves, strategy toward buyers and suppliers, structural analysis within industries (strategic groups, strategic mapping, mobility barriers), and industry evolution (life cycle, evolutionary processes).

In Part II, Porter discusses competitive strategy within various generic industry environments, such as fragmented industries (with no real market leader), emerging industries (e-commerce and Internet are excellent examples, although not mentioned in this book as it was written in 1980), mature industries, declining industries, and global industries.

In Part III, Porter discusses strategic decisions which businesses/firms can take, such as vertical integration (forward, backward, partnerships), capacity expansion, and entry into new industries/businesses.

Even after 20 years, most of this book still stands strong, although some people will argue this. It is a MUST for MBA-students and all other people interested in strategy/strategic management. The book is good to read (simple US-English) and thus does not become a struggle.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars How Important Are Competitors in Setting Future Strategy?, 28 May 2004
By Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)      
Anyone would agree that this book is the best overview of competitive strategy analysis ever written. The strength of the book is a solid outline of subjects and questions to improve your thinking, and get to be a step ahead of the competition. In highly-competitive, commodity businesses, that's usually what strategies focus on.

On the other hand, the rapid advances of knowledge and technology mean that the relevant benchmark is perfection, not the competitor, in defining an ideal best practice. In that world, this book has serious limitations, because the competitive dimension is often less important than the customer and user dimension these days.

Any business arena begins, as Peter Drucker so aptly put it, with the task "to create a customer." That reminder is especially relevant today when they are so many new ways to serve a customer's needs that no one has ever considered before. The strategic point of 'Blown to Bits' for example is that almost every business will see its vertical value chain (moving from resources through to the customer) broken apart into tiny segments each served by specialists. If you did not begin with that perspective in analyzing the impact of electronically-based business practices, you could easily focus on the wrong tasks using this book to create an over-broad strategy focus, rather than concentrating on just a few areas.

I suspect that the applications of Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law need to be explicitly considered as part of the analysis that Professor Porter is recommending.

A more general weakness in this book is that it assumes that future conditions will be stable enough to draw conclusions about which conditions will be favorable, without giving enough guidance on how to deal with the increasing frequencies and degrees of volatility that we see (in areas like financial markets, commodity prices, the weather, changing customer preferences, and so forth).

Although no book that takes such a narrow focus can help but have weaknesses (like having the podiatrist not notice that you have kidney problems), if you want a good start of how to think about competitors, this is the book for you. Just be sure you keep developing yours strategy with additional dimensions after you finish using this analysis.

If you have read none of Professor Porter's works, this is the one book you should read.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Starting point for business strategy, 1 Nov 2002
By Gerard Kroese (The Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Michael E. Porter is a Harvard Business School professor and a leading authority on competition and strategy. This book is a landmark in the field of strategy/strategic management, and Porter's view has later become known as the positioning school. The book provides a great framework.

The book consists of three parts - General Analytical Techniques, Generic Industry Environments, and Strategic Decisions. In addition, the two appendices - Portfolio Techniques in Competitor Analysis, and How to Conduct an Industry Analysis - should also be mentioned as they are very useful.

In Part I, Porter discussess the structural analysis of industries (with the world-famous five forces), the three generic competitive strategies (overall cost leadership, focus, and differentiation), an excellent framework for competitor analysis, competitive moves, strategy toward buyers and suppliers, structural analysis within industries (strategic groups, strategic mapping, mobility barriers), and industry evolution (life cycle, evolutionary processes).

In Part II, Porter discusses competitive strategy within various generic industry environments, such as fragmented industries (with no real market leader), emerging industries (e-commerce and Internet are excellent examples, although not mentioned in this book as it was written in 1980), mature industries, declining industries, and global industries.

In Part III, Porter discusses strategic decisions which businesses/firms can take, such as vertical integration (forward, backward, partnerships), capacity expansion, and entry into new industries/businesses.

Even after 20 years, most of this book still stands strong, although some people will argue this. It is a MUST for MBA-students and all other people interested in strategy/strategic management. The book is good to read (simple US-English) and thus does not become a struggle.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars fundamentally important concepts
Seriously useful for anyone who runs their own business and finds themselves squeezed between the tectonic plates of bigger competitors or external factors that they hadn't... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Tim Hobbs

4.0 out of 5 stars comprehensive and good useful
For someone who is a novice in the field of management I found this book very useful. It gave me a useful framework to look at future of my own organisation and I hope this to be... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Saied

4.0 out of 5 stars Beware, this is not a new book
I am very much looking forward to getting stuck into this book, but I personally feel misled by the publication date showing on Amazon and wanted to bring this to the attention of... Read more
Published 24 months ago by M. Eden

5.0 out of 5 stars Packed With Knowledge!
This seminal book is a classic and ought to be read by anyone in business. Michael E. Porter's ideas on competitiveness have lost little relevance despite the fact that he first... Read more
Published on 17 Sep 2004 by Rolf Dobelli

3.0 out of 5 stars Figure out why you buy before you buy
This is emphatically not a work of strategy and and not a book about strategic analysis. I can't see how this would be practical or useful in a real "hands-on" business... Read more
Published on 11 Jun 2004 by GentlemenPreferHats

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book for your study
Most people who buy this book will do so for thier study work. I am undertaking an MBA and this has proven invaluable for the dissertation. Read more
Published on 1 Feb 2004 by markbhai

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential read for MBA students...a good investment in time.
This is not a high brow study based on unworkable theory. It provides a workable structure to building a strategy and gives tangeable examples to help create the vision and the... Read more
Published on 12 Jul 2001

4.0 out of 5 stars A classic
I give it only 4 stars because the not too entertaining writing style; It does tend to be a boring, although important read.
Published on 25 Jan 2001 by Marque Pierre Sondergaard

5.0 out of 5 stars Think Porterian
The whole Porterian paradigm is one worth selling in. Most marketing directors we'll come up against (if you're in your 20's) are old school. Read more
Published on 19 May 2000

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful, but must be complemented with newer works on strate
The book is a brilliant insight into business strategy. It offers a very useful framework for industry analysis but will definitely benefit from a revision. Read more
Published on 13 Dec 1999

Only search this product's reviews



Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 

   


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Look for similar items by subject


Feedback

Ad

Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.