The Research On Competitive Advantage: Based On Customer Value

Competitive advantage is always the centre contents of enterprise strategy management research. From 80's on, in classical theories of competitive advantage, the resource-based theory has become hotspot. Many scholars research the source and acquisition of competitive advantage based on resource, which is a base level. The arising of customer value research supply a new way for the research of competitive advantage. But, until now, the researches on how a company supplies the customer superior value were embedded in the research of the customer value concept and identification, which made it difficult to conduct the customer value-based strategy. As for how to carry out a research which connects customer value to classical competitive advantage theories, especially the resource-based theory, very few scholars engaged in it deeply.In this paper, superior customer value is a new source of competitive advantage. Therefore, based on the concept of customer value, the customer value space is divided into three parts: utility value space, price value space and personality value space. From the analysis about classical competitive advantage theory we can get that customer value is the critical element which influence a company's success. The matching of customer value and superior resource is an effective way to gain competitive advantage. Based on utility value theory, superior resource is divided into three parts: utility value, economic value and psychological value. The matching of customer value and superior resource is analyzed on the basis of the three customer value spaces and the three superior resource values. A company will reach this matching through developing the superior resource based on customer value and such strategy interaction course of rearranging and amalgamate resource to match the request of customer value. Such matching assure the superior resource is leaded to customer, then core specialty and core competence come into being, competitive advantage is promoted, which construct the framework of the research in this paper. The support system includes learning-organization, customer value-based culture and informationization construction. Therefore it is assured for a company that superior customer value can be supplied.