Content area
Full Text
1. INTRODUCTION
The competitive arena has now widened its scope across the entire global marketplace as well as quickened its pace and intensity within a given market segment. In the Singapore context, the biggest competitive challenge for the local small- and medium-sized enterprises (The Straits Times, 1990) is in the new wave of small foreign firms which have moved into Singapore. These small competitive firms have moved here together with the bigger multi-national corporations (MNCs) in their attempt to continue to serve such MNCs as they did back home.
In the midst of such a competitive environment, it becomes relevant that we recognise the competitive paradigms used by corporate enterprises in their fight for their share of the marketplace. While an individual customer's satisfaction may be a very personal and unique phenomenon, corporate enterprises have, nonetheless, traditionally relied upon the design and implementation of broad strategies such as those based upon cost and quality as the means to attract and capture their customers. In this paper, we refer to these broad-based strategies as the paradigms of corporate competitiveness. They represent the strategic means by which corporate entities seek to maintain and/or extend their market share.
Stalk (1988) introduced the notion of progression of such paradigms of competition. He highlighted that the most basic and traditional paradigm of competition is that based on cost: that is, competing for customers based on low production costs and hence on low prices in the marketplace. More recently, Japanese producers have shifted their paradigm of competition to that based on quality and reliability of their products. This quality-based paradigm of competition has made it possible for Japanese automobiles, for example, to be consistently rated above their competitors not only in terms of the reliability of major component systems such as engine and transmission systems, but also in terms of their quality for overall fit and finish. Stalk's consulting experience with Japanese firms showed that with successes in both cost and quality, they have pushed the leading edge of competitive advantage along yet another dimension, namely that of competing through an increased variety of products and services. This paradigm seeks to satisfy the varied needs of customers by providing them with a wide variety of product models to choose from. Stalk...