Specific strategies
Once your company has committed to one of the three generic strategies, you must create more-detailed strategies that are specific to your business. These specific strategies describe in detail the activities your company will accomplish to reach its goals, all within the framework of its generic strategy.
Here’s an example, from a product-differentiated firm that builds seats for kayaks, small one-person boats used on white-water rivers. The brief description here illustrates some specific strategies that will allow the firm to execute on its generic strategy, which is to be the product-differentiated firm in the industry.
You can see that these strategies are focused on the design and promotion of new products. Although there is an element of customer service (“… meet quarterly with key accounts…”), this clearly is a firm that reveres its creative development skills. It’s focused on creating superior products.
You’ll need to do something similar for your own firm. Construct specific and detailed strategies, within your generic strategy, that will compel you to achieve your goals. You can’t steal these strategies from someone else; they’re specific to your company.
As we discussed previously, these strategies will change through time. And that is why you should use the Spider Diagram regularly to keep everyone tuned in to the marketplace—to assess the need for updating the strategies. And that will make the company’s strategies clear and relevant to everyone.