Looking Beyond the Boundaries - A Strategy to Gain Competitive Advantage for the Coles Group of Australia

Abstract

The Coles Group of Australia has allowed its competitive advantage to slip away to rival Woolworth by failing to differentiate its core strategies and by failing to articulate well the strategies that could have been differentiated. In a bid to gain competitive advantage, this report suggests that the Coles Group should look beyond the company boundaries, extending its value chain to suppliers, partners and customers in a seamless manner, employ process like Total Quality Management and Business Process Reengineering in extending the value chain, bedded in a well structured change management programme and look towards globalisation and franchising along with such counter-intuitive, yet innovative, location strategies such as competitive clustering and saturation marketing to regain its competitive advantage.

Keywords: Competition, coopetition, colloboration, strategy, competitive advantage, BPO, Business Process Reengineering, Value Chain, Change Management, Globalisation, Innovation, competitive clustering, saturation marketing

JEL Classification: A12,D11,D21,D40,D61,D70,D91,E20,L12,L13,L15,L21