Our strategy is what we sell

Abstract This article develops a major departure from conventional thinking about business strategy. A competitive strategy must be designed not for a company or profit centre, but for an offering, the thing that customers choose to buy or not buy. Moreover, each such offering normally has a market which differs from the markets of its competing substitutes. This is a central theme in the authors' book Creating Value: Shaping Tomorrow's Business (Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 1997), which comprehensively covers competitive and corporate strategy, including the resource-based approach.