The Role of Resource Profiles in Creating Competitive Heterogeneity Within Strategic Groups

This paper posits an integrated view of intra-industry competition, in which one can define the competitive strategy of any individual firm in terms of a combination of competitive positioning in the product/market space and profiles of key resources. We examine this by analyzing the patterns of firms’ commitments with respect to these two dimensions of competitive strategy, in the form of product/marketbased and resource-based configurations—i.e. strategic groups—within an industry. The two types of strategic groups are found to be nearly orthogonal, supporting our contention and suggesting that intraindustry competition can be depicted as an integration of these two key firm strategy decisions.