Bowman's Strategy Clock*Making Sense of Eight Competitive Positions* (*https://www.mindtools.com/community/pages/article/newSTR_93.htm) In Many Markets open, most products and services can be purchased from a large number of companies, and customers have considerable choice. It's the job of companies in the marketplace to find their competitive advantage and meet customer needs better than the next company. So how, given the high degree of competitiveness among companies in a market, can one company gain a competitive advantage over others? When there are only a limited number of unique products and services, how can different organizations sell basically the same things at different prices and with different degrees of success? This is a classic question that has been asked for generations of professionals. In 1980, Michael Porter published his seminal book, “Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors,” in which he reduced competition to three classic strategies: product differentiation in terms of cost leadership; and market segmentation. These generic strategies represented three ways in which an organization could provide its customers with what they wanted more cheaply or more efficiently than others. Essentially, Porter argued that companies compete either on price (cost), on perceived value (differentiation), or by focusing on a very specific customer (market segmentation). Competing by lowering prices or offering higher perceived value has become a very popular way of thinking about competitive advantage. However, for many businesspeople these strategies were a little too general and they wanted to think about different combinations of value and price in more detail. Looking at Porter's strategies in a different way, in 1996, Cliff Bowman and David Faulkner developed the Bowman Strategy Clock. This business strategy model expands Porter's three strategic positions to eight and explains the combinations of costs and perceived value used by many companies, as well as identifying the probability of success of each strategy. Figure 1 below depicts Bowman's eight different strategies, identified by different price and value levels. {draw:frame} Position 1: Low Price/Low Value Companies generally do not choose to compete in this category. This is the “bargain” category and few companies want to find themselves in this position. Rather, it is a position in which they find themselves forced to compete because their product lacks differentiated value..