THE EVOLUTION OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: HAS VIRTUAL MARKETING REPLACED TIME‐BASED COMPETITION?

Businesses succeed or fail based on competitive advantage. Over the course of business history a number of innovative business practices have earned the distinction of being “milestones” in competitive advantage. Examples of such groundbreaking competitive developments include portfolio strategies in product management and restructuring companies specifically to gain competitiveness. In the early 1990s “Time‐Based Competition” was proposed by Stalk and Hout to be a new major dimension of competition. The book on this subject by these authors, Competing Against Time, (1990) is regarded as a classic work in competitive strategy. In essence, time‐based competition focuses on gaining advantage by being faster than competitors—faster in responding to market changes, faster with new product development and introductions, faster in integrating new technology into products, and faster in distribution and customer service. Success stories of time‐based competitors are numerous; for example the Japanese used time‐based competition as a fundamental component of their automobile manufacturing strategy that caught U.S. firms off guard. Just as time‐based competition matured as a competitive strategy the Internet, World Wide Web and other “virtual” communications links have emerged, proliferated and profoundly impacted competitive strategy. This paper proposes a new dimension of competitive advantage to be called “virtual marketing.” Virtual marketing could be a new milestone in competitive strategy much like time‐based competition.