Market Drivers - Competitive Advantage

Do you believe market-drivers have enduring competitive advantages or can you foresee a situation in which a market-driver loses its footing? Take Starbucks for example: Can you imagine a future in which Starbucks no longer enjoys the prominence it has at the moment? Why, or why not?

“Market-driving companies are usually new entrants to the industry, although there are exceptions. The history of innovation is a pattern in which bursts of breakthrough innovation that reshape an industry are interspersed by flows of less dramatic incremental improvements.”

According to that I generally do believe that companies that drive the market have enduring competitive advantages compared to e.g. market-driven companies because they focus on a vision for the future, unhampered by traditional thinking and industry norms for product or service development. Market-driving companies are poised to make discontinuous leaps in innovation in terms of customer value. Moreover they also have a mission to build unique business systems through technology and business model innovation or rather entrepreneurial capabilities.

As most of the market-driving companies, STRABUCKS started small but its market-driving potential was inscribed in its DNA. Starbucks will always continue to be a market-driving company because it achieves long-run equilibrium with supra-normal profits and hences a sustained competitive advantage. The secret behind this success or rather behind becoming an “owner of the market”, is the fact that STARBUCKS is a company with revolutionary ideas, not products, which again is part of its unique business strategy, too.

Furthermore I don´t believe that STARBUCKS will lose its footing unless it will change its whole idea and business system or a company is coming up with a way better and more affective, innovative system, which I doubt is going to happen soon or ever.

What I do imagine could happen is, that they might engage in market-driven behavior in the short term as...