Today, in the 21st century, most firms across the world are increasingly incorporating a multiplicity of management fundamentals and paradigms into their operations, with the view to developing critical sources of competitive advantage.
This paper discusses how the beauty and cosmetics business will effectively compete based on two such fundamentals, namely business operations and customer perceptions.
In the context of a beauty and cosmetics business mostly targeting anti-aging products, business operations will entail employing three important management imperatives that together endeavor to optimize value generated from business assets, hence ensuring the business is able to attain and sustain competitive advantage.
These management imperatives are interdependent and include ‘generating recurrent value, enhancing the value of business assets, and guaranteeing the income and value of the business.’
Owing to the fact that newer technologies will be used to extract active and natural ingredients for use in making the anti-aging products, it is expected that these products will attract more recurring income, hence become more valuable in the firm’s product portfolio.
Likewise, due to their high value and premium pricing, the anti-aging products will have the capacity to generate more recurring income, hence spurring competitiveness and growth.
The beauty and cosmetics industry is a unique one due to a multiplicity of factors located at the operational level of the industry.
Consequently, it is imperative to suggest that the proposed business will operate at a premium segment due to the prestige of the brands that will be produced, use premium pricing policy for finished anti-aging products, and employ the direct marketing strategy.
Competition is likely to be sustained by focusing more on developing, protecting, and leveraging the firm’s unique operational resources particularly in terms of employing new technologies and using active and natural ingredients in the manufacturing of its anti-aging products, rather than putting much focus on following the rules as dictated by the current marketing environment for beauty and cosmetic products.
The proposed business is also expected to compete based on customer perceptions, especially in terms of the current trends that continue to influence customer perceptions of a particular product.
In the context of anti-aging products, some of the most important trends likely to drive competition based on customer perceptions include (1) manufacturing products in accordance to the fair-trade philosophy, (2) emphasizing that products are being manufactured in a way that is not harmful to environment whilst their effectiveness remains comparable to, or better than, their previous versions, and (3) products are being developed on the basis of an increasingly sophisticated research, formulas, and technologies.
Such trends, in my view, will positively influence customers’ perceptions toward beauty products, particularly in terms of customer purchase behavior, loyalty to the products, as well as customer repeat intentions.
It is also expected that the beauty products will be differentiated to adjust them to the needs and expectations of diverse groups of the population, including baby boomers and the urban affluent.
Overall, this paper has discussed how the proposed beauty and cosmetics business will compete successfully based on two management fundamentals, namely business operations and customer preferences.
The business targets to use active and natural ingredients to develop anti-aging products for a diverse range of the population, hence the need to ensure that these fundamentals are firmly embedded in the firm’s strategies for competitiveness and growth.
Failure to include these fundamentals in the strategies of the proposed business implies that the firm may be unable to transition to profitability.