Template · Strategy & competition
Porter's Generic Strategies template
For choosing, deliberately, whether you compete on cost or on difference, broadly or narrowly, and not getting stuck in the middle. Leave it alone when you have not yet analysed the industry; you would be choosing a position in a market you do not understand. Instead Porter's Five Forces first; you cannot choose a position in a market you have not read.
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Or work it through here
Place your business and its main rivals in the matrix, then record the evidence for the cell you intend to hold and the trade-offs you accept. Your entries persist for this browser session and can be copied out as Markdown or printed.
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What you may do with it
This sheet, meaning our drawing and layout of it, is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Use it commercially, put it in a client deck, print it for a workshop, adapt it. Keep the attribution line that is printed on the sheet and you have met the licence.
Originator: Michael E. Porter. The framework itself is not ours to license, and the written entry behind this page, its worked example, critiques and sources, stays all rights reserved. The full licence position is set out in plain English.
Before you fill it in
A blank template is the easy part. The entry behind it covers how to run Porter's Generic Strategies properly, a worked example, the pitfalls real teams hit, and the situations where it is the wrong tool and something else would serve better.
Read the full Porter's Generic Strategies entryAll templates