INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM, TRAVEL AND HOSPITALITY LAW presented what he called “generic strategies”: leadership by cost, differentiation and focus. This author places the centre of the problem in the identification of the strategy, criticising Ansoff’s approach for having focused only on the expansion of already existing strategies. Porter even writes, referring to Ansoff’s ideas, that “...acquisition and vertical integration are not strategies but means of achieving them” to conclude, in the same passage, that “the centerpiece of a firm’s strategic plan should be its generic strategy”. As can be seen, Porter’s generic strategies already explicitly include differentiation as a strategy for obtaining a competitive advantage. In this strategy, the company invests in its image, technology, technical assistance, distribution, research and development, human resources and market research, with the aim of creating a differentiating effect that can capture the consumer’s attention and, in a second moment, build consumer loyalty. Mintzberg16 devotes great attention to differentiation strategies, even establishing that, basically, all strategies involve a greater or lesser degree of differentiation. Says the author “...an organization distinguishes itself in a competitive marketplace by differentiating itself in some way – by acting to distinguish its products and services from those of its competitors. We take this to mean that all competitive advantage amounts to one form or another of differentiation, hence, this becomes the fundamental basis of every business-level strategy, and therefore fills the face of the circle we have used to identify the core business.” Mintzberg details in an exhaustive manner the differentiation strategies, indicating that these can be determined by the following factors: price, image, support, quality, design, and also undifferentiation, which the author still considers a strategy of this family. Differentiation allows, according to the author, to effectively distinguish the core business of a company. The price continues to be the most basic of the differentiation strategies, but we are mainly interested, given the scope of this work, in the so-called differentiation by support. Mintzberg says that differentiation by support (or peripheral, as the author suggests it can also be called) is more substantial than differentiation by price or by the projected image of the product, but still without having effects on the product itself. In other words, the product will become more appealing (or, at least, it is intended to be) by adding something that, although it does not interfere with the essence of the product, gives it a lateral distinctive capacity. The problem of differentiation by support had already been addressed by other 16 Mintzberg, 1988, pag. 1-67.
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