ARBITRATION AND TOURISM: A FIELD TO EXPLORE authors, such as Levitt17, who argued that no matter how difficult it is to operate a differentiation between products by the most classical means, such as price or design, there will always be a way to differentiate them by support. The author says that “to the potential buyer, a product is a complex cluster of value satisfactions”, and not only the intrinsic value of the product. The result will be an “augmented” product, which includes attributes that the consumer will probably never have thought of. Still with the same author, “it is the process, not just the product, that is differentiated”. 3.3 Economic performance and competitive advantage Every strategy aims at obtaining a Competitive Advantage or it would be meaningless. Competitive Advantage can be defined as an economic advantage obtained in a competitive market or, in other words, it generically corresponds to a difference between two competitors in any conceivable dimension, which allows one to create more value than the other and has traditionally been closely associated with the company. Subsequently, the concept was extended to other realities, being current to apply it to industrial sectors, regions and even countries. The reference to Competitive Advantage nowadays is so usual that many authors already refer to a supposed self-explanatory capacity of it. On the other hand, new approaches to the subject, more or less innovative, constantly appear in the literature. A different and possibly more complex issue is measuring a particular Competitive Advantage. In fact, the measurement of the Competitive Advantage, which even allows organisations to be compared, is often difficult to obtain. Rumelt18, among others, recognises the existence of a certain convergence towards the concept of value creation, a concept which itself is not free of doubts and multiple interpretations. In effect, value creation is a broad concept that can be viewed from various perspectives, like those of customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders or other stakeholders of the company, necessarily comprising various points of arrival, according to the respective sensitivities. The process of measuring the Competitive Advantage has been successively addressed by various authors, such as Barney, Calil, Barney & Hesterly, who suggest quantitative/qualitative measurement methodologies of Competitive Advantage as a way of assessing the economic and financial performance of organizations. 17 Levitt, 1980, pag. 83-91. 18 Rumelt, 2003, pag. 1-5.
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