STEPHEN ROPER, NoIA HEWIET-DUNDAS and Brendan McFerran are with the Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Discussion of product quality in the context of small United Kingdom companies has largely related to the impact of quality certification. Product quality improvement will, however, only yield a competitive advantage if improvements are recognised and wanted by customers. This raises two key questions: first, how aware are small firms of their customers' priorities in improving quality? Second, how does small firms, assessment of their own product quality compare with that of their customers? To answer these questions, perceived relative quality indices were constructed for a group of small firms and their customers. Comparison of customer and supplier responses highlighted significant disparities. First, the small firms in the sample tended to over-emphasise the importance of intrinsic quality attributes while under-estimating the importance to their customers of extrinsic and service quality attributes. Second, there was a major disparity between the relative quality perceptions of the sample of suppliers and their customers. With one exception, small firms in the sample gave themselves a higher relative quality rating than that given by their customers. The results suggest that the sample firms, twothirds of whom were IS09000 registered, needed to re-evaluate their quality priorities. The results also suggest a potential role for development agencies as gatherers/providers of market information.

NOLA HEWITT-DUNDAS, BRENDAN McFerran and Stephen Roper are with the Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre, Belfast, Northern Ireland. It has been demonstrated that those companies which take into account the performance of competitors in the development of their business strategy are considerably more likely to succeed than those which do not account for their competitors' performance. However, if a company is developing a strategic plan and therein accounting for the performance of competitors it is essential that the extent of competitor knowledge is accurate otherwise the company will have a distorted perception of its own relative position within the market and thus formulate a strategy with misguided and often unobtainable objectives. This paper presents the key findings of a project to evaluate the accuracy of information which firms held regarding their competitors and the likely contribution of this information to strategic development. The results of the project demonstrated that only between 50 and 60 per cent of the firms were capable of providing measures of size and efficiency. Of the estimates that were made only 45 per cenit were of reasonable accuracy, suggesting that the sample firms were able to make reasonably accurate assessments of around one-fifth of all competitors' data items. As these firms had performed better than most United Kingdom small firms over the 1991-93 period this would suggest that the comparisons reported within the project were likely to have over-estimated the competitor knowledge of the general population of small firms. If this finding was confirmed by a larger study it would imply that a significant information gap exists in the market knowledge of small firms and therefore is an issue which should be addressed by development agencies.

No abstract

Often businesses fail, or fail to reach their true potential, for strategic rather than operational reasons. This type of failure may be caused because the key decision makers in such firms are not well informed about the strategic landscape in which their firm operates. A military analogy is used to show that successful military campaigns are often predicated upon having accurate maps. Similarly, competitive strategies followed by firms are likely to be more successful if key decision makers possess accurate strategic maps which display the location of their own and rival firms. In other words, those firms which have detailed knowledge of their strategic landscapes are likely to enjoy significant competitive advantage, while firms which are in ignorance of their strategic landscape are less likely to be able to navigate a route that will confer sustained competitive advantage. A firm’s strategic landscape is analysed in terms of: the firm’s true competitive position, the industry conditions under which the firm and its competitors operate and the core strategies that firms in the industry are following. This paper analyses an approach to strategic mapping developed by a major new independent strategic database called CAM (Competitive Analysis Model). This database has been built to aid small firms improve their results through generating accurate strategic maps. These maps enable client firms to assess their strategic locations and performances longitudinally, sectorally and cross‐sectionally. Finally, CAM clients appear to have outperformed similarly structured non‐CAM firms.

With over 2,000 participating firms, CAM-Benchmarking Ltd (http://www. cam-benchmarking.com) is one of the world's largest strategy benchmarking databases for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This paper draws upon CAM data to show that in a geographical region suffering from the deleterious economic effects of peripherality real progress to convergence (in terms of firm performance) can be achieved through benchmarking. More specifically the paper shows that comprehensive benchmarking data can be used to close the information gap that small firms, relative to large firms, often have, and through this process boost individual firm, and hence overall regional, performance.