Business Strategies and Gaps in Porter's Typology: A Literature Review

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the literature on the typologies and taxonomies of business strategies in order to find generic business strategies that a company can follow and to assess whether Porter’s typology shares characteristics with previous studies. For this purpose, we analyze 21 typologies and eight taxonomies in journals and strategic textbooks. This analysis allows us to identify four generic strategies that are commonly accepted in the literature. These generic strategies are differentiation strategies, which consist of three sub-strategies (market, general and innovation differentiation), cost strategies, which consist of the cash flow maximizing and cost leadership sub-strategies, focus strategies which contain the focus cost, focus differentiation, general focus sub-strategies and hybrid strategy. Furthermore, we observe another category in which firms follow no specific strategy. In the second part of this paper, we compare our findings with Porter’s typology. This comparison shows that Porter’s typology is insufficient for explaining other typologies and taxonomies of business strategies.