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Differentiation and Competitive Advantage through Design Thinking

Fashion retail industries face a higher need to improve the responsiveness to the customers’ needs as a mean of achieving a competitive advantage. Matching people’s desire through the production design is a critical aspect that many apparel businesses fall short of, denying them a competitive edge among the competitors among the local and international players. Besides, due to an increased change in customers’ tastes and preference, fashion firms are forced to incorporate technology in the design and production to ensure that the end product is appealing, highly acceptable, and most importantly, commensurate the customer’s stated and implied requirements. Sensibility to design presents a unique chance to fashion firms to leverage market opportunity and customer value through appropriate business strategies, therefore, apparel industries should focus on design sensibility to gain market competitiveness.

According to Wang (29), various firms in the fashion industry can be used to illustrate how design with accompaniment of appropriate competitive advantage theories lead to market leadership. In the endeavor of promoting and sustaining clientele base, apparel industry leverage design thinking to achieve their strategic goals in different ways. First, design thinking capability gives an organization a transient advantage that replaces the traditional perception concerning customer satisfaction (39). Fashion retail firms such as Zara, Stradivarius, Inditex, and Oysho, have heavily invested in the customer satisfaction through innovation and design that have placed them in the limelight in the United States fashion market with a significant command of market share within and without American boundaries.

Secondly, through the theory of market-based view (MBV), firms can attain market leadership using design thinking and by focusing on the industry factors: controllable aspect within the company that can be used in the implementation of the strategic agenda. In this theory, Wang (34), argues that responding to customer’s demands through design sensitivity is vital in promoting organization's economic feasibility and sustainable competitiveness. According to Wang (35) “MBV theory primarily focuses on different sources of competitive value for retail firms with the fundamental aim of improving the end-production and improving the firm’s sustainability. Besides, focusing on the industrial factors aids fashion retailers to enhance the precision in matching the company operations with the people’s demands.

Third, differential competitiveness is achieved when...