Porter’s Competitive Strategy (5 minutes)

In each of these cases, the farmer who intends to transform into a firm should anticipate and plan for five key challenges as envisioned by Michael Porter. These include substitutes, potential entrants, buyer power, supplier power and intensity of rivalry as shown in figure 10 below.

Substitute

In this case, the farmer must expect that others will produce substitute goods (similar but not exact) that will compete with the farmer’s products in the market place and should therefore have a plan on how to compete with competitors.