Yes, that's right.

Right?

Well, competitive edge could be to do with pricing, but not necessarily. Pricing is not the whole story. In fact, we can use 'competitive edge' to talk about any factor that gives us an advantage or edge over our competitors. That doesn't mean the price.

No, not necessarily. If you think about it, many people don't choose their chocolate bar solely on price, because the total cost of a chocolate bar is not that high compared with other kinds of products. So we might decide that a particular product needs to be in the middle of the price range for similar products, or at the lower end of the price range, rather than having to be the cheapest.

And for premium products, like our luxury chocolates range, we don't want the products to be too cheap, or people will think the quality is not as high as we are claiming it is.

In fact, something that's much more important for us as a business than the price for the customer is the cost of production for us. If we can get our production costs lower and take costs out of the business, this gives us more freedom to charge lower prices when we need to, and yet still make a profit. Now this doesn't mean being the cheapest. Instead, it has more do with being able to charge what prices you think are appropriate for the product you're selling. We can have this price flexibility because we've kept the cost of production as low as we can, while still maintaining the quality of our products.

Yes, well another strategy for gaining competitive advantage is through having a product that has a special feature that seems unique to the people who buy the products. For example. last year we launched our 'Real Fruit' chocolate bars range. Now many of our competitors have fruit-flavored bars, but our products are the only ones in the market that have pieces of real dried fruit in them. None of our competitors make these, so we can charge a premium price for them. We can describe this as gaining 'competitive advantage' through differentiation.

And we can also gain competitive advantage by focusing products on a particular group of customers. An example of this is our sugar-free range of chocolates aimed at diabetics. Also, we make 'guaranteed nut-free' products for people who have nut allergy, which we manufacture in a separate factory where no nut products are ever made. Again, people who need these products will often be more loyal to our brand, because we are meeting their needs when maybe our competitors aren't.

Wow, that's really hard to answer. Sometimes we gain an advantage through cost and pricing, sometimes through differentiation and sometimes through focus. It depends on the product range. I suppose what I'm saying is that it's a real mixture. And the same is true for most companies and industries.

Hmm, we do in some areas, but not in others. In business, competitive advantage is something you have to fight to maintain every day. Even when you think you have competitive advantage one day, you might end up losing it the next, - it's never permanent. So, to go back to your first question, that's why people her spend so much time talking about it.