MARKET PLACE OPPORTUNITIES AND COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE AMONG COMMERCIAL BANKS IN KENYA
Paul Waithaka - Department of Business Administration, Kenyatta University, Kenya
ABSTRACT
Globalization and technological advancement have in a big way altered the business landscape, making it difficult for banks to sustain competitive advantage. The need to enhance competitiveness has forced banks to consider competitive intelligence not only as a tool and a mechanism for discovering new opportunities and trends. Competitive intelligence contributes to continuous improvement of the quality of products, services and solutions offered by companies to their clients as well as increasing a firm’s innovative capability. Market place opportunities have been identified as one of the competitive intelligence domains that a firm needs to focus on in order to gain and sustain competitive advantage. This paper sought to examine the effect of market place opportunities on the competitive advantage among commercial banks in Kenya. The target population for the study were directors or managers in-charge of planning or strategy in each of the forty banks in the country. Primary data was collected using a semi structured questionnaire. The questionnaire was tested for both validity and reliability and was found to meet the required threshold. A response rate of 77.5% was achieved in the study and this was adequate for analysis. The study found that market place opportunities had significant effect on the ability of banks to gain and sustain competitive advantage. The study concluded that market place opportunities domain of competitive intelligence would help managers understand strategies the banks would use to identify opportunities in the market before they become obvious to rivals thereby gaining competitive advantage. The study therefore recommends that banks should raise the level of use of competitive intelligence in monitoring the competitive landscape to enable early identification of opportunities in the market place that banks could exploit to their advantage.
