Both you and your competitors will need to determine what important drivers motivate your customers to buy your products but once you know what these drivers are, you must then figure out how to deliver on them better than anybody else.

Doing this successfully is the key to gaining competitive advantage. A strong competitive advantage can provide your business with an important head start in the market place that can force your competitors into an expensive--and often futile--game of catch-up.

A good example of strong competitive advantage is the astounding success story of NTT DoCoMo and its i-mode application. At a time when the wireless Internet remained a non-event in much of the rest of the world, DoCoMo was at the forefront of a Japanese wireless market that was about to explode.

While DoCoMo never advertised the i-mode as an Internet protocol--the 'i' stands for information--it still managed to sign up over 25million subscribers who were able to access over 46,000 web pages from their mobile phones. Although good timing allowed Docomo to be the first company to enter the market, there were three other key factors that helped cement DoCoMo's competitive advantage and ultimately, its market dominance.

The first thing that set DoCoMo apart from its competitors was its introduction of an end-to-end solution that included the complete offering that customers needed to get online: the bandwidth, the handset, the ISP, the content and the billing. Its all-in-one business model made it the convenient, hassle-free choice for a record number of subscribers.

The second thing that DoCoMo did differently was to deploy attractive and versatile handsets, cool 'pocket-rockets' with full-color, 8-and 16-voice sound chips and a novel clamshell design. Produced by such homegrown companies as Fujitsu, Sony, Panasonic and NEC, the handsets themselves got a lot of attention and appealed to a wide range of people.

The last thing that separated DoCoMo from its competitors was the fact that it allowed its content providers to make a good profit on their services, splitting revenues with them 91/9 in the other's favor. With this kind of arrangement, increasing numbers of providers were only too happy to continue developing quality content, to the ultimate benefit of the consumer.

Once DoCoMo had established such strong competitive advantage, it was able to charge ahead with the confidence that it had secured an important head start.

A strong competitive advantage can help your business get ahead and stay ahead of the competition in your industry.