Porter's (1980) Generic Strategies and Performance: An Empirical Examination with American Data

In Part I of this paper, published in O.S. 7/1, we compared the strategic clusters that emerged from a taxonomy of consumer durable businesses to three strategies suggested by Porter (1980). We discovered clusters that pursued combinations of Porter's differentiation and cost leadership strategies, and also those that did not. The purpose of this paper is to compare the performance of these groups of clusters, discuss the differences in strategic behaviour among them that may explain performance, and elicit some normative implications.