Strategic Differentiation Management: A Transnational Study of Costco

Every company’s duty is to develop and execute with strategic business level, which contains the integration and coordination of group of over-commitment and action for enterprises in a particular market to develop core competencies in order to gain competitive advantage, i.e., how to make a competitive option in a particular product market. Business-level strategy is the core strategy which is one of focuses of strategic management. Its purpose is to aim and create distinction in competitive marketing; therefore, enterprises must decide what or how to use different ways to complete the activities or procedure or different actions, to be distinct from the opponents. There are five kinds of business-level strategy: Cost leadership, differentiation, focus on cost leadership, focus on differentiation, and integration cost leadership/ differentiation strategy. Costco in Taiwan has been ranked into the world's top 20 th out of 560 branch stores performance, their performance is always positive. Having become the second largest U.S. retailer, Costco treats employees with good benefits and good reputation over the past thirty years. According to the latest subject of the quarterly show, unlike the other retailers, Costco remains to maintain a strong sales, compared the performance with the same season but last year's, sales was increased eight % and profit rose to nineteen %. In addition, Costco also received the identified SRI (Socially Responsible Investment) excellent company, which is able to give consumers a high quality with low cost. Costco is also the enterprise which meets employees with psychological and essential needs (Costco site). By the alphabet of COSTCO, it represents the cost of whole sales for its characteristics. Thus, based on the literature review, field visits, and interviews, the research was conducted in Taiwan Costco for a differentiation strategy case study. The Costco Differentiation Strategy Research Questionnaire on Differentiation Strategy Value Chain (Porter, 1998) includes nine measurements was used to collect data from a randomly chosen Costco branch. Five-point Likert-type scales were used to measure consumers’ perceptions. Linear Regression was used to analyze whether there is any valuable of Differentiation Strategy Value Chain that impacts on consumers’ re-purchase and derivative behavior (satisfaction). The results showed that nine differentiation strategy valuables on repurchase derivative/satisfaction has a strong significant influence; the first three significant variables include operation, marketing, and enterprise infrastructure, and the operation explained the maximum force for