Competitive parity as strategic dimension – little to gain, much to lose

It is essential for firms in the agri-food business to ensure specific product attributes in the long run and to avoid reputational damage. Competitive advantages cannot be achieved with such product attributes; however, they must be ensured to remain competitive in the long run. Searching for literature on competitive parity resulted to be very difficult and literature on competitive parity seems to merely exist in strategic management literature. The question arises as to whether competitive parity is also a strategic dimension to which companies must pay attention in strategic management, especially with regard to the allocation of scarce resources. Since the majority of firms in the agri-food business work together in supply chain networks, another research question arises: is competitive parity also relevant at the network-level? To answer these questions a systematic literature review, which is based on deliberately chosen leading journals in the field of strategic management and chain management, is conducted. Results on the firm-level and the network-level show that there is hardly any literature on competitive parity available. This paper aims to contribute to a better theoretical understanding of competitive parity in strategic management. It develops a theoretical frame of chain management which combines the aspects of competitive parity with those of chain management in the agri-food business. From this, managerial implications for focal firms in the agri-food industry as well as implications for future research in this field should be derived.