Analysis of Product Differentiation Strategy Influence on Organizations’ Competitiveness of Sugar Firms in Kenya

Abstract

As a result of liberalization and deregulation, organizations are faced with a lot of challenges in their effort to remain competitive and the Kenyan sugar firms are no exemption. The purpose of the study was to analyze influence of differentiation strategy on organizations’ competitiveness of sugar firms. To be able to achieve the study objective, the associations between the different variables associated with the study variables in relation to sugar firms was done hence descriptive cross-sectional research design was used in this study. The study’s target respondents were twenty (20) managers from every sugar firm and its affiliated farmers’ sugar cane out grower firms. According to Krejcie & Morgan’s table, when the population is 240, then the sample size should be 148. Therefore the sample size of this study was 148. Questionnaires were the data collection instrument of this study mainly to collect the primary data and they were administered to the respondents by the researcher himself. Correlation analysis was carried out in order to measure strength of association between cost leadership strategies. Product differentiation strategy had explanatory power over organizations’ competitiveness of sugar firms’ because it accounts for 41.3 percent of organizations’ competitiveness of sugar firms’ change (R square = .413), hence the study rejected hypothesis H₀₂ and states that the influence of differentiation strategy on organizations’ competitiveness was statistically significant. The study therefore concluded that there was a statistically significant influence of differentiation strategies on organization competitiveness therefore this study conclude that sugar firms management in Kenya should make more efforts in employing differentiation strategies in an efforts to improve on organizations’ competitiveness.