Sweet Lisbon 1 | Page 47

seating opportunities, especially during winter periods. On the other hand, the company’s management team underlines that Nannarella’s success is rooted in its unique flavor offerings, ice cream presentations, and low prices. They put forth the argument that if the company were to expand its store sizes, product offerings, and market reach, it would risk cutting off these roots. It would need to incur higher ice cream prices to cover increasing operational cost, such as rent payments. It would need to decrease expensive experimentations on new flavors because of coordination problems among stores. Nannarella would more and more resemble the other traditional ice cream parlors, such as Santini and Artisani. But differential advantages, by definition, emerge out of the potential to do something, in order to create value that others can hardly replicate. Thus, the company plans not to copy expansion strategies of its competitors, namely growing the business through broader product ranges as well as more and larger ice cream parlors. Nannarella’s core competence is to come up with new high quality ice cream flavors on a daily basis. To retain and strengthen this core competence will be the center of Nannarella’s future strategy. 46