The business-level strategy is aimed at gaining a competitive advantage by offering true value for customers while being a unique and hard-to-imitate player within the competitive landscape. We have a good understanding of a business and its external environment, use internal analysis frameworks. When good strategic analysis has been done, we request top managements to move on to strategy formulation by using frameworks.

Functional level strategy is often aimed at improving the effectiveness of a company’s operations within departments. Within these departments, workers often refer to their ‘Marketing Strategy’, ‘Human Resource Strategy’ or ‘R&D Strategy’. The goal is to align these strategies as much as possible with the greater business strategy

At the corporate level strategy however, management not only considers how to gain a competitive advantage in each of the line of businesses the firm is operating in, but also which businesses should be in in the first place. It is about selecting an optimal set of businesses and determining how they should be integrated into a corporate whole: a portfolio. Typically, major investment and divestment decisions are made at this level by the funding top managements