Competitive advantage has long been a mantra of strategy. But a focus on competition, while appealing to testosterone-driven alpha leaders, can be at the detriment of serving the needs of customers. It's time we reframed the phrase, to customer advantage. By Jack Springman.

The insights from behavioural economics are gradually infiltrating management science, primarily through review mechanisms for decisions generated by traditional frameworks. This is a valuable start, but the question remains whether treating it as an adornment grasps the extent of the challenge to these approaches that behavioural science brings. This raises a number of discomforting questions, one of which is whether the popularity of viewing strategy as 'competitive' stems from the relativity - judging in relative rather than absolute terms - that characterises alpha environments.

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