Overall cost leadership is a model tending to reduce the cost of production and make the price of product be lower (Tomasetti, 2023). Differentiation is the way a company tries to highlight a meaningful difference between it and other companies (Frederiksen, 2022). In combining overall cost leadership and differentiation, the company will create an outperformance in comparison to other companies since it will make its products have something unique, special to customers with a low price. Hence, the product will help that company to have a competitive advantage to the other companies. In addition to that, the product can also create customer loyalty and increase the company's reputation.

Meanwhile, the combination might also bring some challenges to the enterprise. It is not easy work to combine the two strategies at a time since the company must meet many requirements in investing resources like people, technology. According to Greer et al. (2017), in order to implement a strategy effectively, the enterprise must facilitate the bundling and deployment of human capital resources. Therefore, there must be much effort and investment in combining many strategies at the same time and then carrying them out simultaneously. Moreover, there might be a conflict in achieving the goals while combining these two strategies. Differentiation requires the enterprise to invest into people and technology. This will increase the cost and the price of products will be higher. Meanwhile, overall cost leadership tends to reduce the cost. As a result, there might be a conflict.

References:

Frederiksen, L. (2022). Mastering differentiation strategy for professional services firms. Hinge. Retrieved from: https://hingemarketing.com/blog/story/expertise-as-a-differentiation-strategy

Greer, C. R., Lusch, R. F. & Hitt, M. A. (2017). A service perspective for human capital resources: A critical base for strategy implementation. Academy of Management Perspectives, 31(2). Retrieved from: https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/636784/document.pdf?sequence=1

Tomasetti, B. (2023). Cost leadership strategy. Carbon Collective. Retrieved from: https://www.carboncollective.co/sustainable-investing/cost-leadership-strategy#:~:text=The%20cost%20leadership%20strategy%20is,competitors%20and%20gain%20market%20share.

This is a discussion forum and I need answer for it as an argument with two references?