Agreements reserve access without requiring ownership.
How Exclusive contractual access works
Evaluate both the competitor’s route around the agreement and the counterparty’s leverage at renewal. A contract can protect sales today while transferring most future gains to its supplier.
How companies won with Exclusive contractual access
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. Blockbuster · 2008–2013
Netflix
Fixed-fee and exclusive programming bought for the whole base
What it did
Starz films for a flat fee reported at about $30 million (2008)
Blockbuster
Kept a store-based model with nearly $1 billion of debt and filed Chapter 11 (Sept 2010)
What is exclusive, for how long, and at what renewal price? Can the counterparty capture the surplus later?
Who names it
Author
What they call it / where it appears
Neumann
A Taxonomy of Moats — Exclusive contractual access
Note. The diagnostic and scenario are Strategy Canon’s analytical application. Test the firm’s benefit and exclusion mechanism separately; this category alone does not establish Power.