Essay: Case Study On Strategic And Business Management.

Strategic Management

The following assignment sets out to prepare a kind of case study on the business management and strategic management. The idea of strategic management is a very complex procedure that involves a lot of stages and all the stages are very important. It is very important because it concerns with the growth of a business and the style of plans that can be undertaken to achieve the desired outcome. In this assignment many things that are associated with the idea of strategic management will be described. Business management is very closely linked with strategic management and it has a large impact on the business decisions. The organizational depends a lot on this. In this assignment, an overview of strategic management and its stages will be given. After that, a comparative study between the chosen organizations will be discussed. The answers to the provided questions will be given with providing an activity map at the end.  The customer journey in a design driven culture will be discussed in order to have a better understanding of the topic. The different attributes of strategic management will be provided so that it will be beneficial for the companies to adopt a perfect strategy.

Strategic management process means a set of strategies that is adopted and applied by the managers and the hierarchy of the organizations when they look out to stretch their business (Hill, Jones and Schilling 2014). Strategy means to make some plans that will help to reach the goals or fulfilling of the objectives. The application of strategic management helps the organizations to meet its goals and reach its target markets and cater to their needs. It is a very important part of a business (Peteraf, Gamble and Johnson 2014). Growing market competition has increased the need for adopting proper strategic plans. The emerging companies need to adopt these kinds of perfect plans to grow in the competition and the bigger companies need to adopt it to sustain their market value and their customer base. In this process, the managers adopt certain strategies that enable them to move forward and help them to achieve more success with a better performance all the time (Borman and Motwidlo 2014).

A. Environmental Scanning

This is the first step in which the business environment is scanned by the experts strategists (Hit, Ireland and Hoskisson 2012). All the necessary information has to be collected and scrutinized so that the strategic purposes should be developed. All the internal and the external factors that influence an organization should be taken into account and analyzed. The managers should evaluate those processes and try to evaluate them.

Environmental Scanning

The objectives of the organization should be assessed first and the decision should be made after a proper thinking on which strategy to be applied. The organizational purpose has to be best served by that.

B. Strategy Implementation 

In this segment, the selected strategies are applied to have the desired results (Jiang and Carpenter 2013). The chosen strategies will put into action in this part. The organizational structure has to be designed, resources have to be distributed, decision making process has to be made and the human resources should be managed.

C. Strategy Evaluation

It is the final part of the strategic management process. In this part, all the internal and external factors are appraised by the managers, performance has to be measured and finally the remedial actions are applied in case of any errors.

A big organization like Google has done its strategic management processes (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2012). They can be listed as below:

1. a) They have to evaluate the organization’s current mission and purpose (Preis, Moat and Stanley 2013).
2. b) They have to gather all the information of the world and make it accessible to everyone
3. c) They will have to expand their workforce for anticipated growth.
4. d) They can deliver new advertising technology to its users.
5. e) They have to assess the business environment and expand their business into the unmapped countries where they have not reached yet.
6. f) Google might launch new products that will attract the customers and they will not be encompassed within just being a search engine platform.

The case discusses about a deep range of conflict between the top sports goods manufacturers of the modern time-Adidas and Puma (Krüger, Stieglitz and Potthoff 2012).The companies were established by two brothers and their rivalry continued for decades.

The key players are the two owners Adolf Dassler and Rudolf Dassler, CEOs Herbert Hainer of Adidas and Jochen Zeitz of Puma, the boxers Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.

At the time the case study was written te two firms Nike and Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR) were trying to buy the company and that was a big dilemma in front of them to decide whether they would decide to be merged with them or run alone like a puma in the jungle.

Puma’s CEO pursued the strategies of restructuring, reducing the headcount and moving the production to Asia so that Puma could reach their adjectives. Several warehouses were replaced by one central distribution center. They also changed the market positioning of their products. Some other strategies include the launching of their new products such as fireproof footwear, endorsing the African football teams, motorcar racing, supplying kits for Michael Schumacher and the Ferrari team and many others in the sports world (Browna et al. 2016).

The strategies implemented by Zeitz were very successful. It changed the complete dimension in the way Puma was moving. The scenario created an entirely new segment market for the industries and into which Adidas and Nike moved into later.

After reading the context about the rivalry between Puma and Adidas, it could be concluded that Puma had done a great business in capturing the sports world and catered to the needs of the sports kits (Krüger, Stieglitz and Potthoff 2012).The question is very complex because either way, the company will be facing repercussions.

Strategy Implementation

The options that are available to John are to give rent to the second and third floors that were to be cleared by the end of 2014. He could also use the upstairs place for casual and tournament gaming space. The space also could have been used to make a café like that of the Snakes and Lattes (Millington and Funge 2016). Other ideas to use the space were to use it as inventory storage, more retail shelf space or he could also open an online retail application in that space to grow his business.

1. Among these available options, John could use the option to open a café in the upstairs place. John had been keen on trying new moves to shock his competitors. He always produced new ideas that catered to the needs of his customer base and 401 Games did very well in the earlier years (Millington and Funge 2016).

1. This option can be recommended in evaluating John Park’s success story in his business and his strategically strong tactics. He had noticed that Snakes and Lattes had been a very popular game among most of the card lovers of the country. He could very easily adopt this kind of thinking and execute it as it was very much innovative. He could also use that space for two things simultaneously. He could use the place as café and the people would pour in thinking it would give them great entertainment while enjoying coffee and light snacks. The business plan is great and it could help John to profit after paying the amount for acquiring the second and the third floors (Ward 2016).

1) Describe- or visually map- the consumer decision journey for purchasing denim pants (jeans)

Consumer decision journey is a very complex method that goes through four stages (Mihart 2012). These four stages include understanding the customer, bringing empathy to the organization, designing in real time and acting quickly. Denim pants are garments that are used all over the world and they are very popular brands. It is not that it became so popular from the word go. It took a long time before the product had proved to be authentic and customer from both financially and qualitatively. The chief designing officer or the chief marketing officer had to make sure the product quality will best serve the customer needs.

2) How has this journey changed in the recent years due to the internet?

This journey has changed in the recent years because the internet has come into use. People can use YouTube, Flipkart, Amazon and other online platforms to see the product reviews and then decide to buy those products (Hsu, Chuan-Chuan and Chiang 2013).

How could a jeans company differentiate itself from the competition in its new environment? Being a jeans manufacturer and seller, a company has to assess the market rates of the garments that are used to make jeans. They have to keep watch of all the recent sales rates and assess their competitors’ strategic decisions to differentiate them from the new environment to attract more customers (Paul 2015).

In this part, a competitive analysis has to be made in order to differentiate between Geico and Liberty Mutual (Honka 2014).

Geico, the famous car insurance company, has been targeting the drivers of the age 16 to 34 for their target markets. They have many objectives like increasing digital advertising by online methods, by phone and by mobile applications. Their target is to reach the awareness of the GEICO brand in the New York suburban areas. The consumers of the company are the demographic customers who are of various communities having cars, auto or other vehicles and needed to have insurance. The drivers belonging to age group of 16 to 34 generally do not have car insurance so they are eying to capture that market by using the 4 P’s of marketing. They use a prizm that reflects their product distribution.

Strategy Evaluation

Their strengths lie in their presentation of themselves and their new policy makings for all ages (Birkland 2014). They have some weaknesses as well. Their policy costs are too high to be afforded by everyone and they have to be cautious of reaching all types of customers.

On the other hand, Liberty Mutual has targeted the people who have recently bought cars and other vehicles. It is notable that they have applied several methods to capture their target audience to add to their customer base. They have to sustain their customer base and for that they need to follow the 4 P’s of marketing (Gordon 2012). They can use this framework to keep their products affordable to all ranges of customers and they should launch new insurance products for their customers.

Their strengths are they have a very good market value of their products and they can reach the customers with their good behavior. They have weaknesses also. They have to reduce the budget of their insurance policies. They also have to launch new policies so that they can attract new consumers (Hollensen 2015).

Recommendations can be made that they have to assess their strengths and weaknesses to their good effect and they should be able to capture their target markets effectively to keep their reputation alive.

According to Porter, the strategy making has been an important essence of shaping an organization. Activities can be performed by acting in different ways by adopting strategies. An activity map can be given in order to give a better idea in terms of the organization FedEx (Lyster 2012).

Conclusion

It can be concluded from the discussion that business management and strategic management is indeed an essential fact in management policies. All the companies need to follow a certain strategic planning to grow in their concerned industry. In this assignment, all the questions have been answered about the given case studies centering on the design driven cultures, rivalry between Puma and Adidas, Games 401 strategies taken by John Park and their evaluations. It has been found that strategic planning needs to be perfect so that the organizations can reach their objectives in perfect time by implementing those strategies in the real world.

References

Birkland, T.A., 2014. An introduction to the policy process: Theories, concepts and models of public policy making. Routledge.

Borman, W.C. and Motowidlo, S.J., 2014. Organizational citizenship behavior and contextual performance: A special issue of human performance. Psychology Press.

Browna, S., Lub, Y., Rayc, S. and Teod, M., 2016. Sensation seeking, sports cars, and hedge funds. working paper.

Gordon, R., 2012. Re-thinking and re-tooling the social marketing mix. Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ), 20(2), pp.122-126.

Hill, C.W., Jones, G.R. and Schilling, M.A., 2014. Strategic management: theory: an integrated approach. Cengage Learning.

Hitt, M.A., Ireland, R.D. and Hoskisson, R.E., 2012. Strategic management cases: competitiveness and globalization. Cengage Learning.

Hollensen, S., 2015. Marketing management: A relationship approach. Pearson Education.

Honka, E., 2014. Quantifying search and switching costs in the US auto insurance industry. The RAND Journal of Economics, 45(4), pp.847-884.

Hsu, C.L., Chuan-Chuan Lin, J. and Chiang, H.S., 2013. The effects of blogger recommendations on customers’ online shopping intentions. Internet Research, 23(1), pp.69-88.

Jiang, N. and Carpenter, V., 2013. A case study of issues of strategy implementation in internationalization of higher education. International Journal of Educational Management, 27(1), pp.4-18.

Krüger, N., Stieglitz, S. and Potthoff, T., 2012, December. Brand Communication In Twitter-A Case Study On Adidas. In PACIS (p. 161).

Lyster, C., 2012. Learning from fedex: Lessons for the city. Journal of Landscape Architecture, 7(1), pp.54-67.

Mihart, C., 2012. Impact of integrated marketing communication on consumer behaviour: effects on consumer decision–making process. International Journal of Marketing Studies, 4(2), p.121.

Millington, I. and Funge, J., 2016. Artificial intelligence for games. CRC Press.

Paul, R., 2015. Denim and jeans: an overview. Denim: Manufacture, Finishing and Applications, pp.1-5.

Peteraf, M., Gamble, J. and Thompson Jr, A., 2014. Essentials of strategic management: The quest for competitive advantage. McGraw-Hill Education.

Preis, T., Moat, H.S. and Stanley, H.E., 2013. Quantifying trading behavior in financial markets using Google Trends.

Ward, J., 2016. Keeping the family business healthy: How to plan for continuing growth, profitability, and family leadership. Springer.