Description
our task will be to create a 10 to 15-minutes video in length and a supporting document summarising the competitive strategy lessons the group has learnt. You will be marked on the content of your video and summary document, as well as your ability to present the evidence effectively and in a coherent manner.
Provide very brief background information about the organisation and a description of its product line or range that is being investigated.
Determine the competitive stance for the product line or range you are investigating. Please provide a rationale for your choice of competitive stance(s) based upon evidence the group has gathered from industry sources, quotes, video clips from the company or YouTube etc.
Employ PEST Analysis to determine the UK and world-wide trends affecting your company and the particular product line/range the group is investigating. You won’t be able to mention everything, so identify and prioritise the trends you think are going to be the most important/challenging in the short to medium term (i.e. within the next 1 to 5 years). This analysis will help the group to determine the market conditions confronting the company. Make sure you take into account the affects the trends will have on the company’s competitive stance for the particular product line or range being investigated, i.e. pricing, costs, suppliers etc. There is no need to tell the viewer the purpose of PEST Analysis, take it for read he or she knows this already.
Prepare a couple of strategic group maps. Ideally, the first map should employ product quality and pricing policy to identify your company’s position within the marketplace. These two axes have been selected, because they mirror what most people perceive (strategy scholars in particular) to be the primary dimensions of how companies compete against their rivals. This map should identify your company’s main competitors as well. This mapping exercise will clarify whether there is a match between the company’s desired competitive stance for its product or range and its actual position in the minds of others like customers.
Please state in the video why this is a favourable or unfavourable comparison for the company’s product or range being investigated. For example, if it is an unfavourable match, this would suggest that the company needs to take further actions to either strengthen its position (increased or change its advertising, introduce quality improvements, increase R&D expenditure etc) or maybe drastically change competitive stance.
The second map should employ other axis to determine other differences or similarities between your company and its rivals. Like the first map, you should discuss what the map reveals about your company’s product or ranges compared to the competition. It may provide clues for further actions that need to undertake in particular, these can sometimes be borrowed from what rival companies are doing. For both maps please inform the marker in the video the source of the data used for each axis if possible, rather than employing your own subjective opinion.
Determine the competitive conditions confronting your company’s product or range by performing a Porter’s Five forces for the particular market being investigated. Please make sure you that in the main you are examining the local market context, however, often the factors affecting each force are determined internationally rather than locally, so let the marker know if this is the case. Please for this analysis just present highlights of your group’s key findings, don’t discuss everything you discover! Just what you think are the most important factors affecting each force.
From the above PEST Analysis, Strategic Group Mapping and 5 Forces Analysis you should now assess whether the company should grow, retrench or consolidate the company’s product line or range investigated. Explain the reasoning behind your choices based on the analysis performed, i.e. based on what you discovered happening in the company’s product or range’s marketplace via the group’s analysis. If you select growth, which the majority of you will do, it can be approached in four different ways as described by Ansoff’s Growth Matrix.
According to Ansoff’s Growth Matrix, company growth can be achieved via four tactics. These tactics are market penetration, market development, product development and diversification. The group’s task is to determine which one of these tactics, or combination, should the company employ if it thinks growth is the most effective aim for its particular product or range? Further information about market penetration, market development, product development and diversification can be found in Chapter 8 of Johnson, G., Whittington, R. Scholes, K., Angwin, D. and Regnér, P. (2017). Exploring Strategy (11th ed.), Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited (i.e. the required textbook).
According to your group’s findings explain whether the current competitive stance of your company’s product or range should be changed, maintained or abandoned all together? Please note that it takes many years to establish a company’s reputation and build the necessary resources and competences to compete in a particular way, so a competitive stance should not be abandoned lightly.
To complement your video, the group should construct a 200 to 300-word summary of the competitive strategy lessons it learnt from analysing a company’s product or range for a particular market. For example, the content of the summary might explain how the video assignment improved the group’s understanding of the subject area in general and/or the employment of analytical techniques in particular. The group can also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of how it planned and implemented the video assignment – what would you do better in the future.
The group should also include at the top of this summary the names of the company and the names of your group members and their IDs.
You will also paste the shared link obtained from Microsoft Stream just below the summary.
You should place a list of any references used in the video at the end of the document as well rather than within the video.