Strategy Formulation

In this assignment, you will examine the company you selected for your Unit 3 assignment, with a focus on the business model it uses. You will analyze its business-level strategy, corporate strategy, innovation strategy, and global strategy to see if it is appropriate for the company’s strategic position. If your firm is a large multi-business entity, you will choose one of the major businesses of the firm for this analysis. In prior units, you collected information about this firm’s external environment and some of its internal competitive advantages. Using this information and strategies you have learned in this unit, address the following questions.

Part One: Evaluate Business Strategy

  • Does your selected business have differentiated products or services? If so, what is the basis for this differentiation from the competition?
  • Does your firm have a cost-leadership position in this business? If so, can you identify which cost drivers it uses effectively to hold this position?
  • What is your firm’s approach to the market? If it segments the market, identify the scope of competition it is using.
  • Using the answers to the preceding questions, identify which generic business strategies your firm is employing. Is the firm leveraging the appropriate value and cost drivers for the business strategy you identified? Explain why or why not.

Part Two: Evaluate Corporate Strategy

The following questions help you to study your selected firm’s use of acquisitions and alliances to grow or change its business.

  • Has your firm participated in any mergers or acquisitions in the past three years? What was the nature of these actions? Did they result in a consolidation of competitors?
  • Research what strategic alliances your firm has entered in the past three years. If there are several of these, choose the one you identify as the most important for further analysis. Based on company press releases and business journal reports for the alliance, what do you find to be the main reason the firm entered these alliances?
  • Do you think each of the three alliances achieves the original intent, and therefore is successful? Why or why not?

Part Three: Evaluate Global Strategy

The following question will help you to study your firm’s global strategy, or a strategy it should pursue globally.

If your firm is already engaged in international activities, answer the following questions:

  • Is your company varying its product or service to adapt to differences in countries? Is the marketing approach different among the nations involved? Should it be?
  • Which of the four global strategies is the firm using? Is this the best strategy for it to use? Why or why not?

If your firm is not currently engaged internationally, answer the following questions:

  • Would your firm’s product or service need to be modified or marketed differently if it expanded beyond the home country?
  • Does your firm have the potential to access larger markets by expanding internationally? Does it have the possibility of lowering input factors with such expansion? Please explain why or why not.