Unit 4 Case Studies Flashcards
Whitbread
Economic Environment
Prospered during recession
Premier Inn a counter-cyclical good, where cheap was advertised, tailored advertising increased awareness and sales.
Thorntons
Economic Environment
Luxury retailer, recession sales decline. Cut costs lower choco price meeting. Cost leadership provided supermarkets with own labelled.
Jaguar Land Rover
Economic Environment
Globalisation
Retrenchment
Market Development, new products increase demand. Moved to growth markets. 1.51bn profit. Recession moved to growth area. Cut 9000 jobs moved to china withdrew manufacturing from Britain to China.
Apple
Globalisation
22 Fake Apple stores same everything. Bought cheap sold high high demand.
Starbucks
Globalisation/Joint Venture
TATA INDIA, 50:50 venture, 50 locations offering Indian style products, TATA know consumer preferences = good synergy.
Rank Leisure
Political/Legal
Ban on smoking impacted Bingo sales, go outside instead of casino games.
Dyson
Political/Legal
Minimum wage little impact, low cost Malaysian work.
Patent/trademark/copyright develop and patent new idea crucial.
GSK
Political/Legal
Minimum wage little effect as high skilled workers. More capital intensive industry.
Patent/trademark/copyright develop and patent new idea crucial.
Domino’s
CSR
30 min guarantee free pizza.
People hit by speeding vehicles and compensation needed to be paid. No significant impact on customer loyalty.
Unilever
CSR
Tackle deforestation and climate change. Don’t publish frequent accounts, encourage long term investment. Improve sustainability good for long run business.
Starbucks
CSR
Fair Trade agreements with suppliers. Ethically diverse workforce. USP higher prices may increase morally conscious demand.
Tax avoidance, no tax 2009-2012, use retained profit, became unpopular some moved to Costa.
HMV + Waterstones
Tech Environment
Online retail, Amazon and Itunes reduced demand for CD’s/Books.
Made redundancies and focused on store experience/online for Waterstones
Celebrity appearances/gigs in store HMV.
Ebay
Tech Environment
Millions of merchants in 190 markets 24 currencies.
Easy process encouraging more buyers/sellers.
First mover advantage chance to establish economies of scale.
Uber
Tech Environment
Disruption where small business can challenge established businesses.
Quick and simpler online service in comparison.
Competition have lost trade significantly.
Competitive Environment
Increasing substitutes increasing competitive rivalry, low barrier to entry allowing entrants cheap to create a website. Competitors innovate and grow increasing rivalry.
Ebay and Paypal
Competitive Environment
Difficult to get brand recognition and trust, reducing threat of competitors. High barrier to entry due to trust, established firms more few dominant firms like Amazon, Alibaba and Ebay.
Automotive Industry
Competitive Environment
Competitive rivalry high foreign competitors price, quality / innovation. Threat of new entrants low – brand recognition and price to get market share. High capital investment, manufacturing facilities distribution network.
Threat of substitutes low, high sunk costs.
Lego
Organic growth
Aim to be best not biggest. Shareholder family only looking to long term future. Heavily invest in innovation to secure future and grow.
BSkyB
Organic Growth
Long-term objective of growing its household subscriber base to 10 million households/customers. Grow organically by focusing on investment in content / innovation.
Sainsbury’s/Argos
Takeovers
Access to Argos’s vast delivery network. After takeover shares increase and cost saving measures improve profitability.
RBS/ABN AMRO
Takeovers
Contingency Planning
Strategic Decisions
Unsuccessful biggest hostile takeover in history. Lots of sub-prime mortgages with massive debt and more money left forced administration. Unsuccessful plan ignored profit warnings and took over. Failure to use scientific method poor decision.
Kraft/Cadbury
Takeovers
Successful takeover, broader geographical area make use of distribution in other countries like South America where previosuly Kraft had little infrastructure.
Uber/Spotify
Joint Venture
Uber - new product existing market
Spotify - existing product new market.
Personalised taxi service increase demand and good advertising
Amazon/Morrisons
Joint Venture
Morrisons products available on Amazon, wholesale supple to amazon increase both firms sales.
Apple 1997
Retrenchment
Steve Jobs said no strategic plan. Changed board of directors ,made ‘Meaningful partnership’ with Mircrosoft.
Tesco
Retrenchment
Reduce range and cost of product match Aldi/Lidl. Sell Fresh and Easy at loss.
Apple 1997
Corporate Planning
Mission statement – getting Apple healthy
Objectives – profitability and sales targets
Can link to every case study, Unilever, Tesco ect.
Johnson and Johnson
Contingency Planning
Successful plan to protect people against faulty Tylenol. Alerted consumers and national withdrawal of products. High costs.
Toyota
Contingency Planning
Strategic Decisions
Unsuccessful plan, accelerator problem 26 crashes. Denied claims it was them continually and changing the problem causing it. Wanted to be largest and didn’t take notice of problems lack of checking faultiness. Conflict Drift rejected information. Apollo culture decisions powerful centre unwilling to tell truth.
John Lewis
Leadership Styles
Apollo culture, Role. Decisions democratic. Porter’s Generic differentiation: high satisfaction Herzberg – communication, responsibility from leadership style) means good quality customer service = higher prices. Likely to meet corporate objective profit maximisation stakeholders happy.
Amazon
Leadership Style
Authoritarian leadership, clear vision contributions towards vision everything everywhere store. Means become cost leaders lean production/economies of scale.
Valve
Leadership Style
Leaders not required for success. Laissez faire leadership staff manage business. Employees and interested projects increase productivity. Flat organisational everyone equal. Important for innovation.
Leadership evaluation
Leaders provide direction for business. Depends on size Amazon / John Lewis same leadership style as Valve, no common vision. Works for Valve employees highly skilled / creative. Valve philosophy hiring. Amazon / John Lewis introduced, unlikely success people resistant change.
Coca-Cola
Strategic Decisions
Scientific not successful. Availability drift focus on available data wrong hypothesis. Sales decreased lost market share to Pepsi. Long term not affected customer loyalty.
Poundland
Organic Growth
Clear focus on a constantly rotating product range at a single price point. The organic strategy was to open stores in suitable locations and repeat offering heavily discounted products.
Economics Environment
Whitbread
JLR
Throntons
Globalisation
JLR
Apple
Starbucks
Political/Legal
Rank Leisure
GSK
Dyson
Corporate Social Responsibility
Unilever
Starbucks
Domino’s
Tech Environment
HMV + Waterstones
Uber
Ebay
Competitive Environment
Facebook
Ebay/Paypal
Automotive
Organic Growth
BSkyB
Poundland
Lego
Takeover/Mergers
Sainsbury’s/Argos
RBS/ABN AMRO
Kraft/Cadbury
Joint Venture
Starbucks/TATA
Morrisons/Amazon
Uber/Spotify
Retrenchment
Apple
Tesco
JLR
Corporate Planning
Apple
ANY BUSINESS
Contingency Planning
RBS/ABN AMRO
Johnson and Johnson
Toyota
Strategic Decisions
RBS/ABN AMRO
Coca-Cola
Toyota
Leadership
Amazon
Valve
John Lewis
