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In strategic planning and strategic management, SWOT analysis (also known as the SWOT matrix, TOWS, WOTS, WOTS-UP, and situational analysis) [1] is a decision-making technique that identifies the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of an organization or project.
SWOT analysis evaluates the strategic position of organizations and is often used in the preliminary stages of decision-making processes [2] to identify internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving goals. Users of a SWOT analysis ask questions to generate answers for each category and identify competitive advantages.
SWOT has been described as a "tried-and-true" tool of strategic analysis, [3] but has also been criticized for limitations such as the static nature of the analysis, the influence of personal biases in identifying key factors, and the overemphasis on external factors, leading to reactive strategies. Consequently, alternative approaches to SWOT have been developed over the years.
The name is an acronym for four components:
Results of the assessment are often presented in the form of a matrix. [4]
Strengths and weaknesses are usually considered internal, while opportunities and threats are usually considered external. [5] The degree to which an organization's internal strengths matches with its external opportunities is known as its strategic fit. [6] [7] [8]
Internal factors may include: [9]
External factors may include: [9]
A number of authors advocate assessing external factors before internal factors. [5] [10] [11]
SWOT analysis has been used at different levels of analysis, including businesses, non-profit organizations, governmental units, and individuals. [12] It is often used alongside other frameworks, such as PEST, as a basis for the analysis of internal and environmental factors. [13] SWOT analysis may also be used in pre-crisis planning, preventive crisis management, and viability study recommendation construction.
SWOT analysis can be used to build organizational or personal strategy. Steps necessary to execute strategy-oriented analysis involve identifying internal and external factors, selecting and evaluating the most important factors, and identifying relationships between internal and external features. [14] For instance, strong relations between strengths and opportunities can suggest good conditions in the company and allow using an aggressive strategy. On the other hand, strong interactions between weaknesses and threats could be analyzed as a warning to use a defensive strategy. [15]
One form of SWOT analysis combines each of the four components with another to examine four distinct strategies: [10]
A SWOT analysis can be used to generate matching and converting strategies. [16] Matching refers to seeking competitive advantage by matching strengths to opportunities. Conversion refers to converting weaknesses or threats into strengths or opportunities. An example of a conversion strategy is to buy off a threat through collaboration or merger. [16]
In competitor analysis, marketers can use SWOT analysis to detail and profile the competitive strengths and weaknesses of each competitor in the market. This process may involve analysing competitors' cost structures, sources of profits, resources and competencies, competitive positioning, product differentiation, degree of vertical integration, historical responses to industry developments, among other factors. Relevant marketing research methods may include:
Marketing managers may also design and oversee various environmental scanning and competitive intelligence processes to help identify trends and inform the company's marketing analysis.
Strengths | Weaknesses | Opportunities | Threats |
---|---|---|---|
Reputation in marketplace | Shortage of consultants at operating level rather than partner level | Well established position with a well-defined market niche | Large consultancies operating at a minor level |
Expertise at partner level in HRM consultancy | Unable to deal with multidisciplinary assignments because of size or lack of ability | Identified market for consultancy in areas other than HRM | Other small consultancies looking to invade the marketplace |
Although the SWOT analysis was originally designed for business and industries, it has been used in non-governmental organisations as a tool for identifying external and internal support to combat internal and external opposition for successful implementation of social services and social change efforts. [9] Understanding particular communities can come from public forums, listening campaigns, and informational interviews and other data collection. [9] SWOT analysis provides direction to the next stages of the change process. [18] It has been used by community organizers and community members to further social justice in the context of social work practice, [18] and can be applied directly to communities served by a specific nonprofit or community organization. [19]
SWOT analysis is intended as a starting point for discussion and not to, in itself, show managers how to achieve a competitive advantage. [20]
In a highly-cited 1997 critique, "SWOT Analysis: It's Time for a Product Recall", Terry Hill and Roy Westbrook observed that one among many problems of SWOT analysis as often practiced is that "no-one subsequently used the outputs [of SWOT analysis] within the later stages of the strategy". [21] Hill and Westbrook, among others, also criticized hastily designed SWOT lists. [21] [22] Other limitations of SWOT practice include: preoccupation with a single strength, such as cost control, leading to a neglect of weaknesses, such as product quality; [20] and domination by one or two team members doing the SWOT analysis and devaluing possibly important contributions of other team members. [23] Many other limitations have been identified. [14]
Business professors have suggested various ways to remedy the common problems and limitations of SWOT analysis while retaining the SWOT framework. [12]
Michael Porter developed the five forces framework as a reaction to SWOT, which he found lacking in rigor and too ad hoc . [24]
SOAR (strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results) is an alternative technique inspired by appreciative inquiry. [25] [26] SOAR has been criticized as having similar limitations as SWOT, such as "the inability to identify the necessary data". [27]
In project management, the alternative to SWOT known by the acronym SVOR (Strengths, Vulnerabilities, Opportunities, and Risks) compares the project elements along two axes: internal and external, and positive and negative. [28] It takes into account the mathematical link that exists between these various elements, considering also the role of infrastructures. The SVOR table provides an intricate understanding of the elements hypothesized to be at play in a given project: [28] : 9
Forces | Internal | Mathematical link | External |
---|---|---|---|
Positive | Total Forces | Total Forces given constraints = Infrastructures / Opportunities | Opportunities |
Mathematical link | Vulnerabilities given constraints = 1 / Total Forces | constant k | Opportunities given constraints = 1 / Risks |
Negative | Vulnerabilities | Risks given constraints = k / Vulnerabilities | Risks |
Constraints consist of: calendar of tasks and activities, costs, and norms of quality. The "k" constant varies with each project (for example, it may be valued at 1.3). [28] : 9
In 1965, three colleagues at the Long Range Planning Service of Stanford Research Institute—Robert F. Stewart, Otis J. Benepe, and Arnold Mitchell—wrote a technical report titled Formal Planning: The Staff Planner's Role at Start-Up. [29] The report described how a person in the role of a company's staff planner would gather information from managers assessing operational issues grouped into four components represented by the acronym SOFT: the "satisfactory" in present operations, "opportunities" in future operations, "faults" in present operations, and "threats" to future operations. [29] Stewart et al. focused on internal operational assessment and divided the four components into present (satisfactory and fault) and future (opportunity and threat), [29] and not, as would later become common in SWOT analysis, into internal (strengths and weaknesses) and external (opportunities and threats). [6]
Also in 1965, four colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration—Edmund P. Learned, C. Roland Christensen, Kenneth R. Andrews, and William D. Guth—published the first of many editions of the textbook Business Policy: Text and Cases. [6] (Business policy was a term then current for what has come to be called strategic management. [30] ) The first chapter of the textbook stated, without using the acronym, the four components of SWOT and their division into internal and external appraisal:
Deciding what strategy should be is, at least ideally, a rational undertaking. Its principal subactivities include identifying opportunities and threats in the company's environment and attaching some estimate of risk to the discernible alternatives. Before a choice can be made, the company's strengths and weaknesses must be appraised. [6]
Looking back from three decades later, in the book Strategy Safari (1998), management scholar Henry Mintzberg and colleagues said that Business Policy: Text and Cases "quickly became the most popular classroom book in the field", widely diffusing its authors' ideas, which Mintzberg et al. called the "design school" model (in contrast to nine other schools that they identified) of strategic management, "with its famous notion of SWOT" emphasizing assessment of a company's internal and external situations. [8] [31] [30] However, the textbook contains neither a 2 × 2 SWOT matrix nor any detailed procedure for doing a SWOT assessment. [6] Strategy Safari and other books identified Kenneth R. Andrews as the co-author of Business Policy: Text and Cases who was responsible for writing the theoretical part of the book containing the SWOT components. [8] [32] [33] More generally, Mintzberg et al. attributed some conceptual influences on what they called the "design school" (of which they were strongly critical) to earlier books by Philip Selznick (Leadership in Administration, 1957) and Alfred D. Chandler Jr. (Strategy and Structure, 1962), [8] with other possible influences going back to the McKinsey consulting firm in the 1930s. [31] [34]
By the end of the 1960s, the four components of SWOT (without using the acronym) had appeared in other publications on strategic planning by various authors, [35] and by 1972 the acronym had appeared in the title of a journal article by Norman Stait, a management consultant at the British firm Urwick, Orr and Partners. [36] By 1973, the acronym was well-known enough that accountant William W. Fea, in a published lecture, mentioned "the mnemonic, familiar to students, of S.W.O.T., namely strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats". [37] An early example of a 2 × 2 SWOT matrix is found in a 1980 article by management professor Igor Ansoff (but Ansoff used the acronym T/O/S/W instead of SWOT). [4]
Strategy is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the "art of the general", which included several subsets of skills including military tactics, siegecraft, logistics etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in Eastern Roman terminology, and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century. From then until the 20th century, the word "strategy" came to denote "a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills" in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact.
Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost.
Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to attain strategic goals.
In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.
A marketing plan is a plan created to accomplish specific marketing objectives, outlining a company's advertising and marketing efforts for a given period, describing the current marketing position of a business, and discussing the target market and marketing mix to be used to achieve marketing goals.
Marketing management is the strategic organizational discipline that focuses on the practical application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organizations and on the management of marketing resources and activities. Compare marketology, which Aghazadeh defines in terms of "recognizing, generating and disseminating market insight to ensure better market-related decisions".
Porter's Five Forces Framework is a method of analysing the competitive environment of a business. It draws from industrial organization (IO) economics to derive five forces that determine the competitive intensity and, therefore, the attractiveness of an industry in terms of its profitability. An "unattractive" industry is one in which the effect of these five forces reduces overall profitability. The most unattractive industry would be one approaching "pure competition", in which available profits for all firms are driven to normal profit levels. The five-forces perspective is associated with its originator, Michael E. Porter of Harvard University. This framework was first published in Harvard Business Review in 1979.
The word ‘dynamics’ appears frequently in discussions and writing about strategy, and is used in two distinct, though equally important senses.
Marketing strategy refers to efforts undertaken by an organization to increase its sales and achieve competitive advantage. In other words, it is the method of advertising a company's products to the public through an established plan through the meticulous planning and organization of ideas, data, and information.
In strategic management, situation analysis refers to a collection of methods that managers use to analyze an organization's internal and external environment to understand the organization's capabilities, customers, and business environment. The situation analysis can include several methods of analysis such as the 5C analysis, SWOT analysis and Porter's five forces analysis.
Business analysis is a professional discipline focused on identifying business needs and determining solutions to business problems. Solutions may include a software-systems development component, process improvements, or organizational changes, and may involve extensive analysis, strategic planning and policy development. A person dedicated to carrying out these tasks within an organization is called a business analyst or BA.
VRIO is a business analysis framework for strategic management. As a form of internal analysis, VRIO evaluates all the resources and capabilities of a firm. It was first proposed by Jay Barney in 1991.
Technology strategy is the overall plan which consists of objectives, principles and tactics relating to use of technologies within a particular organization. Such strategies primarily focus on the technologies themselves and in some cases the people who directly manage those technologies. The strategy can be implied from the organization's behaviors towards technology decisions, and may be written down in a document. The strategy includes the formal vision that guides the acquisition, allocation, and management of IT resources so it can help fulfill the organizational objectives.
Strategic thinking is a mental or thinking process applied by an individual in the context of achieving a goal or set of goals. As a cognitive activity, it produces thought.
Context analysis is a method to analyze the environment in which a business operates. Environmental scanning mainly focuses on the macro environment of a business. But context analysis considers the entire environment of a business, its internal and external environment. This is an important aspect of business planning. One kind of context analysis, called SWOT analysis, allows the business to gain an insight into their strengths and weaknesses and also the opportunities and threats posed by the market within which they operate. The main goal of a context analysis, SWOT or otherwise, is to analyze the environment in order to develop a strategic plan of action for the business.
Strategic communication can mean either communicating a concept, a process, or data that satisfies a long-term strategic goal of an organization by allowing the facilitation of advanced planning or communicating over long distances, usually using international telecommunications or dedicated global network assets to coordinate actions and activities of operationally significant commercial, non-commercial, and military business or combat and logistic subunits. It can also mean the related function within an organization, which handles internal and external communication processes. Strategic communication can also be used for political warfare.
Market environment and business environment are marketing terms that refer to factors and forces that affect a firm's ability to build and maintain successful customer relationships. The business environment has been defined as "the totality of physical and social factors that are taken directly into consideration in the decision-making behaviour of individuals in the organisation."
BSC SWOT, or the Balanced Scorecard SWOT analysis, was introduced in 2001, by Lennart Norberg and Terry Brown.
Strategic fit expresses the degree to which an organization is matching its resources and capabilities with the opportunities in the external environment. The matching takes place through strategy and it is therefore vital that the company has the actual resources and capabilities to execute and support the strategy. Strategic fit can be used actively to evaluate the current strategic situation of a company as well as opportunities such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and divestitures of organizational divisions. Strategic fit is related to the resource-based view of the firm which suggests that the key to profitability is not only through positioning and industry selection but rather through an internal focus which seeks to utilize the unique characteristics of the company's portfolio of resources and capabilities. A unique combination of resources and capabilities can eventually be developed into a competitive advantage which the company can profit from. However, it is important to differentiate between resources and capabilities. Resources relate to the inputs to production owned by the company, whereas capabilities describe the accumulation of learning the company possesses.
In organizational theory, organizational analysis or industrial analysis is the process of reviewing the development, work environment, personnel, and operation of a business or another type of association. This review is often performed in response to crisis, but may also be carried out as part of a demonstration project, in the process of taking a program to scale, or in the course of regular operations. Conducting a periodic detailed organizational analysis can be a useful way for management to identify problems or inefficiencies that have arisen in the organization but have yet to be addressed, and develop strategies for resolving them.
The SWOTs perspective is often used to pose questions for strategic management (e.g., Ansoff, 1980). Steiner's (1979) 'WOTS' approach, Rowe, Mason and Dickel's (1982) WOTS-UP, and Delbecq's (1989) 'TOWS' framework identify three of many derivations.See also: Weihrich 1982 , p. 54: "For convenience, the matrix that will be introduced is called TOWS, or situational analysis"; Sevier 2001 , p. 46.
Few people realize that there is an inherent danger in conducting a situational analysis using the old tried and true SWOT. The danger is this: When you look inside the organization first, you create a set of glasses through which you will look at the world. In doing so, you are highly likely to overlook significant opportunities and threats.See also Minsky & Aron 2021.
The tried and true SWOT Assessment examines positive and negative factors as does a Force Field Analysis, but a SWOT has a particular focus on the upsides and downsides for the action group itself.
Before you as a salesperson can develop a strategy, you have to assess the situation. We recommend the tried-and-true SWOT analysis. You start by taking a look at your Strengths and Weaknesses, your Opportunities and any Threats. Then you do exactly the same thing from the perspective of each of your competitors.
The results of a SWOT analysis can be (and almost always are) presented simply as a 2 × 2 grid, with one dimension representing the internal versus external factors, and the other depicting positive versus negative valence. ... To improve the inventory collection, you should start with the external factors, then turn your attention to the firm's internal ones.See also Sevier 2001.
What Andrews and his colleagues in the Business Policy course resolutely refused to do—and the main reason his ideas largely disappear from the subsequent history of strategy—was to agree that there were standard frameworks or constructs that could be applied to analyzing a business and its competitive situation. Oh, they might allow one, perhaps because they had helped develop it: so-called SWOT analysis, which called for looking at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats besetting an enterprise.
SWOT analysis is described in very many publications. A few examples of books that describe SWOT analysis and are widely held by WorldCat member libraries and available in the Internet Archive are: