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Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy. It may also extend to control mechanisms for guiding the implementation of the strategy. Strategic planning became prominent in corporations during the 1960s and remains an important aspect of strategic management. It is executed by strategic planners or strategists, who involve many parties and research sources in their analysis of the organization and its relationship to the environment in which it competes.
In the field of management, 'strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's top managers on behalf of owners, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates.
Marketing management is the organizational discipline which focuses on the practical application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organizations and on the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities.
In business, a competitive advantage is the attribute that allows an organization to outperform its competitors. A competitive advantage may include access to natural resources, such as high-grade ores or a low-cost power source, highly skilled labor, geographic location, high entry barriers, and access to new technology.
Competitor analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats. Profiling combines all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment.
Porter's Five Forces Framework is a method for analyzing competition 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.
SWOT analysis is a strategic planning technique used to help a person or organization identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to business competition or project planning. It is designed for use in the preliminary stages of decision-making processes and can be used as a tool for evaluation of the strategic position of a city or organization. It is intended to specify the objectives of the business venture or project and identify the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving those objectives. Users of a SWOT analysis often ask and answer questions to generate meaningful information for each category to make the tool useful and identify their competitive advantage. SWOT has been described as the tried-and-true tool of strategic analysis, but has also been criticized for its limitations.
Porter's generic strategies describe how a company pursues competitive advantage across its chosen market scope. There are three/four generic strategies, either lower cost, differentiated, or focus. A company chooses to pursue one of two types of competitive advantage, either via lower costs than its competition or by differentiating itself along dimensions valued by customers to command a higher price. A company also chooses one of two types of scope, either focus or industry-wide, offering its product across many market segments. The generic strategy reflects the choices made regarding both the type of competitive advantage and the scope. The concept was described by Michael Porter in 1980.
Marketing strategy is a long-term, forward-looking approach with the fundamental goal of achieving a sustainable competitive advantage.
A value chain is a set of activities that a firm operating in a specific industry performs in order to deliver a valuable product for the market. The concept comes through business management and was first described by Michael Porter in his 1985 best-seller, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.
The idea of the value chain is based on the process view of organizations, the idea of seeing a manufacturing organization as a system, made up of subsystems each with inputs, transformation processes and outputs. Inputs, transformation processes, and outputs involve the acquisition and consumption of resources – money, labour, materials, equipment, buildings, land, administration and management. How value chain activities are carried out determines costs and affects profits.
The resource-based view (RBV) is a managerial framework used to determine the strategic resources a firm can exploit to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.
The six forces model is an analysis model used to give a holistic assessment of any given industry and identify the structural underlining drivers of profitability and competition. The model is an extension of the Porter's five forces model proposed by Michael Porter in his 1979 article published in the Harvard Business Review "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy". The sixth force was proposed in the mid-1990s. The model provides a framework of six key forces that should be considered when defining corporate strategy to determine the overall attractiveness of an industry.
A market analysis studies the attractiveness and the dynamics of a special market within a special industry. It is part of the industry analysis and thus in turn of the global environmental analysis. Through all of these analyses, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) of a company can be identified. Finally, with the help of a SWOT analysis, adequate business strategies of a company will be defined. The market analysis is also known as a documented investigation of a market that is used to inform a firm's planning activities, particularly around decisions of inventory, purchase, work force expansion/contraction, facility expansion, purchases of capital equipment, promotional activities, and many other aspects of a company.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing:
Strategic analysis typically focuses on two views of organization: the industry-view and the resource-based view (RBV). These views analyse the organisation without taking into consideration relationship between the organizations strategic choice and institutional frameworks. The National Diamond' is a tool for analyzing the organization's task environment. The National Diamond highlights that strategic choices should not only be a function of industry structure and a firm's resources, it should also be a function of the constraints of the institutional framework. Institutional analysis becomes increasingly important as firms enter new operating environments and operate within new institutional frameworks.
In organizational theory, dynamic capability is the capability of an organization to purposefully adapt an organization's resource base. The concept was defined by David Teece, Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen, in their 1997 paper Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management, as "the firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments".
Competitive heterogeneity is a concept from strategic management that examines why industries do not converge on one best way of doing things. In the view of strategic management scholars, the microeconomics of production and competition combine to predict that industries will be composed of identical firms offering identical products at identical prices. Deeper analyses of this topic were taken up in industrial organization economics by crossover economics/strategic-management scholars such as Harold Demsetz and Michael Porter. Demsetz argued that better-managed firms would make better products than their competitors. Such firms would translate better products or lower prices into higher levels of demand, which would lead to revenue growth. These firms would then be larger than the more poorly managed competitors. Porter argued that firms in an industry would cluster into strategic groups. Each group would be similar and movement between groups would be difficult and costly. Richard Rumelt and Stephen Lippman demonstrated how firms could differ in an industry in partial equilibrium-like circumstances. Richard Nelson and Sidney G. Winter discussed how firms develop differing capabilities. During this time, industrial economics focused on industry characteristics, treated the differences among firms in an industry as trivial. This was a point of contention within strategy and between strategy and economics from about 1980 to the mid-1990s.
Porter's four corners model is a predictive tool designed by Michael Porter that helps in determining a competitor's course of action. Unlike other predictive models which predominantly rely on a firm's current strategy and capabilities to determine future strategy, Porter's model additionally calls for an understanding of what motivates the competitor. This added dimension of understanding a competitor's internal culture, value system, mindset, and assumptions helps in determining a much more accurate and realistic reading of a competitor's possible reactions in a given situation.
Jay B. Barney is an American professor in strategic management, best known for his contributions to the resource-based theory of competitive advantage.
Strategic planning and uncertainty intertwine in a realistic framework where companies and organizations are bounded to develop and compete in a world dominated by complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty in which unpredictable, unstoppable and, sometimes, meaningless circumstances may have a direct impact on the expected outcomes. In this scenario, formal planning systems are criticized by a number of academics, who argue that conventional methods, based on classic analytical tools, fail to shape a strategy that can adjust to the changing market and enhance the competitiveness of each business unit, which is the basic principle of a competitive business strategy. Strategy planning systems are supposed to produce the best approaches to concretize long term objectives. However, since strategy deals with the upcoming future, the strategic context of an organization will always be uncertain, therefore the first choice an organisation has to make is when to act; acting now or when the uncertainty has been resolved.
References
- Hunt, M. (1972) "Competition in the Major Home Appliance Industry", doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1972.
- Porter, M. (1980) Competitive Strategy, Free Press, New York, 1980.
- Hodgkinson, G.P. (1997) "The Cognitive Analysis of Competitive Structures: A Review and Critique", in: Human Relations, 50 (6), 625-654.
- Jeannet, Jean-Pierre & Hein Schreuder (2015), "From Coal to Biotech: The Transformation of DSM with Business School Support", Heidelberg: Springer. ISBN 978-3-662-46298-0
