Busıness Management (ENG) — Ünite 5 Soru-Cevap

Sustainable competitive advantage is either being ahead of competitors or achieving higher performance than the industrial average for a long time.

Strategic management is the integrative management field that combines analysis of the firm’s external and internal environments, formulation of strategy resulting in the company’s corporate, business, and functional strategies, and implementation of a set of coherent actions in the quest for competitive advantage.

The effectiveness of vision statements differs based on type. A product-oriented vision defines a company in terms of a product provided (e.g. to be the best company in the mobile phone business). Product-oriented visions tend to force managers to take a more myopic view of the competitive landscape. A customer-oriented vision defines a company in terms of providing solutions for customer needs. 

Values provide guidance on what is desirable, proper, and appropriate in the organizational context.

(1) the number of producers in the market,

(2) the companies’ degree of pricing power,

(3) whether the products offered are undifferentiated or differentiated (products that are different but viewed substitutable by customers), and

(4) the market is consolidated or fragmented (market share for the leading four firms is equal to or less than 40% of total industry sales).

Corporate-level strategy includes the determination of the long-term goals and objectives, the allocation of resources, and the adoption of courses of action in seeking competitive advantage when competing in more than one industry and market simultaneously.

As a corporate-level strategy, diversification is the degree of doing business in different industries to offer new products and services. Pınar had applied a diversificiation strategy when it moved into frozen foods. Amazon’s latest corporate-level strategy is the entry into the retail business by purchasing Whole Foods. 

A strategic business unit (SBU) is an independent division of a larger corporation with its own mission, vision, market features, customers, and profit-and-loss responsibilities.

Dominant-business diversification happens as a company gains 70% to 94% of the revenue from one business, which shares its resources, capabilities, and core competencies with all the other SBUs.

The terms mergers and acquisitions are often used instead of each other, although they are not equivalent. If two independent companies come together and become just one company, a merger occurs. Mergers tend to be friendly. Usually, companies which engage in mergers have similar sizes. 

Outsourcing refers to the contracting out of activities that otherwise would be conducted within a company. There are two types of outsourcing: outsourcing primary activities and outsourcing support activities. Outsourcing primary activities have to be organized for preserving a high level of operational integration because its main attractiveness has been the prospect of minimizing stock. Outsourcing support activities, such as accounting, IT, and HR, does not require such finely adjusted integration with primary activities.

Business-level strategy refers to the determination of the long-term goals and objectives, the allocation of the resources, and the adoption of courses of action in seeking competitive advantage when confıned to a single product market.

A differentiation strategy refers to offering higher value through delivering products with unique characteristics while keeping costs at the same or similar levels with the competitors and charging higher prices to the customers.

A cost-leadership strategy refers to offering the same or similar value for customers by delivering products or services at a lower cost than competitors, enabling the company to charge average or lower prices to the customers.

Global strategy includes the determination of the long-term goals and objectives, the allocation of the resources, and the adoption of courses of action in seeking competitive advantage when competing around the world.

Global integration - local responsiveness refers to a model on how to simultaneously deal with two sets of pressures for global integration and local responsiveness.

A home replication strategy is based on selling the same products in both domestic and foreign markets through exploiting home-based core competencies.

A localization strategy, which is common in the consumer markets and usually adopted when entering the large and/or idiosyncratic foreign markets, necessitates maximizing local responsiveness and hoping that local consumers will perceive the products as local ones.

A transnational strategy, which requires realizing global learning and diffusion of innovations, integrates the benefits of a localization strategy (high local responsiveness) with those of a global-standardization strategy (lowest-cost position attainable).

A global-standardization strategy, which is common in the industrial markets and network organizations, includes achieving significant economies of scale and low cost inputs by pursuing a global division of labor based on wherever best-of-class capabilities reside at the lowest cost.