Strategy: In the Beginning
_____ is the set of actions that its managers take to outperform the company's competitors and achieve superior profitability.
A strategy
is a technique for displaying the different market or competitive positions that rival firms occupy in the industry.
Strategic Group Mapping
The competitive power of a resource or capability is measured by how many of four specific _____ tests it can pass.
VRIN
These five strategies make-up the generic competitive strategies
low-cost provider strategy.
broad differentiation strategy
focused low-cost strategy
focused differentiation strategy
best-cost provider strategy
_____ is a subsidiary business that is established by setting up the entire operation from the ground up.
Greenfield venture
This is also known as a "Reactive Strategy Elements"
An emergent strategy
intense competitive pressures from just one of the five forces may suffice to destroy the conditions for good _________ and prompt some companies to exit the business.
profitability
analysis is a simple but powerful tool for sizing up a company’s strengths and weaknesses, its market opportunities, and the external threats to its future well-being.
SWOT Analysis
_____is the range of product and service segments that the firm serves within its product or service market.
Horizontal Scope
The problem a ______ faces is maintaining quality control; foreign franchisees do not always exhibit strong commitment to consistency and standardization, especially when the local culture does not stress the same kinds of quality concerns.
franchisor
A ________ describes management’s aspirations for the company’s future and the course and direction charted to achieve them.
A strategic Vision
An example of the producers of eyeglasses and contact lens face competitive pressures from the doctors who do corrective laser surgery is an example of _________
Competitive Pressures from Substitutes
Resources can be divided into two main categories: ____________ resources.
tangible and intangible
____involves abandoning efforts to beat out competitors in existing markets and instead invent a new industry or new market segment that renders existing competitors largely irrelevant and allows a company to create and capture altogether new demand.
A blue-ocean strategy
A company may opt to expand outside its domestic market for any of five major reasons:
To gain access to new customers.
To achieve lower costs development, manufacturing, or marketing
To gain access to low-cost inputs of production.
To further exploit its core competencies.
To gain access to resources and capabilities located in foreign markets.
Well-stated _________ must be specific, quantifiable or measurable, and challenging and must contain a deadline for achievement.
Objectives
_____are the major underlying causes of change in industry and competitive conditions.
Driving Forces
Virtually all organizational _______ are knowledge-based, residing in people and in a company’s intellectual capital, or in organizational processes and systems, which embody tacit knowledge.
capabilities
Using hit-and-run or guerrilla warfare tactics to grab ________ from complacent or distracted rivals.
market share
With a strategy of unrelated diversification, an _____ is deemed to have potential if it passes the industry-attractiveness and cost of entry tests and if it has good prospects for attractive financial performance.
acquisition
_________strategies concern the approaches employed in managing particular functions within a business-like research and development (R&D), production, procurement of inputs, sales and marketing, distribution, customer service, and finance.
Functional-area
________ comprises six principal components: political factors; economic conditions in the firm’s general environment (local, country, regional, worldwide); sociocultural forces; technological factors; environmental factors (concerning the natural environment); and legal/regulatory conditions.
PESTEL
Bristol-Meyers Squibb’s famed “string of pearls” acquisition capabilities, which have enabled it to replace degraded resources such as expiring patents with new patents and newly acquired capabilities in drug discovery for new disease domains...is an example of a _____capability
dynamic
allows a firm to do one or more of the following:
Command a premium price for its product.
Increase unit sales (because additional buyers are won over by the differentiating features).
Gain buyer loyalty to its brand (because buyers are strongly attracted to the differentiating features and bond with the company and its products).
Successful broad differentiation
_________are cost savings that accrue directly from a larger-sized operation—for example, unit costs may be lower in a large plant than in a small plant. ________, however, stem directly from strategic fit along the value chains of related businesses, which in turn enables the businesses to share resources or to transfer them from business to business at low costs
Economies of scale , Economies of scope