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Intended And Emergent Essay

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Evaluate the suitability of the emergent and intended approaches to strategic management for Tesco
One of the world’s largest retailers operating in 12 different countries and with over 500,000 employees is Tesco PLC (Tesco, 2014). Tesco’s states their strategic priorities as to continue their investment in the strong UK businesses, establish a multichannel leadership and to pursue disciplined international growth (Tesco, 2014). In any company, strategy plays a key part in its success or failure and can be split into two types; intended and emergent. An intended approach is described as “a planned strategy designed at a senior level of management for the implementation at other organisational levels” (Witcher & Chau, 2014). Whereas the …show more content…

On one side the increasing customer demand and needs led to this being successful for Tesco as they could add in extra products and dominate their indirect competitors. But on the other hand for some customers too much space and too big stores could put Tesco at the risk of customers being put off; “If you got to Tesco for your biscuits, you might not want to walk around a massive hypermarket” (Dangerfield, 2007). This again is the changing customers’ needs and therefore drove Tesco in 2002 to publicise a takeover of T&S stores, leading to the launch of One Stop convenience stores (Tran, 2002). This emergent strategy occurred two days after Co-op snapped up the largest convenience store, Alldays (Tran, 2002). Eisenhardt and Brown pointed out that emergent strategy can arise from an improvisational approach, which comes about by acting rapidly on the advantage created (Eisenhardt & Brown, 1998). Therefore Tesco saw their competitor’s actions from their acquisition and implicated their own emergent acquisition strategy to be on the same level as Co-op. This strategy was not the most suitable as it was a rushed venture and Tesco already had Tesco Express outlets around the UK, so the only thing they were achieving by taking over T&S stores is narrowing down the competitors in the market. Furthermore at the expense of £377m they still only had 3.5% of the convenience store market along with consumer

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