Michael Porter's Contribution To Marketing Case Study

Assuming that the company’s goal is to maximize profits, the current cost system is not an appropriate tool for strategic planning. The ambiguity of the overhead costs per product makes it difficult to accurately analyze the cause and effect relationships of changes and/or improvements to specific product line.

While we are performing our analysis on different aspects of the company, we look at the three main types of cost. When we remain devoted to improving our costs, and the faults related, we show our same devotion to our consumers. This is portrayed by the quality of products we put on the shelves. Prevention costs, appraisal costs and Failure costs are areas

Porters Generic Competitive Strategies: The relative position of a company within its industry concludes whether the profitability of the firm is above or below the industry’s average. The above average profitability of the firm is fundamentally showing the sustainable competitive advantage in its long run. According to Michael Porter, competitive advantages originate from the value of a firm and there are two types of competitive advantages, which a company can own. These are low cost or differentiation. For any company, in

The solution to be implemented should felicitate higher coordination among the business partners leading to better information circulation and targeted customer approach, i.e. to make efforts that the same technician handles the same customer.

Ubisoft has different production, marketing, administrative and Internet teams in different countries. As each department uses different IT systems, managers have an initial problem of whether the IT centres should be centralised or decentralised. Centralisation has its advantages as it offers a rapid system response, it can save money through avoidance of duplicated activities and offers better security. Its disadvantages include if the central unit fails then the entire system will collapse and they might lose touch with the goals of major IT departments.

The current simple allocation approach is insurance premiums and sales commissions are tracked at the legal business unit entity and product line level to properly compensate sales agents. Certain support functions are only accounted for at the corporate level and are subsequently allocated to product lines and business units according to the number of policies outstanding. Along with the recent development trend, Hampton thinks that this approach cannot reflect the claim on resources that is made by various business units and product lines. She also realizes that although sales volume has increased, profitability declines. So a new approach is necessary and extremely urgent. Better and appropriate allocation approach can help management obtain more accurate insight into product profitability, make correct product pricing decisions and so on.

According to Porter (1985) a company can apply three generic types of strategies to protect itself while competitive force is a key issue of the management. To achieve this position a strategy based on competency must be accomplished

Competitive advantage is the point of power for any organization as it is the point from which an organization can maximize it's profits if it's been planned for it well .

Pricing Strategy. In using the value chain resource analysis one can see that the pricing structure could lower the overhead costs because there is no need for a large

The purpose of this paper is to answer a few important questions: Why do companies allocate costs? How do companies allocate costs? And how this cost allocation can affect the decision making of the company. It is important for the companies to find the proper method to allocate the costs. Cost allocation is an important issue in many companies because many of the costs associated with designing, producing and distributing products and services are not easily identified with the products and services that are created. It would have been easier for companies to allocate cost if costs were directly traceable with the products and the cost allocation would have been minor issue for the company. The decision-making

Principles of cost benefit analysis: it should be designed and developed in a manner to get the maximum benefit with minimum possible

Strategy can be defined as being different from one’s competitors, finding the race to operate and accomplished it. According to Michael Porter (1996), while becoming better at what you do is desirable, it will not benefit you in the long run because it is something other competitors can also do. Strategies for organizations are originally developed by Michael E. Porter in 1979 by introducing the five forces model. A company can identify the industry profitability and attractiveness by analyzing the five forces of Porter (Johnson et al., 2008). And then a reasonable strategy can be set up in line with the strengths and the weakness of an organization is able to create a plan for a stronger position for the organization within its

Competitive advantage is explained by Mahoney and Pandian (1992) as the function of industry analysis, organizational governance and the firm’s effects in the form of resource advantages and strategies. In order for a firm to be competitive it must adapt to the volatile business environment and through strategic management decisions establish a competitive advantage that will ultimately produce superior performance relative to its competitors (Akimova 2000).

Michael E. Porter, associate professor published the article titled “How Competitive Forces shape Strategy” in Harvard Business Review in 1979. This article is retitled as “The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy” and published in Harvard Business Review in 2008. Michael E. Porter developed the model of Five Competitive Forces which is defined as “Competitive Strategy – Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors”. It has become a main device for analyzing an organizations structure in strategic practices.

Upon analysis, it came to the fore that the current system had some obvious drawbacks which motivated the need for a new system. Under the old system, it was assumed that all customer orders placed the same demand on the resources of Kanthal. This was not accurate as customers differed by: the level of technical and commercial service they required, whether they demanded standard or non-standard products and by their ability to forecast their demand. Because of these discrepancies, under the old cost system an order which placed fewer demands on Kanthal's resources would be overcosted and appear to be unprofitable or less profitable than it was. This order would represent a hidden profit. Whereas, an order which placed a disproportionately large burden on the company's resources would appear to be more profitable than it was. This was a hidden loss order. Due to these hidden loss situations, many of Kanthal's resources were employed towards unprofitable products and customers.