Porter ‘Five Forces Analysis’ for the Banking Industry in Ghana

Customers make demands on the market by routinely expressing their desire for “more”. This has been called “seeking a bigger and better deal”. The demand is for more value, and more options. As they search the marketplace for its offerings, customers are often pleased to see new suppliers. They consider the new offerings, and make decisions about changing their purchasing habits.

Bargaining Power of Buyers: The bargaining power of buyers is high in the department store retail industry. The volume of buyers is high, and buyers are very price sensitive in this industry. The products are not highly differentiated, and there are numerous stores that offer the same, or similar, products, giving buyers the opportunity to search for the lowest prices and information. The industry has substitutes available in the form of specialty, differentiated products and stores. This increases the power of buyers,

Bargaining power of buyers is medium-high because of the low switching costs and wider spectrum of similar products selling at competitive prices due to the influence of developing countries

Due to the fact of price sensitivity is high, consumers are willing to consume identical product with lower price; they stand on a strong bargaining position. On the contrary, suppliers have relative strong bargaining power because the high concentration of the industry.

Porter’s Five Forces is defined as threats of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, power of buyers, the threat of substitutes and rivalry among existing competitors. New entrants into the industry aim to gain market share from rivals, so the intensity of competition may require to make changes on current strategy of marketing to maintain existing market share. The bargaining

The bargaining power of customers determines how much customers can impose pressure on margins and volumes.

Bargaining Power of Buyers - The force of the buyer’s bargaining power can reduce prices and demand higher quality products and services (Porter, 1998).

The competitive forces that shape company strategy are very important to consider in any organization. However, they are especially important when an organization’s forces fall closer to the “intense” side on the scale between “intense forces” and “benign forces.” “Almost no company earns attractive returns on investment” when forces are intense, like those in industries that sell luxury goods. (Porter, 2008). Yet, Robert Mondavi’s wineries have leveraged the five forces (barriers to entry, bargaining power of suppliers/buyers, threat of substitutes, and competitive rivalry) in order to maintain consistent profits. The five forces are discussed in detail below with the level of importance increasing throughout the descriptions.

Bargaining power of buyers: Businesses and individuals all fall under the customer's category for this industry. Big customers do get volume discounts and can negotiate prices with sales representatives. However smaller customers have to take what is being offered to them. The only say they have is that they can switch between the players, but due to intense competition, the prices offered are generally the same across the service band.

The market greatly depends on how powerful buyers are in terms of their willingness to pay certain prices. The following determines the bargaining power of buyers

Bargaining power of buyers -Buyers are not in concentrated groups and do not buy in large amounts. However, within the entertainment industry, customers have a lot of alternatives and have no switching cost. However the introduction of DVDs, influenced customers to purchase DVDs since the cost is almost the same cost of rentals. This makes buyer power moderate (Xie & Lin, 2008).

The threat of substitutes is low. Buyers are unlikely to substitute Corning’s product because few substitutes exist. Additionally, switching costs would also be high for business buyers to substitute Corning’s with another manufacturer’s

Buyers have more power when they are large-volume buyers, the product is a significant aspect of the buyer's costs or purchases, the products are standard within an industry, there are few switching costs, the buyers earn low profits, potential for backward integration of the buyer group exists, the product is not essential to the buyer's product, and the buyer has full disclosure about supply, demand, prices, and

The power of buyers is high because this company depends of the businesses and consumers’ demand. This is because they can decide where to buy

The bargaining power of buyers is affected by the concentration and number of consumers, when buyer power is strong, they gain the power to choose between producers and ultimately equip themselves with bargaining power which then the producers will have to conform to in order to produce profit, under these conditions the buyer has the most influence in determining the price of products. Also when buyers have strong bargaining power in the exchange relationship, competition can be affected in several ways. Powerful buyers can bargain for lower prices, better