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Questions And Suggested Answers Club Med Essay

Decent Essays

Case: Cultural Turnaround at Club Med
Questions
1. Analyse Club Med’s culture before 2000.
2. Explain the reasons for Club Med’s success between the 1950s and the 1990s.
3. How do you explain Club Med’s difficulties in the early 1990s?
4. Why did Bourguignon’s plan fail? Do you think that Giscard d’Estaing’s plan will be more successful?

This case example enables students to explore the impact of culture and history on an organisation’s strategy.
1. Club Med’s cultural web before 2000 should highlight the following points:
Power structures. Very decentralised. Village General Managers are highly empowered and highly autonomous. Their personal relationship with the founders (Trigano and Blitz), based on trust, is a key.
Organisational …show more content…

Club Med also developed a rich culture, which fuelled its strategic positioning. This culture generated a very strong sense of belonging among both employees and customers. Competitors did not manage to imitate this culture, which was one of the main sources of Club Med’s competitive advantage.
3. Club Med’s difficulties in the early 1990s? Though Club Med’s culture fuelled its success from the 1950s to the 1980s, in 1990s it hampered its development. The founding families were still in power, and most of the executives were former village General Managers. All of them embodied Club Med’s historical culture, and it was very difficult for them to envisage another approach. The context had evolved; however, new aggressive competitors had appeared (Look, Marmara, Nouvelles Frontières etc.) and they deliberately imitated Club Med’s recipe, at lower prices. As a consequence, Club Med’s differentiation was no longer credible. Moreover, the community life culture and relaxed morals were no longer in line with social context. As a consequence, Club Med suffered from a strategic drift: its strengths became weaknesses and it lost control on the environment it had created.
4. Bourguignon’s plan failed for two main reasons:
Bourguignon focused on marketing and management control (external growth, marketing investment and cost cutting), but he neglected cultural aspects. As a consequence, Club Med’s employees never

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