Swot Analysis : Marketing Strategy Essay

SWOT has been used by countless practitioners, marketing researchers, and is a frequent and popular tool for business marketing and strategy students. Its simplicity and catchy acronym perpetuates its usage in business and beyond as the tool is used to assess alternatives and complex decision situations. In the business arena the grouping of internal and external issues is a frequent starting point for strategic planning. It can be constructed quickly and can benefit from multiple viewpoints as a brainstorming exercise. Typically, managers first consider internal strengths and weaknesses (at the top row of the 2 × 2 grid) which can include image, structure, access to natural resources, capacity and efficiency, and financial

SWOT analysis is a structured planning method to evaluate the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats involved in a business venture. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture and indentifies the internal and external factors that are favourable and unfavourable to achieve the objective.

They are women with incomes of $25,000 or more a year that care about their appearance and spend money on beauty products. They tend to have curly or frizzy hair. They are women that tend to use beauty salons and keep up with fashion and fashion trends.

SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) are a way that business managers, owners, and general employees can look at their job, or business. I chose this however, because it is so ubiquitous, while it is often used in the business world it can apply to virtually any situation and this is why it is a great idea and thing to follow. It provides an outline that the individual may choose to follow, this is important because people often are not analytical and objective. This leads to rational decisions such as someone doing something on a whim, or making a choice out of emotion which only works sometimes. If the individual can see the details of SWOT in every scenario or even most it will be beneficial and save time. It is an efficient and very simple way for someone to become analytical which can save a business from going under and failing.

Kellogg’s is one of the major food manufacturing companies in the world and its main products are breakfast cereals and snacks. The story of the firm started in 1898 when the brothers W.K. Kellogg and J.H. Kellogg discovered a new process to make cereals (Corn Flakes). Nowadays, Kellogg’s is a multinational company with a presence in 180 different countries producing a wide range of cereals and snacks that consist of crackers, toaster pastries, cereal bars, biscuits, fruit-flavoured snacks, frozen waffles and vegetarian foods. The vision of the company is defined by the following sentence: “To enrich and delight the world through foods and brands that matter”. Furthermore, Kellogg’s states that their purpose is “Nourishing families so they can flourish and thrive”.

Strategic Management is a set of upper level management decisions and actions that will determines the long term objectives and performance of a corporation. It accomplishes this task by including a variety of tools and analysis techniques, which will implement, evaluate and control the general direction of a company. This is done through strategy formulation which begins with a situational analysis that emphasizes the monitoring and evaluating of external opportunities and threats in light of a corporation´s strengths and weaknesses (Wheelen and Hunger, 2006; Saloner et al., 2001). The objective of this paper is to describe, analyze and discuss advantages and disadvantages of a concept named SWOT, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. These are the concepts that are frequently used as tools for the analyzing of all external environments of an organization including their internal factors that constitutes its structure (Wheelen and Hunger, 2006).

The aim of this paper is to critically evaluate the SWOT analysis as one of popular tools in marketing. SWOT analysis is an analysis method of identifying all external and internal factors for organization strategies (Rauch, 2007). It is considered in this paper that though SWOT analysis has limitations, it can be improved to be more effective as its development. This paper firstly focused on the definition of SWOT analysis. And then it discussed the context of the SWOT analysis including its evolution and its applications. Followed by, the paper introduced two relevant practice cases based on SWOT analysis. Next, the critical evaluation of SWOT analysis was presented with

Five Forces Model (p. 64) – Michael Porter identified five key competitive forces that determine an industry’s weaknesses and strengths and those managers need to consider

Target Corporation is known worldwide as a large retail chain that brings in millions of dollars each fiscal year. The ability to remain competitive in a saturated industry could prove difficult to some retailers, but Target remains one of the leaders in the retail market. With success comes risk. Target Corporation competes against online retailers as well as “big box” stores to remain competitive.

3. The policy should be changed and this impact AAA to acquire more Wholesalers and grow their profit margin by allowing the label.

As described in figure 1, The strengths and weaknesses of the SWOT analysis are internal factors , and can be controlled directly by the organisation. Elliot, Rundle-Thiele, and Waller (2010) describes these strengths and weaknesses as those attributes of the organisation that can help or hinder in achieving its objectives.  In figure 2, the strengths portrayed for Foxtel in the SWOT analysis are vast in comparison to it’s weaknesses. In particular, the advertisement campaign has been a strength for Foxtel, despite the global financial crisis, Foxtel was able to successfully ‘sail through the storm’ with the help of a brilliant advertising campaign promising viewers to save money with Foxtel (Simon Canning, 2011) .  In contrast, the advertisements are targeted to a specific audience which has left out the aging population of 65 and over, which constitutes 13.5%  of the population as at 30 June 2010 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2010), this exclusion is a weakness in its advertising campaign.  In addition to weaknesses, Foxtel has

Marketing is an essentially about marshalling the resources of the organization so that they can meet the changing needs of the customers on whom the organization depends. As a verb, marketing is all about how an organization addresses its markets. Marketing is “The management process which identifies, anticipates and supplies the customer requirements efficiently and profitability”.

Upon completion of my undergraduate degree in Aviation Management, I will pursue a career with a major airline. Not only will I realize a life long dream but also it will be a personal accomplishment in an academic road that was often complicated. Ideals may change, values do not and some things just take a little more time to achieve.

Quick to react to market trends due to its supply chain design, operation & delivery

With around 5000 retail outlets worldwide, operating in more then a dozen countries and with over US$286 billion in annual sales, Wal-Mart is the top retail chain and number one fortune 500 company in the world. Wal-Mart is the top employer in the U.S. with 1.3 million employees, “the company accounts for 9 cents of every US retail dollar and sells around 20 per cent of the nation’s groceries and pharmaceuticals.” (Times News Network).