Executive summary
General introduction (including a concise consumers and category market/ trend overview)
Entry mode
-The suitable mode of entry for Zara to enter the clothing industry in Vietnam is franchising.
-As Vietnam’s joint venture regulations are strict; the Vietnamese investors must own at least 51% of the enterprise’s capital. This will create some difficulties to Zara in term of controlling the business.
-Therefore, franchising is more suitable because the mode of entry is suitable for entering a small country and subject to significant cultural differences from Zara’s home base (Spain) as Vietnam. -In term of financial, franchising creates another source of income for Zara, through payment of franchise fees, royalty and
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- use social media such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter as a good communication channel to its consumers and a tool to develop brand community.
- not only focuses on customers but also its employs by applying internal branding, which prods its staff to better understanding, managing and delivering Zara brand.
Product strategy
Product strategy is one of key elements of a brand strategy that leads to the success of a brand strategy. - create its culture to customers: “you better get it today because you might not find it tomorrow” by leaving large areas empty in its expensive retail shops and encouraging occasional stock-outs.
- gathering information to make the decisions on garments sold in all the markets where Zara operates (Bonache and Cerviño, 1996).
- store managers decide the specific garments that will be put on display in the store to meet the customer’s taste in that area (Fabrega, 2004).
- launch new features with high quality standard
- differentiate its products to meet customer’s requirement and needs: product production and delivery in fifteen days; Changes of an existing garment can be put on display within two weeks; manufactures its “live collections”; lauching 11,000 new items every year (Ghemawat and Nueno, 2003).
- Service strategy* * Physical evidences Evidence is a product help consumers understand our product. It is not directly involved in
For this growing population, we can track the merchandises and find out what kind of items the customers spend money on. We gather the data and analyze the pattern and what style the customer is looking for. We send e-mails to the customers when getting new items that fit the customer’s dress preference with style suggestions.
Zara’s first stakeholder is the owners. Owners of the shop plays the biggest role in the company. They are the ones who started Zara and are the people behind the success of the business. The owners are the principal strategist and planner. They are the ones who understand the business so well and they started-up capital to get established and grow their products and services. They also comply with federal and business licensing laws. From forming a limited liability company to creating legal contracts, they know basics of the law and have access to an attorney if legal problems with customers or employees arise.
The business idea of Zara is to link customer demand to manufacturing, and to link manufacturing to distribution. And based on this general idea, Zara has several essential elements for its business model. First, speed and decision making, which means that in the external level, Zara need to respond very quickly to demands of target customers, and always keep in style. While for the inside, Zara treasure intelligence and judgment of common employees who enjoy a great deal of autonomy. Second, its marketing, merchandising and advertising strategy. Zara does not spend on virtually advertising, while it spends heavily on stores, and no selling online because of
One the main features of H&M is the rapidity of shifts in demand and respond to customers’ needs. In fact when necessities of customers change, in only three weeks H&M can create new items. A normal clothes company needs six months to create new collections or articles. That’s why H&M does many researches all the time to find out new tendencies or variations of styles, giving shoppers last tendencies clothes.
There vertical integration allows small batches of produce to be distributed and tested out allow them to save more money and cut inventory backlogs. Zara maintains a low cost by avoiding outsourcing (where possible) and producing all its merchandise and produce in home soil in Spain. Also Zara own many fabric dying, cutting and processing equipment that provided Zara added control and flexibility to adopt new trends on demand. Effectively Zara is able to design and manufacture products as well as deliver them in less than two weeks in contrast to competitors such as Benetton and H&M which require at least between five weeks and 4 months lead time to fill orders from its retail operations. One major unique characteristic was that Zara own its in house production which gives Zara the flexibility of quantity, variety, and the frequency of the designs they produce.
No business in this type of industry has total control over the market price and there are no barriers to entry and exit. Because of its monopolistically competitive playing grounds, Zara’s conduct is to increase its market power by producing demand for its heterogeneous products. Through differentiation and cost leadership, Zara attempts to increase market demand by offering new items weekly while keeping a low inventory, thus making its products unique and attractive to consumers. Because of its backward vertical integration model, Zara creates a strong synergy throughout its production process. Zara has sustained a competitive advantage globally by expanding into new markets and becoming more efficient. In a monopolistically competitive industry, Zara is expected to make profits in the short run but will break even in the long run because demand will decrease as average total costs increase. This means in the long run, a monopolistically competitive firm, such as Zara, will make zero economic profit (AmosWEB, 2001).
It is recommended that Zara maintain full ownership of new stores rather than choosing to franchise. This will ensure the continuation of the strong Zara culture.
The basic strategy for fighting competition is to attract buyers at lower prices, more unique designs, high-quality design, efficient customer service and solid image brand. Thus bargaining power of buyer for apparel industry is high as the products falls under the basic needs in human lives. There is no much difference in terms of products offered by the apparel company, so if buyer is unhappy with the product or service they can easily switch to another brand. Thus, Zara are trying to strengthen its position in the market by using their unique strategy by giving priority to buyer to meet their special needs.
Zara uses vertical integration, in a vertical integration several stages of production and distribution of a commodity are influenced by a single company.
Zara’s business model can be broken down into three basic components: concept, capabilities, and value
Quick response of Zara leads it to be successful in the fashion clothing industry. Zara adopts international strategy for its operation. With vertical integration, it benefits Zara in cost aspect, however, it involves some risks. Due to our anaylysis on Zara’s operations, some of the recommendations are made to facilitate its further improvements.
Zara is a clothing and accessories retailer selling stylish apparel at affordable prices, and it is also the most profitable brand of the Spanish clothing retail group Inditex SA. Ortega planned for this new Zara outlet, located near his factory in La Coruna in northern Spain, to sell this overstock merchandise himself. Since then, Zara has expanded into 500 stores in 68 countries as of January 2007 and has become a leader in customized fashion retailing. This assignment presents core competencies to help Zara achieve competitive advantages in fashion industry. Besides, we also offer five competitive objectives about quality, speed, flexibility, dependability and cost to evaluate
When ZARA first started opening stores outside of Spain, at the end of the 1980’s and beginning of the 1990’s, they looked for markets that resembled the Spanish market, had a minimum level of economic development and would be relatively easy to enter. The entry into the market would be decided by a
The company’s vision as stated on the website: “Zara is committed to satisfying the desires of our customers. As a result we pledge to continuously innovate our business to improve your experience. We promise to provide new designs made from quality materials that are affordable”.
Until now, every garment that is product in Zara’s factories around the world has to travel back to Spain in order to go through quality controls, and is then send to its distributors. But the continuous flows of goods from all the productions sites to Spain and from Spain to the markets of sell, as well as the relative communication flows necessary to such a business model will inevitably slow down as Zara will have to deal with a constantly growing number of customers. Thus, the highly centralized information system of Zara seems not to be easily applicable in Asia, in addition to being time and money consuming.