Question
Complete a page for each question and one reference for each question
Discussion question #1 ”Strategic Choices”: Please respond to the following:
• Determine one key distinction between each of the following strategies: adaptive, market entry, and competitive. Provide one example of each strategy to support your response.
• Examine the nature of a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis. Suggest the manner in which a SWOT could help a healthcare organization implement a market entry strategy.
Discussion question #2——-“Deciding on a Strategy”: Please respond to the following:
• Examine the concept of product life cycle analysis. Provide one example of the way in which this analysis can help an organization to determine whether to continue offering a specific service to the community it serves.
• Determine two reasons why the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) portfolio analysis would be effective in developing a specific adaptive strategy for a healthcare organization. Provide a rationale for your position.
Answer
Contents
Strategic Choices and Deciding On a Strategy
Introduction
Strategic Choices
As far as strategic formulation goes, there are several categories of design that are available for utilization. These include adaptive, market-entry, and competitive strategies. The adaptive strategy is more specific than its directional counterpart and it provides a firm with the crucial methods of achieving the goals and vision of the organization (Swayne, Duncan & Ginter, 2012). This plan also outlines how a firm will respond to changes in the industry or market it competes it. Furthermore, it determines the scope of the organization and stipulates how it will expand, contract or maintain scope. For instance, adopting new technologies such as social media to achieve a goal is an adaptive strategy. On the other hand, the market entry strategy is a subset of the adaptive one in that it provides comprehensive techniques of carrying out the expansion and maintenance of scope stratagems through making purchases, cooperation and internal development (Swayne, Duncan & Ginter, 2012). A good example of this is an acquisition, whereby an organization buys a controlling interest in another business in order to transform the acquired firm into its subsidiary.
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Contrary to these two, the competitive strategy is aimed at creating variances between the firm’s position relative to that of its competitors (Swayne, Duncan & Ginter, 2012). Consequently, for the firm to position itself, it must decide on whether it will perform activities with a different approach or it will perform totally different activities compared to its rivals. For example, product differentiation, whereby an organization produces goods that customers perceive to be different and important to them.
A SWOT analysis is anantecedentof strategic planning. It examines an organization’s strengths and weaknesses, its opportunities for growth and the threats posed by the external environment to its survival and longevity(Swayne, Duncan & Ginter, 2012). This assessment can help a healthcare organization implement a market entry strategy by identifying the opportunities offered by the environment that the firm can take advantage of and use to formulate its own plan of action(Swayne, Duncan & Ginter, 2012). Moreover, the analysis also isolates the threats to the healthcare organization from which it can devise ways to protect itself and minimize their potential risk impact.
Deciding on a Strategy
The concept of product life cycle analysis is widely used in industry and it traces the life of a product from its introduction all the way to its decline. It consists of four stages which are introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Through this analysis, an organization can develop sound strategies to anticipate and manage change (Gardner, 1987). It should be noted that the determination of the stage of a product within the life cycle is a function of costs, profits, sales, and thenumber of competing firms (Gardner, 1987).An organization can rely on this analysis to determine whether to continue offering a certain product to the community. Doing so would entail determininga product’s stage within the life cycle. Once this is established, the marketing mix which consists of product, promotion, price and distribution should be observed since it changes depending on the product’s stage. Finally, the organization should monitor and re-evaluate the product/service in terms of production costs and time taken to make it profitable within its current position (Gardner, 1987). If the outcome is high and demand has declined, the organization should stop providing the product/service.
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) portfolio analysis is quite effective in developing a specific adaptive strategy for a healthcare organization for two primary reasons.According to Stern and Deimler (2012), it is versatile and can be used to formulate a portfolio of healthcare products, services and market segments. Secondly,this tool is based entirely on objective data. Therefore, it is guaranteed to produce the expected results since it cannot be easily challenged (Stern & Deimler, 2012). For instance, resource allocation decisions in healthcare organizations can be easily made across a portfolio. I hold this view primarily because this tool creates a sense of stability for an organization’s management by allowing it to strategically distribute the assortment over all the four quadrants instead of aiming for one which is extremely risky.
References
Gardner, D. (1987). The Product Life Cycle. It’s Role in Marketing Strategy, Die Unternehmung, 41, 219-231.
Stern, C. W., & Deimler, M. S. (Eds.). (2012). The Boston consulting group on strategy: Classic concepts and new perspectives. London: John Wiley & Sons.
Swayne, L. E., Duncan, W. J., & Ginter, P. M. (2012). Strategic management of health care organizations. London: John Wiley & Sons.
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