2. Learning Objectives
• Discuss seven different topics for long-term corporate
objectives
• Describe the five qualities of long-term corporate objectives
that make them useful to strategic managers
• Explain the generic strategies of low-cost leadership,
differentiation, and focus
• Discuss the importance of the value disciplines
• List, describe, evaluate, and give examples of 15 grand
strategies that decision makers use in forming their company’s
competitive plan
• Understand the creation of sets of long-term objectives and
grand strategies options
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3. Long-Term Objectives
• Strategic managers recognize that short-run profit
maximization is rarely the best approach to achieving
sustained corporate growth and profitability
• To achieve long-term prosperity, strategic planners
commonly establish long-term objectives in seven
areas:
– Profitability – Productivity
– Competitive Position – Employee Development
– Employee Relations -- Technological Leadership
– Social Responsibility
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4. Qualities of Long-Term Objectives
• There are five criteria that should be used in
preparing long-term objectives:
– Flexible
– Measurable
– Motivating
– Suitable
– Understandable
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5. The Balanced Scorecard
• The balanced scorecard is a set of four measures
that are directly linked to the company’s strategy
• Developed by Robert S. Kaplan and David P.
Norton, it directs a company to link its own long-
term strategy with tangible goals and actions.
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6. Balanced Scorecard (contd.)
The scorecard allows managers to evaluate
the company from four perspectives:
financial performance
customer knowledge
internal business processes
learning and growth
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8. Generic Strategies
• A long-term or grand strategy must be based on a
core idea about how the firm can best compete in
the marketplace. The popular term for this core idea
is generic strategy.
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9. The Three Generic Strategies
• 3 Generic Strategies:
• Striving for overall low-cost leadership in the
industry.
• Striving to create and market unique products for
varied customer groups through differentiation.
• Striving to have special appeal to one or more
groups of consumers or industrial buyers, focusing
on their cost or differentiation concerns.
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10. Low-Cost Leadership
• Low-cost producers usually excel at cost reductions
and efficiencies
• They maximize economies of scale, implement cost-
cutting technologies, stress reductions in overhead
and in administrative expenses, and use volume
sales techniques to propel themselves up the
earning curve
• A low-cost leader is able to use its cost advantage to
charge lower prices or to enjoy higher profit margins
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11. Differentiation
• Strategies dependent on differentiation are designed to
appeal to customers with a special sensitivity for a
particular product attribute
• By stressing the attribute above other product qualities,
the firm attempts to build customer loyalty
• Often such loyalty translates into a firm’s ability to charge
a premium price for its product
• The product attribute also can be the marketing channels
through which it is delivered, its image for excellence,
the features it includes, and its service network
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12. Focus
• A focus strategy, whether anchored in a low-cost base or a
differentiation base, attempts to attend to the needs of a
particular market segment
• A firm pursuing a focus strategy is willing to service isolated
geographic areas; to satisfy the needs of customers with
special financing, inventory, or servicing problems; or to
tailor the product to the somewhat unique demands of the
small- to medium-sized customer
• The focusing firms profit from their willingness to serve
otherwise ignored or underappreciated customer segments
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13. The Value Disciplines
• Operational Excellence
• This strategy attempts to lead the industry in price and
convenience by pursuing a focus on lean and efficient
operations
• Customer Intimacy
• Customer intimacy means continually tailoring and shaping
products and services to fit an increasingly refined
definition of the customer
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14. The Value Disciplines (contd.)
• Product Leadership
• Companies that pursue the discipline of product
leadership strive to produce a continuous state of
state-of-the-art products and services
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15. Grand Strategies
• Grand strategy
• A master long-term plan that provides basic
direction for major actions for achieving long-
term business objectives
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16. Grand Strategies (contd.)
• Indicate the time period over which long-range
objectives are to be achieved
• Any one of these strategies could serve as the basis
for achieving the major long-term objectives of a
single firm
• Firms involved with multiple industries, businesses,
product lines, or customer groups usually combine
several grand strategies
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17. Concentrated Growth
• Concentrated growth is the strategy of the firm that
directs its resources to the profitable growth of a
dominant product, in a dominant market, with a
dominant technology
• Concentrated growth strategies lead to enhanced
performance
• Specific conditions favor concentrated growth
• The risks and rewards vary
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19. Market Development
• Market development commonly ranks second only
to concentration as the least costly and least risky of
the 15 grand strategies
• It consists of marketing present products, often with
only cosmetic modifications, to customers in related
market areas by adding channels of distribution or
by changing the content of advertising or promotion
• Frequently, changes in media selection, promotional
appeals, and distribution are used to initiate this
approach
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21. Product Development
• Product development involves the
substantial modification of existing
products or the creation of new but
related products that can be
marketed to current customers
through established channels
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23. Innovation
• These companies seek to reap the initially high profits
associated with customer acceptance of a new or
greatly improved product
• Then, rather than face stiffening competition as the
basis of profitability shifts from innovation to
production or marketing competence, they search for
other original or novel ideas
• The underlying rationale of the grand strategy of
innovation is to create a new product life cycle and
thereby make similar existing products obsolete
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24. Horizontal Acquisition
• When a firm’s long-term strategy is based on
growth through the acquisition of one or more
similar firms operating at the same stage of the
production-marketing chain, its grand strategy is
called horizontal acquisition
• Such acquisitions eliminate competitors and
provide the acquiring firm with access to new
markets
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25. Vertical Acquisition
• When a firm’s grand strategy is to acquire firms
that supply it with inputs (such as raw materials)
or are customers for its outputs (such as
warehouses for finished products), vertical
acquisition is involved
• The main reason for backward vertical
acquisition is the desire to increase the
dependability of the supply or quality of the raw
materials used as production inputs
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26. Concentric Diversification
• Concentric diversification involves the acquisition
of businesses that are related to the acquiring firm
in terms of technology, markets, or products
• With this grand strategy, the selected new
businesses possess a high degree of compatibility
with the firm’s current businesses
• The ideal concentric diversification occurs when
the combined company profits increase the
strengths and opportunities and decrease the
weaknesses and exposure to risk
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27. Conglomerate Diversification
• Occasionally a firm, particularly a very large one,
plans acquire a business because it represents the
most promising investment opportunity available.
This grand strategy is commonly known as
conglomerate diversification.
• The principal concern of the acquiring firm is the
profit pattern of the venture
• Unlike concentric diversification, conglomerate
diversification gives little concern to creating
product-market synergy with existing businesses
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28. Turnaround
The firm finds itself with declining profits
• Among the reasons are economic recessions,
production inefficiencies, and innovative
breakthroughs by competitors
• Strategic managers often believe the firm can survive
and eventually recover if a concerted effort is made
over a period of a few years to fortify its distinctive
competences. This is turnaround.
• Two forms of retrenchment:
Cost reduction
Asset reduction
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29. Elements of Turnaround
• A turnaround situation represents absolute and relative-to-
industry declining performance of a sufficient magnitude to
warrant explicit turnaround actions
• The immediacy of the resulting threat to company survival is
known as situation severity
• Turnaround responses among successful firms typically
include two stages of strategic activities: retrenchment and
the recovery response
• The primary causes of the turnaround situation have been
associated with the second phase of the turnaround
process, the recovery response
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30. Divestiture
• A divestiture strategy involves the sale of a firm or
a major component of a firm
• When retrenchment fails to accomplish the desired
turnaround, or when a nonintegrated business
activity achieves an unusually high market value,
strategic managers often decide to sell the firm
• Reasons for divestiture vary
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31. Liquidation
• When liquidation is the grand strategy, the firm
typically is sold in parts, only occasionally as a
whole—but for its tangible asset value and not
as a going concern
• Planned liquidation can be worthwhile
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32. Bankruptcy
• Liquidation bankruptcy—agreeing to a
complete distribution of firm assets to
creditors, most of whom receive a small
fraction of the amount they are owed
• Reorganization bankruptcy—the managers
believe the firm can remain viable through
reorganization
• Two notable types of bankruptcy
– Chapter 7
– Chapter 11
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33. Joint Ventures
• Occasionally two or more capable firms lack a
necessary component for success in a particular
competitive environment
• The solution is a set of joint ventures, which are
commercial companies (children) created and
operated for the benefit of the co-owners
(parents)
• The joint venture extends the supplier-consumer
relationship and has strategic advantages for both
partners
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34. Strategic Alliances
• Strategic alliances are distinguished from joint
ventures because the companies involved do not
take an equity position in one another
• In some instances, strategic alliances are
synonymous with licensing agreements
• Outsourcing arrangements vary
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35. Consortia, Keiretsus, and Chaebols
• Consortia are defined as large interlocking
relationships between businesses of an industry
• In Japan such consortia are known as keiretsus, in
South Korea as chaebols
• Their cooperative nature is growing in evidence as
is their market success
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36. Selection of Long-Term Objectives and Grand Strategy Sets
• When strategic planners study their opportunities,
they try to determine which are most likely to
result in achieving various long-range objectives
• Almost simultaneously, they try to forecast
whether an available grand strategy can take
advantage of preferred opportunities so the
tentative objectives can be met
• In essence, then, three distinct but highly
interdependent choices are being made at one
time
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37. Sequence of Selection and Strategy Objectives
• The selection of long-range objectives and grand
strategies involves simultaneous, rather than
sequential, decisions
• While it is true that objectives are needed to
prevent the firm’s direction and progress from
being determined by random forces, it is equally
true that objectives can be achieved only if
strategies are implemented
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38. Business Model
• A clear understanding of how the firm will
generate profits and the strategic actions it
must take to succeed over the long term.
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