Business Strategy

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Business Strategy - Activity

Image: The Royal Mail has been around a long time but what does the future hold for the business? Copyright: Craig Young, stock.xchng.

The aim of this Activity is to investigate one business and to try to analyse its current position, as well as suggest some future strategic direction that the company could take.

In following through the Activity, you should try to utilise the various methods at your disposal for carrying out the analysis - it could, for example, be a SWOT and PEST analysis or you could choose to analyse the company's current mission statement and corporate culture. Alternatively, you could use Porter's Five Forces analysis. If you want to remind yourself about any of these ideas, look back at the PowerPoint Presentation [319 KB](http://www.bized.co.uk/educators/16-19/business/strategy/presentation/busstrategy.ppt).

Your report should try to identify what the main trends in the market seem to be and the ability of the company to respond to the potential opportunities that may arise in the future.

There are a number of key businesses for which there should be plenty of information to help in your analysis. The following are merely suggestions and you can choose one of your own.

British Airways
Marks & Spencer
Royal Mail
Vodafone
Shell
Boots
WH Smith
MG Rover

Each of the above has had their recent troubles and challenges and so would be interesting cases to study.

Key issues to think about will be:

What is their current market position?
Who are their key target markets?
Who is their main competition?
What are the external factors that have impacted and will continue to impact on the business in the future?
What image have they managed to cultivate? (It may not be a good image!)
What key trends are going to affect the business in the coming years?
Will the business still be in existence in ten years time? If so, in what form?

Related Web sites for Research

The following Web sites will help you to gain useful information about the businesses highlighted above:

BBC business (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/)
The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk)
The Financial Times (http://news.ft.com/home/uk)
The Economist (http://www.economist.com)
Ananova news (http://www.ananova.com)
Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/regions/uk.html)

In each case, use the site search engine to help find the information you require.