Strategic management: Mercator Dolenjska

Résumé du document

In this case study for strategic management, we will analyse the company Mercator Dolenjska. The reason we do that is to look how the future of the company could look like, taking into account its advantages and disadvantages. For that we made an analysis of the company, it's internal and external environment. In order to make a logical and detailed business strategy we made a SWOT analysis and via the outcome of this test we tried to find this optimal business strategy. The first part of the paper will handle about the analysis of the external environment. The main purpose here is to make clear the economic, political, social and demographic. It is just a general summary of related information about Slovenia. The second part is a more specific analysis of the external environment of Mercator Dolenjska. It this part we explained the relation between the company and customers, suppliers and competitors. In this part we will also check how big the thread is of new competitors. The third part is all about the internal environment. We will analyse here the financial aspect and the advantages and disadvantages of their products, services, technologies, personnel and organisational structure. The fourth part summarises the whole paper in the SWOT analysis. Per part we look for the most important aspects for the company, together with some comments to see how we can improve it. Than finally the last part is the conclusion of the whole SWOT analysis, in which we look for the vision, mission, goals and strategy.

Extraits

[...] Bargaining power of customers The retail market in Slovenia is very competitive and it's a market, witch is in a concentration process. The customers want better and better products, and better and services for lower prices. It's easy to switch a retailer, at least in the most places were a lot of retailers are. To fight against that, Mercator (and Mercator Dolenjska as a part of it) tries to develop and upgrade their customer loyalty system. This system tries to get information of the customer behaviour to help the company to identify and improve their needs. [...]

[...] At the other hand it will be very important not to have to many shops in the same neighbourhood because otherwise they will not all be profitable anymore, as we are also experiencing now sometimes. As mentionned in the SWOT analysis, the product variety is really an advantage for Mercator Dolenjska. They have a big range of products, although most of the shops are rather small. So they could attract many people, thanks to this variety, and still keep their local atmosphere. Also Marketing, which is, according to the survey, not doing bad at all, can help to make people familiar with this differentiation of products. [...]

[...] This means that people will get a bigger purchasing power. A bigger purchasing power will result in new potential customers. This will also lead to a clear industry growth of the retail sector. Every company wants to enlarge its market share by attracting this new customers and their new purchasing power. It will be difficult to gain some extra market share through price reduction, although it is still an often-used trick, via rebates, because there is not such a big spread and the other retail market player will definitely follow. [...]

[...] The profitability of the different groups switches all the time, because of different height of the discounts Mercatore Doenjska give to there customers, but in average we can say the increase in the value of sale ranges from 10% to 22%. The services of Mercator Dolenjska are less competitive in comparison the services of there competitors. To make the service better and to increase the customer loyalty it would be possible to offer higher rebates, more convenient terms of payment or bigger discounts on immediate payment. The lack of service is also a key reason for the bad performance of Mercator Dolenjska in the year 2002. [...]

[...] In order to make people more familiar with this kind of working style, Mercator Dolenjska should start an internal campaign in favour of this flexible work. It can do this with arguments as for example the fact that a good working company give more job security, the fact that flexible hours are very effective if you have a family, difficlut hours give better wages. The more flexible ways of payment can be something like: discount food cheques to consume in a Mercator shop, extra assurance, pension Conclusion As one can see, there is still a future for Mercator Dolenjska. [...]