Strategy Formulation Formulating a Strategy in a 21st Century Creative Company e-Types
Business Environment - PEST Macro environmental factors in the world of digital design and marketing – looking at the market potential for digital marketing.
Political No political restraints in most countries – some countries can have limitations in the freedom to design freely.
Economic There is a tendency that resources are spend on differentiation marketing strategies in the world of digital design in the companies that wants to make themselves a known brand. More and more marketing will be based on digital design strategies, hence bigger markets.
Social With more young people attaining more spending power, a broader costumer base on the digital media is attained. This entails a higher potential for profit in the digital markets.
Technological Technology is available everywhere, and the internet is always accessible through a Smartphone, computer or tablet.
Porters Five Forces Competitor analysis within the industry of digital design and marketing.
Industry rivalry The world of digital design is steadily growing. More and more companies are able to do digital design to a certain extend to a low cost.
Threats of new entrants Freeware is available for all who is interested in doing digital design. This entails that there is a potential for very high competitiveness within this market.
Power of suppliers This is a world where suppliers does not have much influence. If a supplier of software raises its prices, it is somewhat easy to change to different design platform.
Power of buyers Since there is a somewhat large competition within this area, the buyer will potentially have the possibility to substitute its supplier to an alternative if the work is not of a sufficient quality or the cost is too high.
Threads of substitutes Substitutes in this way could be alternative ways to do the marketing, or not doing it at all. These solutions could be solutions of choice for some, instead of investing a big amount of money in buying help from consultant companies like e-Types.
SWOT Analysis Strengths • Highly skilled employees. • Highly motivated by assignments that demands the best from you. • Funding is in place – no need to panic about funding. • Strong reputation in the industry.
Weaknesses • Not motivated by doing standard assignments. • Hard to get into the core thinking out of other cultures than the native culture when taking the deep dives into the costumer company culture.
Opportunities • A big market for differentiated design. • Growing market for companies who wants to make differentiated/exclusive brands compared to its competitors.
Threats • If complexity gets too low, there will be a lot of competition from a big group of companies. • Reputation will be lowered by a few poor assignments. • Competition from companies with a lower cost.
Conclusions and learning's from the SWOT Analysis: The strength within e-Types are its intangible and human resources which creates the value for the company and yields its strong reputation in the industry. Due to the opportunities that lies within a growing market of companies that wants differentiated brands, it is suggested that e-Types should go for a SO-strategy.
Competitive Advantage For sustaining a competitive advantage, e-Types must formulate a strategy where the points below are utilized:
Durability Work of a high quality where focus is on a differentiated product, smashing the world of design, compared to the competitors.
Transferability Having focus on the costumers, where the goal is to deliver an end result the costumer wasn't even aware of, would be a very hard advantage to copy – making the transferability very hard.
Replicate If competitors should replicate this type of strategy, they would have to start from the beginning and gain experience the hard way. This type of work is already in the e-Types DNA.
Proposed strategy
Matching the firms resources with opportunities and threat gives rise to a long term strategy to secure a status as a company following a differentiation strategy where the focus should be narrowed into the markets where a big impact can be left and it is allowed to dig deep into the soul of companies to create an identity the company not even could have foreseen themselves. Having this focus will keep the human resources motivated and give them continuous learning's and challenges together with maintaining the e-Types brand value as a high quality digital design company.