M&S Striving For Competitive Advantage
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Introduction
A firms strategy is said to be its long-term objectives or its direction in its quest to gain and sustain competitive advantage over its rivals.
In this race to achieve competitive advantage, a firm must ask itself 3 questions, what forms of value do we seek to create? How do we create this value? And how is the value creation process organised or managed?
I have chosen to research the food department of Marks & Spencer in order to gain an insight into what strategies they use in an attempt to gain competitive advantage.
Marks & Spencer have outlined the following as their core values
Quality
Value
Service
Innovation and
Trust
As a company it is vital that they keep in mind these core values when they are deciding which strategies to employ.
To begin I will carry out a SWOT analysis, as this is a useful analytical tool in giving us a good idea of which strategies they may decide to use. Once the strategies have been identified, an in depth look into each will show why M&S use such strategies as well how they give M&S the competitive advantage they need to succeed.
SWOT Analysis
By looking at Marks & Spencers food department in this way, we can begin to craft out different kinds of strategy that they use in order to gain competitive advantage.
The strategies employed will be born from the strengths and opportunities that the food department possess and used to combat the weaknesses and threats that the food department see as factors that could disrupt progress.
The basis for the strategies that M&S food department use takes an almost top-to-bottom approach. It begins with an issue that M&S as a company take very seriously, and that is Corporate Social Responsibility. A second strategy that links into CSR is supply chain management, and the way that M&S food products are sourced and how they eventually arrive on the shop floor shelves.
Following on from this issue I will continue to look at how M&S use innovation and product differentiation in order to gain competitive advantage, and lastly how M&S have looked to manage their property portfolio in an attempt to reach out further to their customers.
I will now look at how Corporate Social Responsibility is used by M&S food in an attempt to gain competitive advantage.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Whilst some organisations see such an activity as an unwanted cost, M&S have pioneered the use of Corporate Social Responsibility and turned it into an opportunity to gain competitive advantage.
In todays society, the consumer has a lot of power, especially in an industry such as retail and specifically here with supermarkets, therefore simply being able to provide a product of either superior quality or low cost might not always be enough. It is the companies overall appearance that is also important and the way that they go about their business that can have a huge affect on sales as well as consumer perceptions.
In some cases, companies that have not always taken such a socially responsible stance have suffered and have been shown up by organisations such as Greenpeace and such an impact that these protests can have that in some cases consumer boycotts can occur and the business in question can get into real trouble.
In a recent survey, 97% of customers claimed that they thought Corporate Social Responsibility was important (Marks & Spencer Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2006). Taking note from this, Marks & Spencer have taken the lead in the UK and become one of the most socially responsible companies around.
In 2006, a year of significant achievements, a number of initiatives stood out. M&S became the only major retailer to sell only fair trade coffee both in their in store cafes and in their food halls.
Healthy eating is becoming increasingly important to M&S customers also. The “eat well” sunflower now makes up 20% of the entire food catalogue. Also in 2006, M&S became the first UK retailer to commit to removing hydrogenated fats from virtually all foods and are on target to meet governments quotas on salt reducing levels. Also in 2006, M&S were awarded with the prestigious honour of being crowned “Company of the Year” at the Business in the Communitys award for excellence.
As indicated earlier in the passage, 97% of customers felt that CSR was important in companys activities today. As part of my research I carried out a survey on 100 random consumers on there thoughts on which of the 6 major supermarkets was first of all the most socially responsible and secondly in terms of there overall quality. The results were conclusive in the fact that it appears Marks & Spencer are seen as more socially responsible than their competitors at the same time as having superior quality and thus gaining a competitive advantage.
As these results show, M&S as well as having a good sense of corporate social responsibility also seem to possess higher quality products than its rivals and as the next passage describes there could well be a theoretical link explaining this.
As Luo and Bhattacharya (2006) show in the diagram opposite, as M&S engineer there CSR strategies, which include encouraging consumers to eat more healthy products, sourcing from sustainable environments and selling fair-trade products, this can in turn lead to customer satisfaction as the survey results concluded and thus can have a positive impact on the market value of M&S products which was evident in the survey results also.
Attempting to foster good