Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
Strategy & Execution
Strategy / MBA Resources
Case Study SWOT Analysis Solution
Case Study Description of Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza
For the last 24 years Nouveau Event Planning has been operating the largest wedding expo in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, an event called the Wedding Extravaganza. In 2001 the Wedding Odyssey became the second Wedding Expo in Windsor, and started to pose a significant threat to the Wedding Extravaganza. Some strategic decisions in the case include pricing, customer retention, and selection of an appropriate target market. Students are asked to determine the best course of action for the exhibition through analysis of the competitive landscape and future potential of the wedding industry.
Swot Analysis of "Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza" written by Neil Bendle, Rocky Campana includes – strengths weakness that are internal strategic factors of the organization, and opportunities and threats that Wedding Extravaganza facing as an external strategic factors. Some of the topics covered in Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza case study are - Strategic Management Strategies, Market research and Strategy & Execution.
Some of the macro environment factors that can be used to understand the Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza casestudy better are - – cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic , central banks are concerned over increasing inflation, increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings, there is increasing trade war between United States & China, technology disruption, increasing energy prices,
increasing transportation and logistics costs, competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University , we believe that protagonist in Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza case study can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Wedding Extravaganza, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Wedding Extravaganza operates in.
According to Harvard Business Review, 75% of the managers use SWOT analysis for various purposes such as – evaluating current scenario, strategic planning, new venture feasibility, personal growth goals, new market entry, Go To market strategies, portfolio management and strategic trade-off assessment, organizational restructuring, etc.
SWOT Objectives / Importance of SWOT Analysis and SWOT Matrix
SWOT analysis of Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning using facts provided in Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza case study
2. Improving business portfolio management of Wedding Extravaganza
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Strategy & Execution field.
4. Making a Strategy & Execution topic specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Wedding Extravaganza
Strengths Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Wedding Extravaganza in Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza Harvard Business Review case study are -
Strong track record of project management
– Wedding Extravaganza is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy in the Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza Harvard Business Review case study comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the industry, building diversified operations across different geographies so that disruption in one part of the world doesn’t impact the overall performance of the firm, and integrating the various business operations and processes through its digital transformation drive.
Diverse revenue streams
– Wedding Extravaganza is present in almost all the verticals within the industry. This has provided firm in Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza case study a diverse revenue stream that has helped it to survive disruptions such as global pandemic in Covid-19, financial disruption of 2008, and supply chain disruption of 2021.
Digital Transformation in Strategy & Execution segment
- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Wedding Extravaganza digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Wedding Extravaganza has successfully integrated the four key components of digital transformation – digital integration in processes, digital integration in marketing and customer relationship management, digital integration into the value chain, and using technology to explore new products and market opportunities.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Wedding Extravaganza in the segment is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Wedding Extravaganza has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive segment. Secondly the value chain collaborators of the firm in Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza HBR case study have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Wedding Extravaganza are driving operational speed, building greater agility, and keeping the organization nimble to compete with new competitors. It helps are organization to ideate new ideas, and execute them swiftly in the marketplace.
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Wedding Extravaganza has built up over years in its products and services combo offer has resulted in high retention of customers, lower marketing costs, and greater ability of the firm to focus on its customers.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Wedding Extravaganza in the sector have low bargaining power. Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Wedding Extravaganza to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Organizational Resilience of Wedding Extravaganza
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing that Wedding Extravaganza does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Training and development
– Wedding Extravaganza has one of the best training and development program in the industry. The effectiveness of the training programs can be measured in Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza Harvard Business Review case study by analyzing – employees retention, in-house promotion, loyalty, new venture initiation, lack of conflict, and high level of both employees and customer engagement.
Learning organization
- Wedding Extravaganza is a learning organization. It has inculcated three key characters of learning organization in its processes and operations – exploration, creativity, and expansiveness. The work place at Wedding Extravaganza is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders in Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza Harvard Business Review case study emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Weaknesses Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza are -
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of Wedding Extravaganza, firm in the HBR case study Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Slow decision making process
– As mentioned earlier in the report, Wedding Extravaganza has a very deliberative decision making approach. This approach has resulted in prudent decisions, but it has also resulted in missing opportunities in the industry over the last five years. Wedding Extravaganza even though has strong showing on digital transformation primary two stages, it has struggled to capitalize the power of digital transformation in marketing efforts and new venture efforts.
High dependence on existing supply chain
– The disruption in the global supply chains because of the Covid-19 pandemic and blockage of the Suez Canal illustrated the fragile nature of Wedding Extravaganza supply chain. Even after few cautionary changes mentioned in the HBR case study - Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza, it is still heavily dependent upon the existing supply chain. The existing supply chain though brings in cost efficiencies but it has left Wedding Extravaganza vulnerable to further global disruptions in South East Asia.
Need for greater diversity
– Wedding Extravaganza has taken concrete steps on diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the efforts so far has resulted in limited success. It needs to expand the recruitment and selection process to hire more people from the minorities and underprivileged background.
Lack of clear differentiation of Wedding Extravaganza products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Wedding Extravaganza needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Interest costs
– Compare to the competition, Wedding Extravaganza has borrowed money from the capital market at higher rates. It needs to restructure the interest payment and costs so that it can compete better and improve profitability.
Products dominated business model
– Even though Wedding Extravaganza has some of the most successful products in the industry, this business model has made each new product launch extremely critical for continuous financial growth of the organization. firm in the HBR case study - Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza should strive to include more intangible value offerings along with its core products and services.
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Wedding Extravaganza is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication mentioned in marketing section of case study Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza can help to provide better information regarding products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
High dependence on star products
– The top 2 products and services of the firm as mentioned in the Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza HBR case study still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Wedding Extravaganza has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
No frontier risks strategy
– After analyzing the HBR case study Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza, it seems that company is thinking about the frontier risks that can impact Strategy & Execution strategy. But it has very little resources allocation to manage the risks emerging from events such as natural disasters, climate change, melting of permafrost, tacking the rise of artificial intelligence, opportunities and threats emerging from commercialization of space etc.
High cash cycle compare to competitors
Wedding Extravaganza has a high cash cycle compare to other players in the industry. It needs to shorten the cash cycle by 12% to be more competitive in the marketplace, reduce inventory costs, and be more profitable.
Opportunities Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities highlighted in the Harvard Business Review case study Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza are -
Loyalty marketing
– Wedding Extravaganza has focused on building a highly responsive customer relationship management platform. This platform is built on in-house data and driven by analytics and artificial intelligence. The customer analytics can help the organization to fine tune its loyalty marketing efforts, increase the wallet share of the organization, reduce wastage on mainstream advertising spending, build better pricing strategies using personalization, etc.
Buying journey improvements
– Wedding Extravaganza can improve the customer journey of consumers in the industry by using analytics and artificial intelligence. Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza suggest that firm can provide automated chats to help consumers solve their own problems, provide online suggestions to get maximum out of the products and services, and help consumers to build a community where they can interact with each other to develop new features and uses.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Wedding Extravaganza is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza case study suggests that firm can utilize new technology to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Wedding Extravaganza to conduct training and development for its employees across the world. This will result in not only reducing the cost of training but also help employees in different part of the world to integrate with the headquarter work culture, ethos, and standards.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Wedding Extravaganza can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Developing new processes and practices
– Wedding Extravaganza can develop new processes and procedures in Strategy & Execution industry using technology such as automation using artificial intelligence, real time transportation and products tracking, 3D modeling for concept development and new products pilot testing etc.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– Consumer behavior has changed in the Strategy & Execution industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Wedding Extravaganza can take advantage of these changes in consumer behavior to build a far more efficient business model. For example consumer regular ordering of products can reduce both last mile delivery costs and market penetration costs. Wedding Extravaganza can further use this consumer data to build better customer loyalty, provide better products and service collection, and improve the value proposition in inflationary times.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Wedding Extravaganza in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Strategy & Execution segment, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Finding new ways to collaborate
– Covid-19 has not only transformed business models of companies in Strategy & Execution industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. Wedding Extravaganza can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Wedding Extravaganza can build a diversified supply chain model across various countries in - South East Asia, India, and other parts of the world. This reconfiguration of global supply chain can help, as suggested in case study, Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza, to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Wedding Extravaganza can leverage digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the production process, customer analytics to get better insights into consumer behavior, realtime digital dashboards to get better sales tracking, logistics and transportation, product tracking, etc.
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Wedding Extravaganza can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Wedding Extravaganza operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in Strategy & Execution sector.
Identify volunteer opportunities
– Covid-19 has impacted working population in two ways – it has led to people soul searching about their professional choices, resulting in mass resignation. Secondly it has encouraged people to do things that they are passionate about. This has opened opportunities for businesses to build volunteer oriented socially driven projects. Wedding Extravaganza can explore opportunities that can attract volunteers and are consistent with its mission and vision.
Threats Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats mentioned in the HBR case study Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza are -
Aging population
– As the populations of most advanced economies are aging, it will lead to high social security costs, higher savings among population, and lower demand for goods and services in the economy. The household savings in US, France, UK, Germany, and Japan are growing faster than predicted because of uncertainty caused by pandemic.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Wedding Extravaganza high dependence on third party suppliers can disrupt its processes and delivery mechanism. For example -the current troubles of car makers because of chip shortage is because the chip companies started producing chips for electronic companies rather than car manufacturers.
Regulatory challenges
– Wedding Extravaganza needs to prepare for regulatory challenges as consumer protection groups and other pressure groups are vigorously advocating for more regulations on big business - to reduce inequality, to create a level playing field, to product data privacy and consumer privacy, to reduce the influence of big money on democratic institutions, etc. This can lead to significant changes in the Strategy & Execution industry regulations.
Technology disruption because of hacks, piracy etc
– The colonial pipeline illustrated, how vulnerable modern organization are to international hackers, miscreants, and disruptors. The cyber security interruption, data leaks, etc can seriously jeopardize the future growth of the organization.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry in the industry are lowering. It can presents Wedding Extravaganza with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the sector.
Consumer confidence and its impact on Wedding Extravaganza demand
– There is a high probability of declining consumer confidence, given – high inflammation rate, rise of gig economy, lower job stability, increasing cost of living, higher interest rates, and aging demography. All the factors contribute to people saving higher rate of their income, resulting in lower consumer demand in the industry and other sectors.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Wedding Extravaganza has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Strategy & Execution industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Wedding Extravaganza needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Strategy & Execution sector. According to Mckinsey study top managers believe that the adoption of technology in operations, communications is 20-25 times faster than what they planned in the beginning of 2019.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Wedding Extravaganza in the Strategy & Execution industry. The Strategy & Execution industry is already at various protected from local competition in China, with the rise of trade war the protection levels may go up. This presents a clear threat of current business model in Chinese market.
Backlash against dominant players
– US Congress and other legislative arms of the government are getting tough on big business especially technology companies. The digital arm of Wedding Extravaganza business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Wedding Extravaganza can face downward pressure on margins from increasing competition from international players. The international players have stable revenue in their home market and can use those resources to penetrate prominent markets illustrated in HBR case study Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza .
High level of anxiety and lack of motivation
– the Great Resignation in United States is the sign of broader dissatisfaction among the workforce in United States. Wedding Extravaganza needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Strategy & Execution industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Strategy & Execution field will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Wedding Extravaganza can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
New competition
– After the dotcom bust of 2001, financial crisis of 2008-09, the business formation in US economy had declined. But in 2020 alone, there are more than 1.5 million new business applications in United States. This can lead to greater competition for Wedding Extravaganza in the Strategy & Execution sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers in the HBR case study Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza needs to zero down on the relative importance of each factor mentioned in the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants.
We can provide the relative importance to each factor by assigning relative weights. Weighted SWOT analysis process is a three stage process –
First stage for doing weighted SWOT analysis of the case study Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza is to rank the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. This will help you to assess the most important strengths and weaknesses of the firm and which one of the strengths and weaknesses mentioned in the initial lists are marginal and can be left out.
Second stage for conducting weighted SWOT analysis of the Harvard case study Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza is to give probabilities to the external strategic factors thus better understanding the opportunities and threats arising out of macro environment changes and developments.
Third stage of constructing weighted SWOT analysis of Nouveau Event Planning: The Wedding Extravaganza is to provide strategic recommendations includes – joining likelihood of external strategic factors such as opportunities and threats to the internal strategic factors – strengths and weaknesses. You should start with external factors as they will provide the direction of the overall industry. Secondly by joining probabilities with internal strategic factors can help the company not only strategic fit but also the most probably strategic trade-off that Wedding Extravaganza needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.