What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
Leadership & Managing People
Strategy / MBA Resources
Case Study SWOT Analysis Solution
Case Study Description of What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand
South Korea was first introduced to luxury brands in the 1990s. Since then, a great interest in luxury products, or myungpoom, and foreign products, called waejae, has developed. Despite the strong preference for fashion products from the United States and Europe, Sang A, a brand founded by a woman born and raised in Korea, is recognized as a myungpoom in Korea. This new luxury brand is also known for its designer handbags in the United States and is quite successful in both countries. In a comparative study of Sang A and the internationally well-known luxury brand Jimmy Choo using literary research, Internet research, field research, and interviews with Sang A bag consumers, I identified several key elements of success for the two brands: niche market targeting, storytelling, a 'hungry attitude,' high prices but accessible discounts, thorough management of distribution channels, and image-making through star power. This article implicates that Korean consumers have complex desires that go beyond simply wanting foreign goods.
Swot Analysis of "What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand" written by Judy Park includes – strengths weakness that are internal strategic factors of the organization, and opportunities and threats that Sang Luxury facing as an external strategic factors. Some of the topics covered in What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand case study are - Strategic Management Strategies, Product development, Project management, Social platforms and Leadership & Managing People.
Some of the macro environment factors that can be used to understand the What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand casestudy better are - – there is increasing trade war between United States & China, banking and financial system is disrupted by Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models, digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google, increasing commodity prices, increasing household debt because of falling income levels, central banks are concerned over increasing inflation,
technology disruption, increasing transportation and logistics costs, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University , we believe that protagonist in What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand case study can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Sang Luxury, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Sang Luxury 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 What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning using facts provided in What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand case study
2. Improving business portfolio management of Sang Luxury
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Leadership & Managing People field.
4. Making a Leadership & Managing People topic specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Sang Luxury
Strengths What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Sang Luxury in What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand Harvard Business Review case study are -
Successful track record of launching new products
– Sang Luxury has launched numerous new products in last few years, keeping in mind evolving customer preferences and competitive pressures. Sang Luxury has effective processes in place that helps in exploring new product needs, doing quick pilot testing, and then launching the products quickly using its extensive distribution network.
Analytics focus
– Sang Luxury is putting a lot of focus on utilizing the power of analytics in business decision making. This has put it among the leading players in the industry. The technology infrastructure suggested by Judy Park can also help it to harness the power of analytics for – marketing optimization, demand forecasting, customer relationship management, inventory management, information sharing across the value chain etc.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Sang Luxury in the segment is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Sang Luxury has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in, as mentioned in case study What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand - staying ahead in the industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Sang Luxury 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 What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand HBR case study have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Training and development
– Sang Luxury has one of the best training and development program in the industry. The effectiveness of the training programs can be measured in What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand 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.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Sang Luxury in the sector have low bargaining power. What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Sang Luxury to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Strong track record of project management
– Sang Luxury is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Organizational Resilience of Sang Luxury
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing that Sang Luxury does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
High brand equity
– Sang Luxury has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Sang Luxury to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy in the What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand 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
– Sang Luxury is present in almost all the verticals within the industry. This has provided firm in What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand 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.
Weaknesses What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand are -
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, firm in the HBR case study What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand has high operating costs in the. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Sang Luxury 's lucrative customers.
Ability to respond to the competition
– As the decision making is very deliberative, highlighted in the case study What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand, in the dynamic environment Sang Luxury has struggled to respond to the nimble upstart competition. Sang Luxury has reasonably good record with similar level competitors but it has struggled with new entrants taking away niches of its business.
Employees’ incomplete understanding of strategy
– From the instances in the HBR case study What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand, it seems that the employees of Sang Luxury don’t have comprehensive understanding of the firm’s strategy. This is reflected in number of promotional campaigns over the last few years that had mixed messaging and competing priorities. Some of the strategic activities and services promoted in the promotional campaigns were not consistent with the organization’s strategy.
No frontier risks strategy
– After analyzing the HBR case study What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand, it seems that company is thinking about the frontier risks that can impact Leadership & Managing People 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.
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Sang Luxury has not been able to do capital spending to the tune of the competition. This has resulted into fewer innovations and company facing stiff competition from both existing competitors and new entrants who are disrupting the industry using digital technology.
High bargaining power of channel partners
– Because of the regulatory requirements, Judy Park suggests that, Sang Luxury is facing high bargaining power of the channel partners. So far it has not able to streamline the operations to reduce the bargaining power of the value chain partners in the industry.
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Sang Luxury is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication mentioned in marketing section of case study What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand can help to provide better information regarding products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
Aligning sales with marketing
– It come across in the case study What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand that the firm needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department in the case What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Sang Luxury is planning to shift buying processes online.
High cash cycle compare to competitors
Sang Luxury 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.
Products dominated business model
– Even though Sang Luxury 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 - What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand should strive to include more intangible value offerings along with its core products and services.
Skills based hiring
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Sang Luxury has created an environment where the organization is dominated by functional specialists rather than management generalist. This has resulted into product oriented approach rather than marketing oriented approach or consumers oriented approach.
Opportunities What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand | 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 What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand are -
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Sang Luxury can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Sang Luxury 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.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– Consumer behavior has changed in the Leadership & Managing People industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Sang Luxury 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. Sang Luxury 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 Sang Luxury in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Leadership & Managing People segment, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Loyalty marketing
– Sang Luxury 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.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Sang Luxury can make experimentation a productive activity and build a culture of innovation using approaches such as – mining transaction data, A/B testing of websites and selling platforms, engaging potential customers over various needs, and building on small ideas in the Leadership & Managing People segment.
Buying journey improvements
– Sang Luxury can improve the customer journey of consumers in the industry by using analytics and artificial intelligence. What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand 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.
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. Sang Luxury can explore opportunities that can attract volunteers and are consistent with its mission and vision.
Finding new ways to collaborate
– Covid-19 has not only transformed business models of companies in Leadership & Managing People industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. Sang Luxury can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Manufacturing automation
– Sang Luxury can use the latest technology developments to improve its manufacturing and designing process in Leadership & Managing People segment. It can use CAD and 3D printing to build a quick prototype and pilot testing products. It can leverage automation using machine learning and artificial intelligence to do faster production at lowers costs, and it can leverage the growth in satellite and tracking technologies to improve inventory management, transportation, and shipping.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help Sang Luxury to increase its market reach. Sang Luxury will be able to reach out to new customers. Secondly 5G will also provide technology framework to build new tools and products that can help more immersive consumer experience and faster consumer journey.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Sang Luxury to expand its talent hiring zone. According to McKinsey Global Institute, 20% of the high end workforce in fields such as finance, information technology, can continously work from remote local post Covid-19. This presents a really great opportunity for Sang Luxury to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Sang Luxury 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, What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand, to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Threats What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats mentioned in the HBR case study What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand are -
Regulatory challenges
– Sang Luxury 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 Leadership & Managing People industry regulations.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, as highlighted in case study What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand, Sang Luxury may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Leadership & Managing People .
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Leadership & Managing People field will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Sang Luxury can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
Capital market disruption
– During the Covid-19, Dow Jones has touched record high. The valuations of a number of companies are way beyond their existing business model potential. This can lead to capital market correction which can put a number of suppliers, collaborators, value chain partners in great financial difficulty. It will directly impact the business of Sang Luxury.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry in the industry are lowering. It can presents Sang Luxury with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the sector.
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.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Sang Luxury 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 What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand .
Environmental challenges
– Sang Luxury needs to have a robust strategy against the disruptions arising from climate change and energy requirements. EU has identified it as key priority area and spending 30% of its 880 billion Euros European post Covid-19 recovery funds on green technology. Sang Luxury can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Leadership & Managing People industry.
Stagnating economy with rate increase
– Sang Luxury can face lack of demand in the market place because of Fed actions to reduce inflation. This can lead to sluggish growth in the economy, lower demands, lower investments, higher borrowing costs, and consolidation in the field.
Increasing wage structure of Sang Luxury
– Post Covid-19 there is a sharp increase in the wages especially in the jobs that require interaction with people. The increasing wages can put downward pressure on the margins of Sang Luxury.
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Sang Luxury is facing in Leadership & Managing People sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
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. Sang Luxury needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Leadership & Managing People industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
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 Sang Luxury in the Leadership & Managing People sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand 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 What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand 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 What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand 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 What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand 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 What Women Want: Creation of A Luxury Brand 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 Sang Luxury needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.
