Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Marani Brands Inc is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings, increasing commodity prices, challanges to central banks by blockchain based private currencies, geopolitical disruptions, there is backlash against globalization, increasing household debt because of falling income levels, wage bills are increasing,
digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic , etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Marani Brands Inc
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Marani Brands Inc can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Marani Brands Inc, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Marani Brands Inc 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 Marani Brands Inc can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Marani Brands Inc
2. Improving business portfolio management of Marani Brands Inc
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in United States
4. Making a Beverages (Alcoholic) sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Marani Brands Inc
Strengths of Marani Brands Inc | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Marani Brands Inc are -
Learning organization
- Marani Brands Inc 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 Marani Brands Inc is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Marani Brands Inc emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Innovation driven organization
– Marani Brands Inc is one of the most innovative firm in Beverages (Alcoholic) sector.
High brand equity
– Marani Brands Inc has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Marani Brands Inc to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Marani Brands Inc 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.
Training and development
– Marani Brands Inc has one of the best training and development program in Consumer/Non-Cyclical industry. The effectiveness of the training programs can be measured in – employees retention, in-house promotion, loyalty, new venture initiation, lack of conflict, and high level of both employees and customer engagement.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy of Marani Brands Inc comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the Beverages (Alcoholic) 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.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Marani Brands Inc has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Marani Brands Inc staying ahead in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Organizational Resilience of Marani Brands Inc
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing Marani Brands Inc does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Strong track record of project management in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry
– Marani Brands Inc is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Marani Brands Inc has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Beverages (Alcoholic) industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Marani Brands Inc have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Marani Brands Inc in the Consumer/Non-Cyclical sector have low bargaining power. Marani Brands Inc has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Marani Brands Inc to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Ability to recruit top talent
– Marani Brands Inc is one of the leading players in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry in United States. It is in a position to attract the best talent available in United States. The firm has a robust talent identification program that helps in identifying the brightest.
Weaknesses of Marani Brands Inc | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Marani Brands Inc are -
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, Marani Brands Inc has high operating costs in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Marani Brands Inc lucrative customers.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Marani Brands Inc is one of the leading players in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry in last five years.
High bargaining power of channel partners in Beverages (Alcoholic) industry
– because of the regulatory requirements in United States, Marani Brands Inc 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 Beverages (Alcoholic) industry.
Employees’ less understanding of Marani Brands Inc strategy
– From the outside it seems that the employees of Marani Brands Inc 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.
Skills based hiring in Beverages (Alcoholic) industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Marani Brands Inc 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.
Need for greater diversity
– Marani Brands Inc 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.
Products dominated business model
– Even though Marani Brands Inc has some of the most successful models in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry, this business model has made each new product launch extremely critical for continuous financial growth of the organization. Marani Brands Inc should strive to include more intangible value offerings along with its core products and services.
Slow decision making process
– As mentioned earlier in the report, Marani Brands Inc has a very deliberative decision making approach. This approach has resulted in prudent decisions, but it has also resulted in missing opportunities in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry over the last five years. Marani Brands Inc 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.
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Marani Brands Inc 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 Beverages (Alcoholic) industry using digital technology.
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Marani Brands Inc is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication can help Marani Brands Inc to provide better information regarding Beverages (Alcoholic) products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
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 Marani Brands Inc supply chain. Even after few cautionary changes, Marani Brands Inc is still heavily dependent upon the existing supply chain. The existing supply chain though brings in cost efficiencies but it has left Marani Brands Inc vulnerable to further global disruptions in South East Asia.
Marani Brands Inc Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Marani Brands Inc are -
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Marani Brands Inc 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 Marani Brands Inc 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, Marani Brands Inc 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 Marani Brands Inc to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Marani Brands Inc 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.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Marani Brands Inc 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.
Developing new processes and practices
– Marani Brands Inc can develop new processes and procedures in Beverages (Alcoholic) 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.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Marani Brands Inc has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in Beverages (Alcoholic) sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Marani Brands Inc to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Marani Brands Inc to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Marani Brands Inc in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Loyalty marketing
– Marani Brands Inc 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 Marani Brands Inc 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 Beverages (Alcoholic) industry.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Marani Brands Inc can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Marani Brands Inc has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in Beverages (Alcoholic) industry. This can help Marani Brands Inc to build a more holistic ecosystem for Marani Brands Inc products in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry by providing – data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Reconfiguring business model
– The expansion of digital payment system, the bringing down of international transactions costs using Bitcoin and other blockchain based currencies, etc can help Marani Brands Inc to reconfigure its entire business model. For example it can used blockchain based technologies to reduce piracy of its products in the big markets such as China. Secondly it can use the popularity of e-commerce in various developing markets to build a Direct to Customer business model rather than the current Channel Heavy distribution network.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help Marani Brands Inc to increase its market reach. Marani Brands Inc 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.
Threats Marani Brands Inc External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Marani Brands Inc are -
Regulatory challenges
– Marani Brands Inc 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 Beverages (Alcoholic) 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.
Increasing wage structure of Marani Brands Inc
– 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 Marani Brands Inc.
Consumer confidence and its impact on Marani Brands Inc 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 Beverages (Alcoholic) industry and other sectors.
Instability in the European markets
– European Union markets are facing three big challenges post Covid – expanded balance sheets, Brexit related business disruption, and aggressive Russia looking to distract the existing security mechanism. Marani Brands Inc will face different problems in different parts of Europe. For example it will face inflationary pressures in UK, France, and Germany, balance sheet expansion and demand challenges in Southern European countries, and geopolitical instability in the Eastern Europe.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to Beverages (Alcoholic) industry are lowering. It can presents Marani Brands Inc with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the Beverages (Alcoholic) sector.
Environmental challenges
– Marani Brands Inc 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. Marani Brands Inc can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Marani Brands Inc in Beverages (Alcoholic) industry. The Beverages (Alcoholic) 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.
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. Marani Brands Inc needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Marani Brands Inc may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Beverages (Alcoholic) sector.
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 Marani Brands Inc business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Marani Brands Inc has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Beverages (Alcoholic) industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Marani Brands Inc needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Beverages (Alcoholic) 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.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Beverages (Alcoholic) industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Marani Brands Inc can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Marani Brands Inc Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Marani Brands Inc 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 Marani Brands Inc 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 Marani Brands Inc 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 Marani Brands Inc 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 Marani Brands Inc needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.
