Strategic Management of ASDA

Strategic Marketing of ASDA

Introduction

One of the biggest challenges encountered by organizations today is to properly understand the requirements, needs and concerns of customers, in order to create or generate successful products and services to secure competitve advantage (Mintzberg, & Waters, 1985, pp. 257-273). Strategic management ensures the survival of an organization in the long run. Survival in the long term means that the organization is successful enough to meet its objectives by ensuring that it has a competitive edge over its competitors and is following planned business level strategy (Flavian, Haberberg, & Polo, 2002, pp.125-138).

Business level strategy includes the overall competitive theme chosen by a company to give emphasis to the way it is positioned in the market to gain a competitive advantage and positioning the different strategies that can be used in different environments industrialists (Knight, Pearce, Smith, & Flood, 1999, pp. 445-465). Business level strategy or the strategy of competition is the most important subsystem of corporate strategy. It is a set of integrated and coordinated actions taken to exploit core competencies and gain competitive advantage. Integrated and coordinated actions are taken to exploit core competencies and gain a competitive advantage (Campbell, & Alexander, 2007, pp. 42-51).

Competitive advantages determine success or failure of an organization. It is based on unique resources, capabilities and core competencies. This is possible by the fact that management controls to support activities that lead to a competitive advantage (Knight, Pearce, Smith, & Flood, 1999, pp. 445-465). A organization has a competitive advantage when it has some characteristics that differentiate it from its competitors, which give it the ability to achieve higher yields in a sustainable manner over time. A competitive advantage can be a good image, an additional feature of a product, a prime location or simply a lower price than rivals (Johnson, & Scholes, 1997, pp 29-33).

Discussion

Competitive Strategy of ASDA

Supermarkets associated with retailing in UK are referred as the most competitive markets all around the world. The state of profit margin between companies operating in this industry is very thin, but, requires for their overall progress (Coriat, & Weinstein, 2002, pp. 273-290). The UK market is dominated by Sainsbury's and Tesco, two giants of the supermarket industry in UK and all over the world. Though, there are a number of companies operating in the region, which makes the market more saturated, however, Sainsbury and ASDA are in a race to capture the large share of the market (Flavian, Haberberg, & Polo, 2002, pp.125-138). Thus, it can be said that in UK's supermarket industry, ASDA is competing with many retail giants of the world. In order to maintain the competitive advantage companies in this industry introduce new offers for their customers to ensure their loyalty (Dankbaar, 2003, pp. 44-55).

The competitive strategies of ASDA match perfectly with the products attribute because ASDA offers trendy, British, luxury brands. ASDA accepts effective marketing strategy for achievement of objects in view, which are viable during long success since the start of the business ...