Virgin Company Analysis

Introduction

Virgin Company in Britain that caters to the different industry such as travel, entertainment, mobile, lifestyle and the finance industry offering a whole new experience for every people not only in Britain but globally. The creation of 200 companies with a total revenues amounting to 7.2 billion U.S dollars or more than 4 billion sterling pounds in 2002, it is undeniably a very gigantic company that continues to grow. Behind the tremendous success of Virgin Company is it interesting to examine the marketing principles they embraced, specifically the business travel segment of Virgin Trains and Virgin Atlantic. In Virgin, they believe that Virgin stands for value for money, quality, innovation, fun and sense of competitive challenges by delivering quality service through empowerment of the men and women behind the success of Virgin and the facilitation and monitoring of customer feedback for them to improve the customer's experience through innovations of their products and services.

Virgin Group SWOT Analysis

Strengths

The Virgin group has the advantage that they are experienced in two different kinds of distribution. Firstly in stationary trade and secondly in mail ordering. The Virgin Group has a strong brand name incorporated by Richard Branson and is experienced in introducing new products in a competitive marketing environment. The strength of the Virgin brand comes from the relationship that customers have with the idea of Virgin as a maverick, irreverent company built on youthful, entrepreneurial principles (Ragins & Greco, pp 24-88).

Virgin has very few operational relationships between its diverse businesses, but all can benefit from the group's corporate flair at brand marketing and entrepreneurial decision making. Virgin's corporate relationships could be worth more. Branson's leadership style is a unique combination of energy, originality and shrewdness. While providing leadership to his organisation leaves most of the decision making to his professional managers. He has created an environment, which brings out the best in the organisation's people by motivating them and giving them overall sense of direction. The involvement of his employees is very important to Branson. By making his business appear fun he encourages their ability to be creative. The chairman Richard Branson had highly developed quality management skills, team building skills (Proctor, pp 23-178).

Weaknesses

Some of the weaknesses of the Virgin group come from Richard Branson himself. For example he does not like justifying his actions to anyone and this was one of the many reasons the Virgin group was re-privatised. In many ways Virgin settled uncomfortable as a public company. The Virgin group always had a problem with the founding and there was never enough money available for them to go through with the buy out. It did not help them when it came to buying EMI and at the end they couldn't buy it because they didn't have sufficient funds due to the stock market crash (Honeycutt et al, pp 34-278).

When Virgin started the trains it inherited some outdated rolling stock and routes where new track and signalling were urgently required. This resulted in Virgin having to struggle to run ...