Discussion Questions Assey
Toyota is an organization that has established sustained market leadership by successfully leveraging a generic strategy. Toyota as an organization is successful by all standards as a result of employing generic strategy. The Toyota car manufacturing utilizes a generic strategy which has enabled it to gain competitive advantage over other car manufacturing companies that do employ hybrid strategies. Despite the stiff competition in the car manufacturing industry, Toyota has remained as a major key player because of its use of the generic strategy (Eldring, 2009).
Toyota has leveraged successfully the generic strategy in a number of ways. First, the company has pursued differentiation in it products and after sales services of its vehicles. The company has also focused on producing unique cars besides ensuring that the price is reasonable in relation to prices for the competitors. Cost leadership has played a major role in Toyota in leveraging generic strategy. Lele (1992) established that Toyota has been able to strategically to produce strategically cars that meet the demands of both high income earners and low income earners. Lele (1992) noted that this has gone a long way in helping the Toyota Company in maintaining market leadership (p.
88).Value discipline can contriute to market leadership of an organization. Three types of value disciplines exists which include; operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy. For instance, Dell Computer is an organization that focuses on value discipline.
Dell Computer has gone an extra mile to ensure its products are tailor made to meet the customer needs and more so products it offers are user friendly. In operational excellence Dell Computer has ensured that its products are competitive in the market in terms of quality (Wiener, 1995).Dell Computers has successfully achieved value discipline through offering technical support to customers who bought their products. In addition, Dell Computers gave computer-phobia a stiff competition through its products. Wiener (2006) indicated that the stellar phone support came very much in handy for Dell Computers in the process of stamping its authority as in the market in value discipline (p. 10)Market risk pause a major challenge in the management of portfolio companies.
Market risk come as result of unforeseen conditions in the market that may affect various players thereby trigger the demand of products offered to go down. As well coordination is yet another challenge in managing a portfolio of companies. This proves to be a challenge because it is very difficuult sometimes to harmonize the activities of the companies. In some cases costs are a challenge in the management of portfolio companies. This comes as result where the management cannot agree on which areas to give emphasis in terms of financing (Faulkner & Campbell, 2006).Virgin Atlantic is an organization that has been consistently successful.
For it to achieve this success it has emphasized a number of success factors. First, customer care and customer service have been of key focus of this organization because the customer should always be treated as king. Second, service delivery of high quality has come very much in handy in Virgin Atlantic as a success factor whereby it has gone superior heights in meeting customer needs and expectations. Furthermore, handling of customer complaints is yet another success factor emphasized by Virgin Atlantic. This is so because customer’s complaints are successfully tackled and tend to give the organization a competitive advantage (Wiener, 2006).In conclusion, for any organization to gain market leadership it should be ready to pay the price because such leadership is not served on a silver platter.
Therefore, for any organization to be successful it has to employ the above strategies. The above organizations have been successful through the measures they have used to move to that level of success.
