Straegic Industry Drivers

Assume you have applied for a senior strategy job at a big corporation in your country or region that has two or more SBU’s. Prepare notes for a structured presentation to the selection committee about how you think they should be analysing a company’s external environment, for TWO of the corporations SBU’s. The attendees at the presentation will be practical-minded managers who expect you to convince them that the model can and should be used in their business by you, by giving them the relevant principles and especially examples of how to apply the principles to one of their SBU’s. Right now they use Porters five forces model quite well so there is no need to deal with that in depth – instead you need to discuss issues of how to identify an industry’s strategic groups, industry drivers and key success factors.

Write down your structured notes for the presentation, convincing them to employ you to direct their external environmental analysis.

Describe the corporation in your region (and its two or more SBU’s) its industry’s and its existing strategy making process in enough detail for the marker to assess the appropriateness of your presentation notes. The SBU you use as the core of your answer could be real or not.

I will be presenting to the board of Woolworths supermarket chain in Australia. It consists of several SBU’s including (but not limited to) Fresh food & Grocery.

Woolworths’ vision is to be “first choice for fresh food”. My external analysis below will focus on examples of how to apply the principles of external environment analysis to the fresh food business unit.

What are the main industry drivers for Woolworths fresh food and what strategy changes are needed?

While Porters Five forces analysis is essential in determining what kind of competitive forces Woolworth face, and how strong they are; in analysing the external environment on a whole we need to also consider “What factors are driving industry change”.

An external