Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2007 in the subject
Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,3,
University of Applied Sciences Berlin, course: Marketing, language:
English, abstract: Due to strong competition and a continuous market
change, most companies engage in strategic planning today to become or
stay competitive in the long run. Strategy is all-embracing. Strategy
has to capture internal and external aspects, that means to comprise
competencies and market opportunities. Strategy has to keep in view the
own company, the customers and the competitors. The challenge is to
create customer values and competitive advantages to assure benefits and
growth. As a result, the starting point of every strategic decision
demonstrates the recognition and the analysis of the company's current
situation containing a high variety of parameters. These parameters are
generally defined by the company's influence into internal and external
parameters. However, the understanding of the company's situation is
only defined in absolute by analysing parameters and its bilateral
dependencies. Therefore, the combination of the company's internal
factors and the external environmental circumstances presents the basis
for the strategy development and the resulting organisational marketing
goals and application of the marketing instruments. The SWOT analysis is
a strategic planning tool used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities and Threats of a company. It provides information that is
helpful in matching the company's resources and capabilities to the
competitive environment in which it operates. The resulting SWOT matrix
contrasts the results of the internal analysis (strengths and weakness)
and the external analysis (opportunities and threats) to define
strategic fields of action. That application of a SWOT analysis is
therefore instrumental in strategy formulation and selection.
