EMI

EMI



Introduction

The EMI Group (Electric & Musical Industries Ltd.) is a British music company. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry, making it one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major publishing arm - EMI Music Publishing - based in New York City. The company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but is now wholly owned by Terra Firma Capital Partners.

In organization is a creature of its environment. Its very survival and all of its perspectives, resources, problems, and opportunities are generated and conditioned by the environment. Thus, it is important for an organization to monitor the relevant changes taking place in its environment and formulate strategies to adapt to these changes. In other words, for an organization to survive and prosper, the strategist must master the challenges of the profoundly changing political, economic, technological, social, and regulatory environment. To achieve this broad perspective, the strategist needs to develop and implement a systematic approach to environmental scanning. As the rate and magnitude of change increase, this scanning activity must be intensified and directed by explicit definitions of purpose, scope, and focus. The efforts of businesses to cope with these problems are contributing to the development of systems for exploring alternatives with greater sensitivity to long-run implications.

This emerging science has the promise of providing a better framework for maximizing opportunities and allocating resources in anticipation of environmental changes. This article reviews the state of the art of environmental scanning and suggests a general approach that may be used by a marketing strategist. Specifically, the article discusses the criteria for determining the scope and focus of scanning, the procedure for examining the relevance of environmental trends, the techniques for evaluating the impact of an environmental trend on a particular product/ market, and the linking of environmental trends and other “early warning signals” to strategic planning processes.

Operationally, five different types of environments may be identified technological, political, economic, regulatory, and social and the environment may be scanned at three different levels in the organization corporate, SBU, and product/ market level. Perspectives of environmental scanning vary from level to level. Corporate scanning broadly examines happenings in different environments and focuses on trends with corporate-wide implications.

For example, at the corporate level IBM may review the impact of competition above and below in the telephone industry on the availability and rates of long-distance telephone lines to its customers. Emphasis at the SBU level focuses on those changes in the environment that may influence the future direction of the business. At IBM, the SBU concerned with personal computers may study such environmental perspectives as diffusion rate of personal computers, new developments in integrated circuit technology, and the political debates in progress on the registration (similar to automobile registration) of personal computers. At the product/market level, scanning is limited to day-to-day aspects. For example, an IBM personal computer marketing manager may review the significance of rebates, a popular practice among ...