MARKETING AND STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

Marketing and Strategic Management

Marketing and Strategic Management

Question 1- The Virgin emergent approach to strategy development has not always proved successful - Virgin Bride and Virgin Cola, for example, remain relatively small businesses. Does this matter? Do all emergent strategies have to be successful?

This question aims to explore the meaning of emergent strategy. Therefore, the starting point in answering this question should define the term. Virgin is a useful example for this cause. As per the statement of Richard, (2009), opportunities in business are like buses, all the time there is one more coming along. The key point of emergent strategies is their experimental nature. Therefore, it follows that some of the tests are not successful. At times, even the best laid plan bring is unanticipated outcome. Emergent strategy is the process in which organizations identify unexpected outcomes from executing corporate strategy. These organizations also learn to integrate those unanticipated results into future plans of the organizations. For instance, use of social websites for the enhancement of marketing plans can be termed as a part of marketing programs. However, in case the social website marketing perspective of the plan all of a sudden becomes successful, then it is an emergent strategy which should be addressed. In other words we can say that emergent strategy emerges from all over the organization over time. Emergence is self organization which is bubbled up from bottom rather than being trickled down from the top. It is common in intricate systems where agents are autonomous for moving around and interacting for the discovery of potentials. For successful emergent strategies there should be a specific level of freedom and autonomy (De Wit & Meyer, 2010, pp. 114-115).

It is required form organizations for emergent strategy that the organization constantly generates a wide range of hypotheses and tests them in smaller scale experiments. In addition, the organizations should feed the more successful experiment and prune the failed experiments. For the innovation in substantial manner, the organization ought to have constant bets of every size at every point in the power-law curve. Since, the organizational environment changes, the company shifts and go for adaptation to the application of its strengths to changing environment, Emergent strategy is an organic way to develop which enables the organization to learn and constantly develop new tactics over the time on the basis of constant culture of hypothesis and experiments. Therefore, we can state that it is not likely that emergent strategy will be successful all the time. However, importantly it does not matter to Virgin Groups of companies. On the other hand, the pay offs from successful strategies should be greater that the issues of losses. Otherwise, it will have an adverse effect on the organizational performance and the group may collapse (De Wit & Meyer, 2010, pp. 114-115).

Question 2- Critically evaluate Virgin Group's strategies over the period of the case. Was the company wise to spend so much time investing in so many new product areas? What would ...