Information System For Business Marketing Assignment

Porter’s value chain model
Name
Institution
Date
Background
Companies seek to remain profitable and sustain their competitive advantage to improve the overall performance of the firm. To facilitate this, organizations undertake strategic analysis and concentrate efforts to improve performance while comparing the success factors with the competitors in the industry. Firms draw on their strengths while minimizing the weaknesses, addressing threats and taking advantage of opportunities available. Porter’s value chain model analysis is one such tool to facilitate strategic competitive analysis.
Introduction
The value chain represents the firm activities that depend on the industry where the organization operates. Value chain analysis is in turn a tool that analyzes the internal firm activities to identify the ones most valuable and how the firm is likely to gain competitive advantage by leveraging on the company’s strength’s. The value generating activities are part of the value chain, and Michael Porter proposed that there are primary and support activities in different firms. The primary value activities include the logistics, operations, marketing & sales and services while the support value chain activities include the firm infrastructure, HR management, technology development and procurement. Porter’s Value Chain Analysis Model will be utilized to explore competitive advantage.
Porter’s Value Chain Analysis Model
In Porter’s value chain analysis analyzing value addition of the activities is considered as are the cost of activities and coordination of the activities (Rieple & Singh 2010, p. 2292). Firms make strategic decisions based on how they affect the firm’s profitability position and competitive advantage (Ensign 2001, p. 1). Value analysis chain analysis is useful to identifying and formulating effective competitive strategies where there is emphasis on developing linkages between the activities that create value (Ensign 2001, p. 1).
One of the ways to integrate the value chain model is targeting specific sections of the value chain for the organizations to meet their competitive goals. The case for the porter model is gain sustainable competitive advantage where the firm outperformers the rivals through relying on the capabilities. The ability to respond to customer needs and the macro-economic changes while creating supply chains for products facilitates market adaptation as firms can meet market shifts when required (Montgomery, E. G., & Oladapo 2015, p. 1695). The first step before integrating the value chain analysis model is developing organizational expertise to perform the value chain activities while harnessing the capabilities to enhance competitiveness (Prajogo, McDermott & Goh 2008, p. 617). Another aspect is identifying the activities hat create value with emphasis on the resources and capabilities to leverage on strength.
Since marketing is one of the primary activities in the model, the marketing efforts will emphasize the need to understand customer needs and meeting them. Additionally, customer service affects performance of the firm and will be prioritizes as this increases value. Virgin Australia is one company that needs to leverage customer service delivery , beginning with the recruitment process and even there are opportunities to improve brand promotion as the company is reputable. Marketing links the business with the customer and after identifying the goods and services that the customers need this is expected to improve performance and reduce the quality gap. The value chain analysis model originally utilized in the manufacturing sector has been adapted to the service sector where the strategies are aligned with the value activities in the planning process (Choi 2001, p. 10) Interacting and targeting customers is valuable to provide valuable information. The case for better marketing is that there is improved customer focus and performance.
Another aspect to integrating the model is emphasis on procurement and supplies as this optimizes the supplier relationship and Virgin Australia should also focus more on strategic relationships with significant suppliers to further improve competitiveness. Even as procurement is a support activity the capability to meeting the supplies of high quality when required is a primary consideration for the efficiency of the supply chain (Zhang 2010, p. 180). Supplier relations...