The SWOT analysis

During the week,we were taught to use SWOT analysis that is used by the managers to have planning and business strategy. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threat.

I am going to use apply this tool into real life example, McDonalds. Here is the table illustrating the SWOT analysis of McDonalds. 

Strengths -       Having a large market share throughout the world -       Having good brand recognition -       Distribution all over the world -       Customer loyalty	Weaknesses -       Unhealthy food menu -       Negative publicity -       Few differentiation -
Opportunities -       Changing people’s eating habits by selling more healthy food apart from fast food -       Increase differentiation of food choice to attract larger customer groups	Threat -       Increasing competitor in the market -       People’s emphasize more on healthy eating habits -       Lawsuits against McDonalds -       Negative reports against McDonalds

For the STRENGTHS, McDonalds occupied a large market share throughout the world since there are branches all over the globe. It has a good brand recognition and higher level of customer loyalty as everyone in the world must have heard of or have tried food in McDonalds before.

For the WEAKNESSES, McDonalds has poor reputation as it sells unhealthy fast food such as hamburgers, french fries, ice-cream... These food are oily and deep fried food which can adversely affect people's health. People may suffer from obesity, high blood cholesterol, diabetes, heart diseases... Moreover, it is said that there are few differentiation of food choices.

For the OPPORTUNITIES, McDonalds has initiated some healthy food choices such as salad. McDonalds can also sell more healthy food in order to change people's eating habits and promote the importance of health. Apart from increasing healthy food choices, McDonalds can increase it's differentiation of food choices by increasing ingredients or flavours in order not to let customers feeling bored. These enables a wider range of customers to buy food from McDonalds.

For the THREAT,  McDonalds has increasing competitor in the market. More and more fast food restaurants were set up these years, such as KFC, Burger King, Subway... It's competitors are selling similar foods and this may reduces people choosing to buy food from McDonalds. What's more is that people are getting more concerned about their health now and there were reports demonstrating that eating food from McDonalds is harmful to our health. Example, theres a documentary called Supersize me and this talks about how may a person's health be affected when they eat McDonlads continuously. This arouses people's attention towards health and people would tend to choose other restaurants instead of McDonalds.

I found this documentary quite interesting as there's a man trying to eat food from McDonalds for 30 days. He would like to examine the effects of McDonalds. This documentary shows the negative impacts of eating fast food and this can be one of the threat for McDonalds as well since people are having more concern towards their health now.

I learnt different definitions regarding strategies and how to identify different levels of strategies used in organizations. We were required to read a journal written by Mintzberg. The journal clearly elaborates his definition regarding strategy, explores the complexity of variety strategy formation processes by refining and elaborating the concepts of deliberate and emergent strategies. Deliberate and emergent strategies are conceived as two ends of a continuum along which real- world strategies. Different forms of strategies included planned, entrepreneurial, ideological, umbrella, process, unconnected, consensus and imposed strategies.