Crafting & Executing Strategy: The Quest for Competitive Advantage: Concepts and Cases 23th edition

24) B

 

Long service times between flights would greatly increase the cost of an airline's operation that cannot be mitigated by low prices, which would, in turn, lead to losses. Other airlines, on the other hand, offer low prices by aggressively reducing costs, internal and external.

25) D

 

Amy's Drive-Thru focuses on healthy fast food for non-meat eaters. It caters to drive-through and casual-dining customers seeking healthy alternatives and generates profits by offering products and services that rivals do not. It also concentrates on a narrow customer base.

26) D

 

BloomsJay caters to gay customers, focusing on a narrow customer base and providing a unique holiday experience. It has adopted a focused differentiation strategy concentrating on a narrow customer segment and outcompeting rivals by offering customers attributes that meet their specialized needs and is more appealing than rivals' offerings.

 

27) D

 

The baby products retailer selling unassembled parts made in China is most likely to have the lowest costs and to pursue a low-cost provider strategy. The other companies listed are more likely to pursue focused differentiation or best-cost strategies.

28) A

 

A best-cost provider strategy is giving customers more value for the money by satisfying their expectations on key quality features, performance, and/or service attributes while beating their price expectations. This approach is a hybrid strategy that blends elements of low-cost provider and differentiation strategies; the aim is to have lower costs than rivals while simultaneously offering better differentiating attributes.

29) E

 

Adapting to new conditions and constantly evaluating what is working well enough to continue and what needs to be improved are normal parts of the strategy-making process, resulting in an evolving strategy. Strategy features that work with evolving markets would not trigger evolution as long as the firm's fundamentals are sound.

30) A

 

Industry environments characterized by high-velocity change require companies to repeatedly adapt their strategies. Companies in industries with rapid-fire advances in technology, such as consumer electronics and gaming entertainment software, may find it essential to adjust key elements of their strategies several times a year, especially in saturated markets with ample and strong rivalry.

31) A

 

A company's strategy evolves incrementally as management fine-tunes various pieces of the strategy and adjusts it in response to unfolding events. Inevitably there will be occasions when changing market and competitive conditions call for some kind of strategic reaction or abandonment of a current strategy, but a company's strategy also consists of deliberate and proactive (or planned) elements.

32) C

 

A portion of a company's strategy is always developed on the fly, coming as a response to fresh strategic maneuvers on the part of rival firms, unexpected shifts in customer requirements, fast-changing technological developments, newly appearing market opportunities, a changing political or economic climate, or other unanticipated happenings in the surrounding environment. These adaptive strategy adjustments make up the firm's emergent strategy.

33) E

 

Managers of every company must be willing and ready to modify the strategy in response to changing market conditions, advancing technology, unexpected moves by competitors, shifting buyer needs, emerging market opportunities, and new ideas for improving the strategy.

34) D

 

Regardless of whether a company's strategy changes gradually or swiftly, the important point is that the task of crafting strategy is not a one-time event but always a work in progress. The strategic vision of a company affects the strategies, and changes to strategies are not a set target; they depend on market factors and the company's position.

35) D

 

A company's realized strategy is composed of planned initiatives to improve the company's financial performance and secure a competitive edge in combination with initiatives to deal with unanticipated developments and fresh market conditions.

36) C

 

The biggest portion of a company's current strategy flows from previously initiated actions that have proven themselves in the marketplace and newly launched initiatives aimed at edging out rivals and boosting financial performance. This part of management's action plan for running the company is its deliberate strategy, consisting of proactive strategy elements that are both planned and realized as planned.