How SWOT Analysis in Practice Can Help Companies - Essay Example

The paper "How SWOT Analysis in Practice Can Help Companies" is an outstanding example of an essay on business. Is SWOT analysis only used by MBAs in es, or is it actually useful for people in the field? Two SWOT papers done by companies in the field indicate it has independent utility.

Skoda Auto
Skoda Auto in the UK conducted a SWOT analysis to guide its strategy in the UK market. What was surprising was how helpful a simple analysis of the marketplace was. For example, The fact that the UK car market is highly fragmented and competitive, a weakness, meant that brand distinction became far more important than actually changing the cars themselves. Similarly, their analysis that their customers generally liked driving a Skoda indicated that they needed to actually make no changes to the actual car. The most interesting element was that Skoda realized that other manufacturers focused on the car, despite nominal changes in performance, and that they should instead focus on the experience of the brand and intangible assets.

Microsoft
Hafner and Hibbert performed a SWOT analysis of Microsoft in 2001. Some of the conclusions were obvious: Linux and Macintosh were potential threats, Microsoft had been slow in coming to the Internet and had been beaten out by companies like Google, etc. But others were more interesting. For example: “Currency exchange rates affect demand for application/operation software and hardware, and fluctuating currencies can negatively impact revenues in the global marketplace”. Hafner and Hibbert point out that Microsoft had not done the management to protect against that kind of volatility.

Conclusion
SWOT in practice, then, can help companies do two things: 1) Catalog for the obvious that has thus far escaped attention or has simply been assumed and not been critically analyzed; 2) Perceive past the obvious to the non-trivial. Read More