Strategic Marketing of SportUNE - Case Study Example

Strategic Marketing Name Institution Date Introduction SportUNE’s mission is to engage and support communities by providing opportunities for better sporting and healthy lifestyles. Its vision is to provide integrated growth opportunities for sport and healthy lifestyle. To this end, the club lays emphasis on 7 core values: Professional leadership; cost-effective service; commitment to healthy lifestyle; people as the foremost priority; openness and transparency; inclusion and diversity, and stakeholder relationships. The clubs primary focus is on students, staff, teaching and research support. The clubs objective is to enable staff and students maintain a sustainable healthy lifestyle. To this end, the club seeks to develop and enhance students’ access to programs, tools and resources that promote participation in sporting activities. SMART Objectives SportUNE’s marketing strategy focuses on growing and supporting club participation. The club thus regards empowerment of staff as a critical component in effective implementation of its strategy. The clubs strategy seeks to incorporate and accommodate the diverse needs and interests of its staff through provision of opportunities to maintain a balanced and healthy lifestyle. The HMR strategy is thus to recruit and retain staff through provision of exceptional lifestyle opportunities. In order to develop as preferred centre for excellence both in education and sports, the club has put in place a strategic development plan to provide teaching and research support. This is well exemplified in the clubs development of strong partnerships and collaboration with academic departments in provision of sport related postgraduate and undergraduate programs. The club provides a wide range of opportunities for the student fraternity to develop a worth educational portfolio through student internships. A key component of SportUNE’s marketing mix is to position the club as a high performance center. The clubs marketing strategy focuses on marketing the facilities offered as an integrated individual and team performance centre. This is to be achieved through strengthening of existing relationships and collaboration with National Sporting Organizations, their clubs and other professional bodies The club seeks to distinguish itself through provision of quality on-campus experience. To this end, the clubs management focuses on effective and efficient management of the institutions spots infrastructure to achieve optimum benefit not just for the university, but the larger community as well. This is to be achieved through development and provision of programs, tools and resources that enhance and promote involvement in sport and other physical activities. The club thus lays significant emphasis on building promoting and maintaining consistent participation portfolios that involve grass root activities as well provision of high performance opportunities. Secondly, the cub’s strategic marketing objective is to be a market leader in innovative utilization educational technology in provision of distance education. Of significant importance is the promotion of academic opportunities that distance education provides by offering new and innovative programs related to Sport and Exercise science. This is to be achieved by enhancing more engagement and participation by distance education students through development of key regional initiatives that include key sporting networks, most notably the association for Elite University Athletes. Thirdly, SportUNE’s marketing objective is to set higher industry standards for social inclusiveness and better access to higher education. This is to be achieved through effective utilization of sport to encourage equitable provision of learning and recreation opportunities by enhancing mutual respect and engagement among the diverse groups. A key strategy in achievement of this objective is promoting accessibility to programs and facilities by communities and groups. Fourthly, SportUNE’s seeks to position itself as a disguised center of excellence in all the institutions dedicated fields of research. Of priority is the development of the institution as centre of excellence in provision of sport education. To this end, the institutions key priority is to forge strong partnerships with all academic departments and to facilitate efficient delivery of key sport-related programs for both undergraduate and postgraduate. Finally, SportUNE’s market plan focuses on fostering business processes that optimize efficiency in service delivery and promotes a service culture that effectively addresses the divergent needs of both the students and staff. The club seeks to enhance market penetration and position through maximization of the value of the institutions venture in SportUNE’s resources for increased benefit to the students, staff and community at large. More resources are to be cultivated in enhancing service delivery standards and effectively meeting health and sporting needs. Subsequently, the primary focus of SportUNE’s marketing strategy is on promoting healthier lifestyles for staff and students through improved access to the clubs facilities and programs. Hierarchy of Strategies SportUNE’s marketing strategy is by and large a firm-level strategy, largely because the club is a composite of a larger institution that provides specific services that cannot be duplicated by a new entrant or competing entity within the institution. Firm-level strategy is to a great extent correlated with strategic orientation, which is generally defined as “how an organization uses strategy to adapt and/or change aspects of its environment for a more favorable alignment” (Manu and Sriram, 1996, p.79). Strategic orientation in marketing literature is commonly referred to as strategic choices, a strategic thrust, or a strategic fit. The nature of this strategy is that it is enduring in nature. SportUNE’s strategic plan is a typical example of this kind of strategy, and this can arguably be attributed to the monopolistic nature of the entity’s market environment. This does not imply that the stability of the clubs strategy or its enduring nature is exemplified in a lack of variation in the way it implements its strategy; rather, it is the nature of the market place, industry and the entity’s approach that are relatively stable. A change in strategy may therefore not be a critical issue on the club’s management agenda, but as observed in the discussion on prospector-oriented strategy, it is of significance that the club reevaluates and modifies its market strategy to remain relevant in an increasingly globalised economy. Porter’s Five Competitive Forces In his book “Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors,” Michael Porter developed a model referred to as the Five Competitive Forces which has grown to become a significant tool employed in analysis of organizational industry structure and strategic processes. The five forces, according to Porter, influence the intensity of an industry’s competition and thus the attractiveness and profitability of the industry. The objective of an organizations strategy is hence to influence market forces such that the overall market position and profitability is improved. The first competitive force is the bargaining power of suppliers, a factor that is less likely to influence SportUNE’s market plan. This is largely due to the nature of industry in which the club is a player. As a sports club, the competitive advantage is largely derived from the facilities and services it offers, which are marginally influenced by inputs from external sources. The second driving force is the customers’ bargaining power, which may influence volumes and margins in profitability and market position. SportUNE’s customers are largely members of staff and students, who are likely to exemplify loyalty to the institutions club and the services it offers. The third force is the threat of new entrants, which again is unlikely to have a negative impact on SportUNE’s fortunes given that the club enjoys monopoly as the primary provider of sporting facilities and services, and thus enjoys brand loyalty from the university fraternity. Forth is the threat of substitutes, which is influenced by factors that include brand loyalty of customers, close customer relationships, switching costs, and the relative price of substitutes. Similarly to the threats discussed above, SportUNE’s is to a large extent cushioned from the effect of substitutes, which are unlikely to penetrate the University market as important players. The fifth force is the competitive rivalry that may arise between existing industry players. Strategic Fit The strategy that an organization chooses to employ in securing a market edge largely depends on how its strategic approach in managing product-markets, production and distribution systems, and organizational structure and processes. This was first discussed by Miles and Snow (1978) who classified firms depending on their response to three elements that they dabbed “an adaptive cycle” (Miles and Snow, 1978, p.27). Firms can hence be classified as either ‘prospector’, ‘defender’, ‘analyser’ or ‘reactor’. Prospectors are relatively proactive and adopt strategies to prevailing competitive environment. They are keen to explore emerging opportunities either in product or market development. Defenders are the contrast of prospectors, as they focus more on maintaining a stable position through protection and securing of their product-market activities. A hybrid of the two is what the authors described as analysers, as they explore new frontiers in policy and market while securing key products, customers and skills. The last segment referred to as reactor organizations exemplify a lack of focus and clear strategy, opting to instead react to developments in the competitive landscape as need may arise. They are largely unstable and inconsistent. The limitation to this classification is that it focuses on inter-group comparison, while disregarding the intra-group aspect (Speed, 1993). This is particularly exemplified in discussions regarding the competitive and market positioning of SportUNE, which enjoys full monopoly of its target market and is therefore not bound to formulate and institute market strategies based on external market forces. SportUNE’s market strategy should however be more prospectors oriented. According to Naman and Slevin (1993), the contemporary competitive environment has become more complex owing to drastic advancements in technology. Modern technological innovations have increased the pace of developments in information and communication technology, advances in research and development, and increased integration of the global economy. SportUNE’s marketing strategy seeks to capitalize on these advancements by enhancing the opportunities for students to access education through distance learning, a venture that can only succeed through proactive development of the enabling technological framework necessary for effective and efficient communication with the larger community. Macro and Micro forces The changes in educational needs that have prompted SportUNE to explore international markets are reflected in Naman and Slevin’s (1993) discussion, who acknowledge that environmental complexity is positively related to proactive behavior, innovation, and risk taking. These dimensions are closely correlated to the prospector –orientation, and points at a newer strategic dimension that SportUNE should explore to enhance its product and service portfolio. The clubs strategic marketing plan should hence focus on developing a technological framework that makes it possible for the larger global community to access information and education through long-distance learning. As observed by Crant (2000), “Many practitioner-oriented publications argue that managers should be more proactive on the job, and that proactive behavior is an increasingly important component of job performance. Organizational research on the antecedents and consequences of proactive behavior has appeared in several different literatures and has taken different approaches toward defining, measuring and understanding Proactivity” (p.435) A strategy to appeal to the larger global community through development of a more enabling communication framework will not only enhance the value of SportUNE’s product and service portfolio, it will also fetch numerous additional benefits. As a prospector, the club is well positioned and less likely to face competition for resources as it gets to attract a global appeal for its products and services. Additionally, prospector orientation will provide greater strategic sustainability while significantly reducing potential failure rate and shrinking of its market value. The result is that the club will generate higher rents as it faces less competition while developing monopoly of strategic space. Conclusion A significant strength and core advantage of SportUNE is its resource based abilities that can enable it secure a sustainable competitive advantage. According to Grant (1991), firm specific resources may include capital equipment, brand names skills and individual employees. SportUNE focuses mainly on providing sporting and health services to students and staff, who form its primary clientele. But for the club to be productive requires Better Corporation and coordination of resources. Firm’s capabilities are inherent in its resources, and the capabilities form the primary source of competitive advantage (Grant, 1991). A notable weakness of SportUNE’s strategy and marketing mix is the lack of effective mobilization and utilization of its resources. SportUNE has access to abundant firm-based resources, which ought to enable it be sustainable, grow more rapidly, and have extra organizational slack. The expectation is that the firm should explore a broader range of possible options, and thus generate more rents. References Crant, J.M. (2000). ‘Proactive Behaviour in Organizations’. Journal of Management, 26(3), pp.435-462. Grant, R.M. (1991). ‘A Resource-Based Theory of Competitive Advantage: Implication for Strategy Formulation’. California Management Review, 33(Spring), pp.114-135. Manu, F.A. and V. Sriram (1996). ‘Innovation, Marketing Strategy, Environment and Performance’. Journal of Business Research, 35, pp.79-91. Miles, R.E. and C.C. Snow (1978). Organizational Strategy, Structure and Process. McGraw Hill, New York, NY. Naman, J. and D. Slevin (1993). ‘Entrepreneurship and the Concept of Fit: A Model and Empirical Tests’. Strategic Management Journal, 14(2) pp.137-153. Porter, M.E. (1980). Competitive Strategy. Free Press, New York, NY. Speed, R. (1993). ‘Maximizing the Potential of Strategic Typologies for Marketing Strategy Research’. Journal of Strategic Marketing, 1, pp.171-188. Read More