Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

SWOT, like all marketing tools are analysis tools and a SWOT assignment is about analyzing the company situation and not a book report. The grade is in the analysis process, not the answer. Consider yourself lucky that you didn't find an answer either lying around the net or from corporate execs at Best Buy - or you would have come close to failing this part of your semester project.

So let's look at the components of a SWOT analysis:

First recognize that Strengths and Weaknesses are internal - so your analysis will look inward to the company.

Strengths
What elements internal to Best Buy can you identify as strengths? In particular, what elements can Best Buy use to develop competitive advantages and allow them to satisfy customer needs better than the competition? An example could be the Geek Squad provides Best Buy with better technical customer service then, say, Sears or online competitors like Tiger or CDW.

Weaknesses
Converse to strengths, what elements internal to Best Buy prevent them from satisfying customer demands as well as the competitors can? An example could be higher overhead associated with store design versus, say, Lowes (for appliances).

Opportunities and Threats are environmental and outward looking.

Opportunities
What elements outside of Best Buy could allow opportunities to arise to their benefit? An example might be

Threats
What elements outside of Best Buy exist or could arise to limit Best Buy's Success? An example could be the national attitude toward protectionism could mean import restrictions or tariffs on imported products - raising costs at Best Buy.

A good list of potential SWOT areas to run through is at https://www.businessballs.com/ Just listing the categories given here won't be adequate to say you did a "SWOT." You will need to provide an example or description of how it fits Best Buy.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

Let's talk "real world" versus academia. In any marketing analysis, nothing is based on pure opinion. Some analysis is based on "more solid" facts than others, however. For instance, if you have "personal experience" with a Best Buy store versus aCompUSA where the employees are more knowledgeable, then your analysis would include this, based on a sample of one store of each type - with a note that more research is needed to test out this conclusion. If, however, you have researched the training of both stores and find that Best Buy's regime is more extensive versus CompUSA and have sampled one store of each type and your experience bears out that Best Buy employees are more knowledgeable - then you have a stronger conclusion. Not rock solid, but better. If you know the training is better and you have statistically surveyed a significant sample of stores to prove this out, then you would have a conclusion with significant confidence. Follow me?

All of these cases I describe are fact based, not opinion. Some of the conclusions are less sure than others because there is less data on which to base it. When you discuss the conclusions you make based on the data, you also qualify it with a measure of the certainty of the data on which it is based. And if you can see a path to increase the confidence in the conclusion, mention that as well. This is the way marketing analysis is done in the real world and this process will be valid for you to use in your projects.

Does this make sense?

Wayde