Role of strategic management in marketing, finance, HR, and global competitiveness.

Role of Strategic Management in Marketing, Finance, HR and Global Competitiveness The Following Text focuses on International Strategies which propel any organization from national level to international level..

The Strategic Role of marketing

Management has forgotten, or never realized, the ability of the marketing function to help drive organizational change, how the burden is on marketers themselves to rise above the tactical level and drive organization-wide initiatives to deliver value to customers.

First, shareholders and analysts are pressuring corporations and their CEOs to deliver against short-term profit and revenue objectives. CEOs are unsure of returns from marketing expenditures and marketers have acquired a reputation as a "spend" function rather than a "save and make" function. The belief is that a finance person managing a brand would probably take more time to determine how much to spend to support it and how to measure the effects of the spending than a marketer, who would just ask for more money. Marketing initiatives must have a substantial, demonstrated, top- or bottom-line effect to excite the CEO. Second, marketers are too often seen as specialists and tacticians talking about the "Four Ps" (product, place, price, and promotion) rather than strategists who help CEOs lead organizationwide initiatives that have strategic, cross-functional, and bottom-line impact. With all its specialization, marketing has not aspired to lead major transformational projects that involve cross-functional, multinational teams sponsored by the CEO. Other functions have been better at rallying around transforming initiatives such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and reengineering led by operations; Economic Value Added (EVA) and Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) guided by finance; and the Balanced Scorecard driven by accounting. The result is that one encounters the positions of chief operating officer, chief technology officer, and chief financial officer much more frequently than the chief marketing officer in companies.

The Strategic Role of finance

Any person, corporation, or nation should know who or where they are, where they want to be, and how to get there.[2] The strategic-planning process utilizes analytical models that provide a realistic picture of the individual, corporation, or nation at its consciously incompetent level, creating the necessary motivation for the development of a strategic plan.[3] The process requires five distinct steps outlined below and the selected strategy must be sufficiently robust to enable the firm to perform activities differently from its rivals or to perform similar activities in a more efficient manner.[4] A good strategic plan includes metrics that translate the vision and mission into specific end points.[5] This is critical because strategic planning is ultimately about resource allocation and would not be relevant if resources were unlimited. This article aims to explain how finance, financial goals, and financial performance can play a more integral role in the strategic planning and decision-making process, particularly in the implementation and monitoring stage.

The Strategic Role of Human Resource Management

Many firms approach Human Resource from a cost prospective instead of focusing on how to execute the firms strategy through effective utilization of their resources. The trend is typically reflected in cost per hire, number of resource requisition raised and creating a metrics for number of resumes sent to fill the requirement. In effect HR in IT is all about resource fulfillment and cost. Human resources in our business must focus on aligning itself with the business, think about key business challenges and design an HR plan to respond to the challenges. HR metrics is about measuring and managing the linkages between the initiatives and key challenges that are strategic to the business. Hence alignment with the business is very crucial to define the key attributes in order to enable the implementation of a competitive HR strategy. In experience those are: 1 Building and developing a competency model. 2 Very competitive and committed people. 3 Robust training model that helps get ahead of competition.

The Strategic Role of global competitiveness

In this we look at the strategies companies adopt when they expand outside their domestic marketplace and start to compete on a global scale. One alternative available for companies is to follow the same strategy worldwide, which is referred to as a global strategy. Selling the same product the same way in every nation (standardisation) allows a company to realise substantial cost savings from greater economies of scale. These cost savings can then be passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices, enabling firms to gain market share from competitors. However, to succeed in a new marketplace, it may have to customise its product offering to cater to the tastes and preferences of local consumers. While this may help, the shorter production runs associated with such a strategy sometimes raise the costs of competing and lower a firms profit margins. The decision to standardise or customise is a classic dilemma that confronts global companies. In this unit, we consider the different strategies that companies use to compete in the global marketplace and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each. In this unit we also examine the different approaches that companies employ to enter foreign markets-including exporting, licensing, setting up a joint venture, and setting up a wholly owned subsidiary. In this we examined the various ways in which companies can benefit from global expansion. The optimal choice of entry mode to serve a foreign market. International expansion represents a way of earning greater returns for companies by transferring the skills and product offerings derived from their unique competencies to markets in which indigenous competitors lack those skills. Due to national differences, a company can benefit by basing each of activity it performs at the location where factor conditions are most favourable to the performance of that activity. This is referred to as location advantage. By increasing sales volume rapidly, global expansion can assist a company in the process of moving down the experience curve. The best choice of strategy for a company to pursue is affected by two kinds of pressures: pressures for cost reductions and pressures for meeting the needs of local markets (local responsiveness). Pressures for cost reductions are greatest in industries producing commodity-type products, for which price is the main competitive weapon. Pressures for local responsiveness arise from differences in consumers tastes and preferences in national infrastructure and/or traditional practices, in distribution channels, and in demands by host governments. Companies following an international strategy transfer the skills and products derived from unique competencies to foreign markets and at the same time undertake some limited local customization. Companies pursuing a multidomestic strategy customise their product offering, marketing strategy, and business strategy to national

conditions. Companies pursuing a global strategy focus on deriving benefits from cost reductions that come from experience-curve effects and location advantages. There are five different ways of entering a foreign market-exporting, licensing, franchising, entering into a joint venture, and setting up a wholly owned subsidiary. The optimal choice among entry modes depends on the companys strategy.