INGLOT'S STRATEGIC PLAN Strategic Plan

Firm-level factors contributing to INGLOT's competitive advantage

Country-level (macro) factors that have contributed to INGLOT's competitive advantage

Sustainability of INGLOT

INGLOT's strategic plan for the next five years

Strategic direction and goals

Organization of INGLOT's strategic plan

Environmental scan

Sources of agility

Sources of absorption

Sources of agile absorption

Strategic action plan by year

INGLOT's strategic plan

Firm-level factors contributing to INGLOT's competitive advantage

INGLOT is committed to research and development in order to meet customer needs. One is the company's Freedom System concept that enables the company to provide exemplary products for its customers and allow potential customers to experiment with different colors and shades of their makeup products. This is one major source of competitive advantage since it allows INGLOT to be competitive in their product development and the success of their innovation is seen in product acceptance for example the breathable nail enamel that was largely enjoyed by Muslim women (Necas and Huy, 2014).

The company's production concept is also a source of competitive advantage. The company has state-of-the-art production facilities that it fully owns. This facility allows the company to be a cost leader since unit costs are lowered since its company's production is done at low-cost locations. This also allows the company not to compromise quality of its products since it can monitor production with ease. Since the company owns the production facilities, changing the product mix or introducing products becomes very easy because it only involves internal changes (Necas and Huy, 2014).

INGLOT's strategy is also a source of competitive advantage for the company. INGLOT has concentrated on its cosmetics line for face, eyes, body, nails, and lips. This concentrated product offering allows the company to highly specialize in its products and therefore offer customers the best quality and most innovative products possible (Necas and Huy, 2014).

INGLOT's pricing strategy also affords the company competitive advantage. INGLOT's prices are in the medium range compared with its competitors. This pricing strategy allows INGLOT to provide customers with high quality products at a reasonable price thus affording the company competitive advantage for its products (Necas and Huy, 2014).

INGLOT's competitive advantage also comes from its distribution strategy. INGLOT operates its own stores and subsidiary companies in Poland, Australia, UK, USA, and Ukraine. This allows the company to concentrate its product offering to meet local consumer needs, and keep prices low compare to those of competitors to afford the company competitive advantage. At the same time, INGLOT has used other avenues such as franchising and partnering with large retail chains to improve the reach of their distribution activities (Necas and Huy, 2014).

Country-level (macro) factors that have contributed to INGLOT's competitive advantage

At the country level, INGLOT has also enjoyed several sources of competitive advantage. First is the company's efforts to select local partners who were skilled in the country's market potential. For example in Canada and the Middle East, INGLOT has benefited greatly from local entrepreneurs who exported the concept of INGLOT into these international markets (Necas and Huy, 2014).

INGLOT's strategy to create a unique combination of high quality products and affordability has led the company to gain competitive advantage in international markets. In countries such as Poland, Australia, UK USA, and parts of Europe, the company has been able to tailor their product offering to the market thus gain market share (Necas and Huy, 2014).

Sustainability of INGLOT

INGLOT has expanded into 44 countries in the world by conquering the internal and external constraints that hinder the company's expansion and successful operations. This has meant the company has diversified its product offering to tailor them to the market they operate, and has allowed the company to sustain its growth into the different markets it operates. The company's pricing strategy also allows for sustainability since the company has kept the cost of production of its products low thus passing these cost savings to consumers with medium-pricing of its products (Necas and Huy, 2014).

INGLOT's strategic plan for the next five years

Strategic direction and goals

The strategic direction of INGLOT is to increase its expansion into new markets and foothold in the markets, which it currently operates. This means the company should leverage its strengths to take up opportunities for growth and work to sort out their weaknesses in order to mitigate threats (Simons, 2010). The five-year period covered by this strategic plan involves assessing INGLOT's current approach to the business and engaging stakeholders to deepen their expansion.

The goals of this strategic plan are thus to improve its product offering by understanding customer needs better and creating partnerships that enable the company to model their products on consumer needs. The company also aims at developing a highly motivated...

Through this strategic plan, INGLOT's product and brand awareness will be improved by increasing visibility and attracting support to successful brand and product integration.
Organization of INGLOT's strategic plan

INGLOT's strategic plan is a management tool and serves two purposes. First is that it presents a comprehensive analysis of the company's progress to date and acts as a reference guide for future activities. The strategic plan starts with the company SWOT analysis then an analysis of the industry using the blue oceans strategy to evaluate INGLOT's environment. The last section is the action plan for the company and this will be based on each year's planned activities.

SWOT analysis

The company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are summarized in table 1 below. They represent only a small portion of the company's complete environmental scan.

Helpful for achieving the objectives

Harmful to achieving the objectives

Internal

Strengths

INGLOT fully owns its state-of-the-art production facilities.

INGLOT has its own research and development facilities that creates opportunities for product development.

INGLOT has low costs of operation as a result of its state-of-the-art production facilities and use of traditional advertising channels.

INGLOT's distribution strategies are low cost and allow the company to serve customers based on their local needs.

INGLOT is a family-owned business meaning its management structure promotes easy decision making.

INGLOT has a skilled and experienced executive team that complements its operations.

Weaknesses

INGLOT's uses different international expansion strategies including local partnership, franchising, and partnership with large retail chains.

INGLOT's international expansion strategy is adhoc meaning the company does not have a proper international expansion strategy.

INGLOT's products only cover a particular market segment because they do not provide highly purchased products such as perfumes, anti-ageing products, and hairstyling and baby products.

External

Opportunities

INGLOT's products are one of a kind and they are able to expand to more markets such as Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

The company can begin to understand consumers better through market research to deliver a wider product range.

Since INGLOT has its own production, research and development facilities, it can increase its product offering with relative ease.

Threats

Lack of barriers to entry of competitors, new businesses can venture into this field of cosmetics with relative ease.

International expansion depends largely on partnerships with large retail chains and other local business. This means INGLOT may have to share partners with its competition thus creating potential marketing challenges.

Environmental scan

INGLOT has succeeded in creating a blue ocean by simultaneously creating value for its consumers and keeping costs low. INGLOT's products are highly valued by its consumers as is evident in the company's growth. This approach to creating a blue ocean has other important elements. One is the barrier to imitation that INGLOT has created. By being innovative and providing products that consumers can experiment with, INGLOT has succeeded in creating barriers to competitor imitation thus creating value in its products.

INGLOT has created a consistent pattern of growth and innovation that allows the company's products to remain attractive to current and future customers. As suggested by Kim and Mauborgne (2007), instead of fighting with the competition to steal market share, the company created their own blue ocean of high quality products at an affordable price.

Sources of agility

In conducting a scan of INGLOT's operating environment, it is important to highlight the sources of agility that allows the company to spot opportunities and exploit changes in the market towards success (Sull, 2009). First is the operational source of agility. INGLOT has been able to cut costs by using the latest technology thus offering high quality products at relatively lower prices. Innovation has also been an operational source of agility since INGLOT has leveraged real-time market data and performance goals to introduce new product offerings.

The company portfolio has also been a source of agility. The company, being a family business is able to reallocate resources with ease from business units or products that are less promising to those that offer better returns on investment (Sull, 2009). INGLOT also has a talented and experienced executive team that offers diverse information on the business performance as well as centralized control of resources. This means the company has the required managerial attention to focus its activities.

Strategically, INGLOT has also created a source of agility (Sull, 2009). That allows it to seize growth opportunities by scaling up their business as need arises and implementing innovative changes in products to grow their market share. INGLOT's strategy has used creative mechanisms to mitigate risk and wait for the right…