Global Communication Benchmarking Competition: Ford

Global Communication Benchmarking

Competition: Ford Motor Company

A) According to Brent Archer (2007), Ford Motor Company is facing falling stock prices and increasing competition, particularly over the past five months. Contributing factors to the problem include rising costs and the housing market, in addition to a sub-prime mortgage crisis that hurt car makers and a less than favorable U.S. economy. Indeed, according to Douglas McIntyre (2007), the company has faced substantial losses throughout the year.

B) While Ford Motors is the second largest car seller in the United States, it needs a strategy that could mitigate the problems it is facing in order to remain competitive with other large car companies, and most in particular with General Motors, its most prominent competitor. According to McIntyre, such strategies could include expansion of its existing product line to a full line of cars and light trucks. McIntyre also projects that the markets will begin to improve at some point in the future. When this happens, Ford needs the capacity to increase production.

On the other hand, the current problems may necessitate strategies such as laying off workers and managers, and stopping production at certain facilities. The problem with this is that this will also cut its future capacity to increase production when needed.

In terms of the future, a cut in workforce and production capacity will mean an inevitable loss of future competitive strength. In order to mitigate this, Ford could rather investigate expanding production into areas that have proved themselves to be more profitable in terms of competition. Market research yields could for example be used to heighten the company's competitive edge, with special deals offered to encourage customers to choose Ford Motors over its competitors. Pay cuts rather than layoffs can also be used in order to mitigate losses. Workers can be provided with a choice of layoff or pay cut. Incentives to remain with the company can be offered in the form of bonuses for ideas and/or actions that result in sales.

Blockbuster Movies

A) Blockbuster's most prominent competition is Netflix (Johnson, 2004). According to Johnson, the company was to expand to the Internet in order to remain competitive within the rental movie market, which Netflix is currently dominating. Indeed, according to later reports, this is indeed what the company has done. Whether this will have the desired effect or will simply drive Blockbuster further away from their competitive edge, remains to be seen. Indeed, Netflix has the advantage of diversity in terms of its rental titles. The Johnson piece reports that Blockbuster was planning to gain customers by offering better Internet deals than Netflix. In retrospect, the problem is however that the deals are so excellent that they badly affect Blockbuster's revenues (Cruise, 2007). Indeed, the company's current strength - its in-store customers - is being undermined by its efforts to increase its online customers to compete with Netflix.

B) Blockbuster believes that it can gain competitive advantage over Netflix by offering better deals to their in store customers, which could also entice online customers away from Netflix (Cruise, 2007). Such deals include in store coupons and free movie swaps. In addition, the company offers in store merchandise to visiting customers in an attempt to mitigate lost online revenue.