I The SWOT Analysis

Executive Summary

Marketing offers numerous valuable tools to analyze a company’s current situation. Though, most of them have the weakness of providing only a very isolated view that is not suitable for a long-term entrepreneurial decision. The SWOT analysis, however, pursues an integrated approach including key company and environmental variables. The objective is the confrontation of the company’s internal strengths and its weaknesses as well as company-external business opportunities and risks in order to generate possible strategic options.

The SWOT analysis particularly supports a combined and integrated approach of the current company situation enabling well-balanced and comprehensive decisions. One main benefit is thus the reduction of complexity through the integrated approach, leaving the key factors and strategies as analytical residue.

In practice, the SWOT method is a well established tool to analyze business units in larger companies and smaller start-ups in particular during their launch.

The SWOT analysis though reveals limited possibilities when analyzing all business units of large companies. For this task other, more holistic, approaches as the share- holder-value concept or the portfolio analysis are appropriate. However, this large field of tools will not be treated in this assignment. The SWOT analysis is though, despite its disadvantages, one of the most important instruments for the internal analysis of a company’s situation that - in every case - delivers a pretty comprehensive and resilient foundation for further entrepreneurial decisions and strategic planning.

II

  The SWOT Analysis  

Tables of  Content  

  Executive Summary  I

Tables of  Content  II

List of Figures ........................................................................................................ III

List of Abbreviations ..............................................................................................IV

1  Introduction  1

2  Theoretical foundations of the SWOT Analysis  2

2.1  Area specific Analysis  3

2.1.1  Potential Analysis  3

2.1.2  Competitor Analysis  3

2.1.3  Market Analysis  5

2.1.4  Environmental Analysis  6

2.2  Integrated Analysis  6

2.2.1  Analysis of Strengths and Weaknesses  6

2.2.2  Analysis of Opportunities and Threats  8

2.3  Deduction of Strategies  9

3  Review 11  

  Bibliography  13

III

  The SWOT Analysis  

List of Figures

  Figure 1: System of Strategic Analysis  2

  Figure 2: The SWOT Matrix  10

  Figure 3: Different Types of Strategies within a SWOT Analysis 11  

IV The SWOT Analysis

List of Abbreviations

4Ps Product, Price, Place and Promotion

B2C Business-to-Consumer

B2B Business-to-Business

SWOT Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

USP Unique Selling Position