Exam 4: Business Level Strategy

An examination of a company's activity map will reveal its strategic themes.

Describe the advantages of integrating cost leadership and differentiation strategies.

By examining the ____ of Southwest Airlines, one can identify the strategic themes around which it has developed its business strategy. These themes include limited passenger service, high aircraft utilization, highly productive ground and gate crews, and so forth.

The use of a differentiation strategy would be expected to be LEAST effective in which of the following markets?

Suppose another firm found a way to offer IKEA's customers (young buyers interested in stylish furniture at low cost) additional sources of differentiation while charging the same price or to provide the same service with the same sources of differentiation at a lower price. What category of competitive risk to a focus strategy would this be?

The Li Ning Company's move from a cost leadership strategy to an integrated cost leadership/differentation strategy in the sportswear industry was so successful in China that both Nike and Adidas exited the Chinese market (Chapter 4 Strategic Focus).

Virtually anything can be a basis for a firm to create a differentiated product or service.

The effectiveness of any of the generic business-level strategies is contingent upon

Ever improving levels of efficiency enhance profit margins for a cost leader. This effects which of the five forces of industry structure most directly?

Although it is a cost leader, IKEA also offers differentiated features that appeal to its target customers, including its unique furniture designs, in-store playrooms for children, wheelchairs for customer use, and extended hours.

New Balance Athletic Shoes target Baby Boomers' needs for well-fitting shoes. The company is unique in that it offers a very broad range of shoe widths. A realistic potential risk New Balance runs in this focused differentiation strategy includes the possibility that:

Define strategy and business-level strategy. What is the difference between these two concepts?

Blind taste-tests have shown that the taste of premium-priced vodkas and inexpensive vodkas are indistinguishable even to regular drinkers of vodka. But the sales of premium vodkas are thriving. This is an example of

The ________dimension of relationships with customers is particularly important for social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The benefit of a flexible manufacturing system is that

The value-creating activities associated with the cost leadership strategy and differentation strategy are the same.

Low-cost leaders usually concentrate on the value chain activities of inbound logistics and outbound logistics as a means to reduce costs.

Global competition has increased the options for consumers and has made it more imperative for firms to identify the needs of customers in order to earn above-average returns.

Starbuck's determined that all of the following customer needs were important EXCEPT

As the television industry has changed in the last few decades from just three major networks to a multiplicity of networks, one of the major aspects of business strategy for the newer networks is ____ than the traditional networks.