Strategic Marketing Case Study Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Strategic Marketing Case Study - Essay Example On the other hand, IBM realized that customer-centric and service-centric products have a high-profit margin and investments  in products such as software would ensure that company’s profit margin remained high. Hence, divesting from the low-profit margin products was the first step towards investing in service-centric products. Secondly, the company invested in making the company investing in developing services and software with an emphasis on meeting the specific needs of some industries. In this case, the company’s investment in this line ensured that it de-emphasized on creating and producing hardware and focused its attention towards producing services and software tailored to meet the needs of specific industries. Finally, IBM invested in the application of the technology that it manufactured to market its products and reach out to its customers. In this case, the company had realized that it was making technology that it never exploited, whose implications whe n selling products to customers were evident since customer failed to identify IBM's application of technology. Qn. 2 Description of Louis Gerstner’s Strategy Implementation Style First, it is important to point out that Gerstner was in charge for the turn-around witnessed at IBM. In effect, he was responsible for implementing the competitive strategy that enhanced profitability at the company. In line with this, the case study implies that he single-handedly brought momentous changes to the organization by designing the competitive strategy and overseeing its full implementation. Importantly, the case study does not provide evidence that Gerstner used a team to arrive at the competitive strategy and neither does the case study provide evidence regarding the use of a team to implement the strategy. Hence, the implementation style that Gerstner used to implement the competitive style can be summed up as the commander approach style. In this regard, Gerstner focused on formulat ing an approach to enhance the company’s competitive advantage. In addition, he applied a rigorous analysis to develop a logical strategy whose implementation changed the course of IBM. Gerstner’s implementation style was important since he was new in the company, which ensured his insulation from any prior personal biases or political influences. In effect, this might be one of the reasons that contributed to the success of the strategy. Qn. 3 Implications of the Globally Integrated Enterprise Model for Marketing Managers in the Australia and New Zealand Subsidiary of IBM At the beginning, it is important to point out that the model for operation in IBM used to be a country-based model prior to the global integrated approach. In effect, the company designed the global integrated enterprise model for all its marketing managers in all the countries of the company’s operations. In effect, IBM marketing managers in a country like South Africa use a similar model to the one used by marketing managers in IBM’s Australia and New Zealand subsidiary. The integration of this model in the IBM subsidiary may have different implications. First, it reduces the duplication of roles in the approach that guided the company’s delivery of specific internal services, which reduces a subsidiary’s costs of operations. In this case, the subsidiary may have global procurement done in a different part of the world while paying of accounts and expenses on human