Your first assignment for this course is to put together a SWOT analysis for the brand Method. This will provide you with some much needed practice for putting together the SWOT analysis for your chosen client.
As I always warn students, SWOT (or Strengths - Weaknesses - Opportunities - Threats), sounds deceivingly simple. The matrix itself is indeed a simple and easy to understand concept. However, actually putting together a comprehensive, in-depth SWOT for a company can prove challenging, especially when it comes to opportunities and threats. Here are a few outside sources that you might find useful when preparing the assignment or the SWOT for your client:
- http://www.netmba.com/strategy/swot/
- http://rapidbi.com/created/SWOTanalysis.html#howtodoaswot
- The following is a great example, a SWOT Analysis for Walgreens. As you can see in the document, every SWOT element is explained and justified in detail: http://www.acraretail.org/documents/Walgreens_Barbero.pdf
- How can the client use their strengths and effectively take advantages of the opportunities you identified?
- How can the strengths be used to overcome the threats the client is facing?
- What should the client do to minimize the weaknesses you identified and be able to both face their threats and take advantage of the identified opportunities?
Answering these questions will help guide your marketing recommendations.
If you have any SWOT-related questions or comments, please make them here.
