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Strategic Choices

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Need help with formulating charts and organizing paper. There are two parts.

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This solution gives you a detailed discussion on Strategic Choices

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Part I tables: Please see the attachment.

Part II
For this case, you will be identifying the primary business strategy employed by CPK. You will also be providing a critical analysis evaluating that strategy in the context of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Step One: Which of the four strategies discussed in this module (see background materials) does CPK follow? How do you know?

The strategy followed by California Pizza Kitchen is that of differentiation. The reason is that the restaurant chain specializes in California-style pizza. It sells non traditional pizzas and is not focused on any niche or segment. (Porter, M, 1998),

Step Two: Using the process you learned earlier, integrate this strategy with the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and. This should give you some specific actions the company is taking relative to their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. These actions are referred to as "strategic choices". Do CPK's strategic choices align with the firm's generic strategy? What are the points of disconnect? You need to think critically about this step. NO company achieves perfect alignment with its strengths, weaknesses, opportunites and threats, with its chosen strategy. It is your job to uncover the discrepancies and problems.

California Pizza Kitchen is making strategic choices but these are at variance with its overall strategy. Instead of maintaining its exclusiveness, California Pizza Kitchen has started including the normal pizza toppings and has started charging lower prices at its restaurants. The surprisingly reasonable pizza has been launched to attract customers during economic downturn. However, this leads to dilution of the differentiation strategy and leads to mediocre financial performance for California Pizza Kitchen.

Step Three: Identify any specific sustained competitive advantages conferred on CPK by virtue of its strategic choices.
California Pizza Kitchen has enjoyed sustained competitive advantages by the virtue of its differentiation. During the downturn when less exotic items appeared on its menu and the firm was compelled to sell lower priced items. The result was that California Pizza Kitchen lost its competitive advantage. It has a large debt and in 2010 was seeking to sell the company (Kurtz. D, 2008), .

Step Three:

? Discuss the effectiveness of CPK's' strategy in the light of its internal strengths and weaknesses, and external threats and opportunities.

California Pizza Kitchen's internal strengths are that it has been able to develop high quality authentic Californian Pizza. its strength is that the company has been innovative. It has been able to create pizza like the Thai Chicken Pizza, Jamaican Jerk Chicken, and the BBQ Chicken Pizza. The weakness of California Pizza Kitchen is that it has a large debt and needs ...

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