Case Study: Five Companies

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In accordance with BrainMass standards this is not a hand in ready assignment but is only background help.

Step 1
In the first case Better Place had the problem of locating its electric filling station in the market. According to Porter's Value chain the inbound logistics would involve the existence of a large number of electric cars and their access Better Place filling station. The operations would be the filling up of electric cars. The marketing & sales would be to identify hospitable locations for filling stations that would be receptive to electric cars. Better Place identified that these were Urban centers that were less than 90 miles apart. Better Place selected Israel and then Denmark for locating Better Place electric refilling stations. The key service provided was battery pack recharging facilities and infrastructure facilities. Using Porter's five forces analysis, the key force Better Place deals with is buyer power. It seeks buyer information across countries, studies buyer volume, and price sensitivity of buyers. Shai Agassi carefully considered buyer information including geographies that had already made political and cultural advance favoring electric vehicles. The strategy used by Better Place is niche marketing. It has selected areas where there is an underlying market, hospitable locations, and consumers are receptive to electric cars. The first niche selected is Israel, the second is Denmark. This strategy has made Better Place a sustainable business.

Step 2
The second case is about Nike. The value chain component addressed by the company is inbound logistics. It addressed the design of shoes. The Asian suppliers received designs from Nike. Nike decided to modify the designs so that waste was reduced substantially. The marketing and sales wanted to improve the image of Nike which was stung by criticism of its labor practices in 1990s. Nike re-studied the designing process and found that three shoes material went into producing just one shoe. The competitive force faced by Nike was supplier power. It had to make its supplier's operations compliant with labor laws. In addition, it had to undertake social responsibility measures related to its suppliers. It had to ...