The Strategy Planning

Question: 1.You Can Focus on Aspects of Organizational Design and Firm Processes or on Product and Service Offerings? 2 Behavioral, and Sociocultural Particularities? Answer : 1 The global Companies, such as McDonald focuses on the product adaptation and standardization strategies for achieving the cost advantage as well as enhancing the product performance. The product standardization is the term followed by the firm to make changes or modifications to the existing products by considering the quality, freshness, product name, logo, national product standards, brand name, and packaging for all markets. The product standardization involves the practices of setting the identical characteristics to the products in order to deliver value to the customers. It uses the standard product development technologies, product modification and innovation trends, engineering ideas, and significant RD efforts to enhance the brand awareness and loyalty into the customers(Loukakou, 2012). The product modification, innovation, variation, differentiation, product design and packaging, and creativity are important components of the product standardization and adaptation. The product adaptation involves changes or specific modifications made to the existing products or creation of new products for the foreign markets, merging differences into the product from the products of the global markets in order to ensure the suitability of the products to each market. Itis used by the firm to enhance the product performance, brand positioning, acceptability, and survival of the products by ensuring the responsiveness of the products to the customers. 2 Indicate how your organization (or an international firm operating in your industry) achieves standardization and the associated cost advantages and how it does (or should) pay heed to localized conditions such as legal, political, geographical, behavioral, and sociocultural particularities? Mc Donald is an international firm that makes strategic decisions by aligning the organizational strategy to the macro environmental factors, such as political and legal barriers, socio-cultural trends, technological advancements, economic fluctuations, and environmental factors. It uses Porters three generic strategies including the cost leadership, product differentiation, and focused strategy to attain the competitive advantage by reducing the external environmental impact(Christiansen, Bryan, Kasarc, and Fatmanur, 2016). Pestle analysis and Porters five forces models are used by Mc Donald to develop appropriate strategy and planning after analyzing the external environmental impact and attractiveness of the industry. These strategic tools provide the firm the external and internal data based on the customers demands, market dynamics, competition levels, industry size, and regulation barriers in the relevant industry so that an appropriate strategy could be designed and implemented in response to the external environmental changes. The STP model (segmentation, targeting, and positioning strategy) assists to focus on the customers needs and to represent them the valued and exclusive quality of the products after making the specific modification or changes to the existing products as per the customers feedbacks(Cook, 2016). References Christiansen, Bryan, Kasarc, and Fatmanur (2016).Corporate Espionage, Geopolitics, and Diplomacy Issues in International Business. London: IGI Global. Cook, A. T. (2016). Managing Growth and Expansion into Global Markets: Logistics, Transportation, and Distribution. London: CRC Press. Loukakou, D. M. (2012).Product standardization and adaptation in International Marketing.[Online]. Available at: https://hv.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:543563/FULLTEXT01.pdf. (Accessed: 12 March 2017).