Strategic Analysis Assignment: Implementing Digital Strategy for YourHome

Question

Task: Strategic Analysis Assignment Instructions: YourHome is a small family-owned bed and breakfast (B&B) business. YourHome has been running in a small touristic town in the UK for more than a decade. YourHome offers budget accommodation and credential breakfast for travellers. YourHome has been a flagship B&B in the town, and it is known by great customer service.

The business has been good not until recently when a chaines-bramd hotel is built the town two months ago. The chained-brand hotel offers modernized rooms at a similar rate as they have huge capitals from the investors aiming to penetrate the market for budgeted accommodation. As a result, YourHome business dropped drastically last month. Although the location of YourHome is better than the chained-brand hotel as it is closer to most of the touristic spots in the town. Still, due to brand effect and membership reward system, some travellers have switched to the chained-brand hotel.

The customer base of YourHome is existing customers or customers referred by existing customers. Most of the customer is either local or European. YourHome adopts “word of mouth” strategy to gain new customers. YourHome does not have any sophisticated digital platform. YourHomeadvertises the room on Airbnb website and booking.com. However, YourHome has to pay the agent fees to these agents for advertising the room. In addition, YourHome also has simple systems written by family members for keeping customer details, finance and accounting activities. YourHome has ten employees. Two staff is working in the kitchen, two for cleaning, two for the reception and four for administration.

As the founder of YourHome, you have decided to create and implement a digital strategy in order to maintain the current position in the market place.

Answer

Introduction
This report on strategic analysis assignment is going to discuss a literature review on both organizational analysis and strategic analysis. The organizational analysis will consist of organizational Onion and Enterprise Architecture and strategic analysis will consist of SWOT and PESTLE analysis. Through the analysis, this report is going to state how YourHome can create and implement a digital strategy in order to maintain the current position in the marketplace.

Overview of the Analysis
Through the PESTLE analysis, it can be understood how the political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors will decide the future of YourHome. Through the SWOT analysis, YourHome can evaluate its strength, threat, opportunities, and weaknesses. With the help of these analyses, YourHome can make a strategy to make itself attractive in the digital marketplace. Organizational onion helps an organization to create contingency, and also helps to prepare a back-up plan when any unexpected thing happens which prevents the organization from achieving its desired goal. Enterprise architecture is applied to achieve the organization’s current and future goals.

Case Study
YourHome is a UK-based hospitality company of a small scale. It is situated far from the crowd of the city though most of the famous tourist spots of the UK are accessible from YourHome. It has a total of ten people working as employees and some of them are even the family members of the owner. Suddenly a world-famous hotel chain has started its branch near YourHome, which is taking away its customers. That company is well funded and has a massive online presence. To compete with it YourHome now has planned to establish its online presence.

Literature Review
The literature review will be done based on two analyses as organizational analysis and strategic analysis.

Organizational Analysis
An organizational analysis is a process of analyzing the work environment, employees, development, and operations of an organization (Burrell and Morgan, 2017). Like the multi-layered onion, an organization also consists of several layers of work. According to Nagy and Oross (2018), in order to build a new business, in this case online marketing, an organisation needs to use all of its layers as a whole to make the venture possible. This is done with the help of Organisational Onion.

Enterprise architecture helps an organisation to make a blueprint of the business in which it is going to venture. As suggested by Frampton, K. and Tamm, T., (2018), it gives the organisation an image of how it should progress to make the business successful.

Strategic Analysis
Strategic analysis is the process which includes doing detailed research on the business environment of a particular organisation in which it operates (Bettis, Mitchell&Zajac, 2012).

PESTLE Analysis
PESTLE analysis is generally done to research a particular area of business in which a new organisation starts a new business or a prevailing organisation ventures into a new business (Dagnino, G, King, D &Tienari, 2017).

Table 1: PESTLE Analysis of YourHome
(Source: Self-created)

SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis is a strategy based planning in which the strengths and weaknesses of an organisation is calculated properly to plan future movements of the organisation (Gurel and Tat, 2017).

Table 2: SWOT Analysis of YourHome
(Source: Self-created)

Results Related to the Case Study
PESTLE
It has been observed after doing the PESTLE analysis that there is no major obstacle for YourHomewhich will prevent it from starting its online marketing. The fact is that most of its visitors are either the people of the UK or Europeans and they are technologically sound, the online platform would be a great idea to spread the business. There are also various policies taken by the UK government to help the small businesses especially after the covid-19 era. It can also avail this benefit.

SWOT
In the SWOT analysis of YourHome in the context of the UK market place, various points have been identified which can ignite certain concerns. There are more weaknesses of this organisation than its positive aspects. Still it should work on the few positive aspects it has, e.g. it can center its marketing strategy on the fact that numerous more places can be accessed from its location, as it caters a small number of tourists at a time it can introduce more personal care services to its customers. The main positive point is that despite the presence of bigger and branded competitors, YourHome is still running. So it should take this situation as a head start and plan ahead how to grow its business. The business can take the maximum benefit of the place and can design new and innovative means to attract new customers. Through this way, it can expand the business.

Organisational Onion
In the process of growing its business, organisational onion can help YourHome in many ways. Initially, it can divide the steps of conducting a new business in various steps. At one time it should concentrate on one step only to develop the process systematically. Next it should consider the suggestion of all levels of employees to finally decide what will be the best for it. Last but not the least whatever it does, its core function should remain intact i.e. providing quality services to the customers for which it is famous for. Quality services will help the business to flourish as it has done in the past years. Hence, word of mouth will act as a proper method and this way it can generate leads from the customers.

Figure: 1 Diagram of Organisational Onion
Source: (Clarke, 2020)

Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise architecture is the most important thing for YourHome to achieve the target it has taken of establishing itself online also. As already discussed there are numerous disadvantages of YourHome which can prevent it from achieving the target. The process can take a lot more time than estimated. So the main thing for this organisation is to be motivated and stay focused. Enterprise architecture will help it to do so. Introducing Enterprise architecture in an organisation is considered a holistic approach as it gives a clear understanding of the contribution of each department in the vision, how they are related to each other and how they can work together to make the vision successful.

How Your Home Can Implement This Method
In order to stay in the present market competition YourHome should implement the suggestions provided in this report. For this it should hire a proper marketing agency who can digitally advertise for the organization, make a proper well defined website where every information will be available from images of the rooms to utility and prices and other personal care services, take help from the government policy offerings to add some more capital, hire new employees so that they can attend to more number of tourists. On the hotel website there should be a review of the tourists. It will help more visitors to opt for YourHome and also help its owner to rectify any grievance faced by any visitor. After successfully implementing these strategies it should then focus on its infrastructure and even building new branches.

Conclusion
In this research, the assumed problems of YourHome have been discussed. In order to provide its solution PESTLE and SWOT analysis have been done. In the SWOT analysis it can be seen that it needs to adopt different marketing strategies to boost its business. Its main privilege is its location. Therefore, many other tourist spots can be accessed from here. This advantage should be the center of attraction of its marketing strategy. This will help it to attract more customers. Despite several bigger competitors, YourHome has been able to sustain till date. This is a positive aspect of the organisation and hence the policies should be taken accordingly. Also it has been shown how Organization Onion and Enterprise architecture can help the organization to set up its strong virtual presence to compete with other big brands in the present market place of the UK.

References
Burrell, G. and Morgan, G., 2017. Sociological paradigms and organisational analysis: Elements of the sociology of corporate life. Routledge. Viewed 27 March 2021, http://www.geocities.ws/dakdo_wid/ontologi.pdf

Clarke, M 2020.Industry-specific impact assessment program: Onion. Available at: https://www.horticulture.com.au/globalassets/laserfiche/assets/project-reports/mt19012/mt19012---vn10001-impact-assessment.pdf

Dagnino, G, King, D &Tienari, J 2017, Strategic management of dynamic growth. Long Range Planning, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 427-430.

Frampton, K. and Tamm, T., 2018 ‘Achieving benefits with enterprise architecture’, The Journal of Information Systems, vol.27, no. 2, pp.139-156. Gürel, E. and Tat, M., 2017, ‘SWOT analysis: a theoretical review’, Journal of International Social research, vol. 10, pp. 994-1006

Krylov, S., 2019. Strategic customer analysis based on balanced scorecard. Ekonomicko-manazerskespektrum, 13(1), pp.12-25. Available at: https://ems.uniza.sk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/EMS_1_2019_02_Krylov.pdf

Nagy, A and Oross, D., 2018. The tradition of youth work in Hungary: the onion model. The history of youth work in Europe, viewed 27 March 2021, http://real.mtak.hu/83474/1/35_46_Nagy_Oross.pdf Perera, R 2017, The PESTLE analysis.Nerdynaut.