Written Assignment #1 – Apple’s Strategy
Refer to Assurance of Learning Exercise #1 (Apple) in Chapter One of your Thompson (2022) text. Read “Apple Inc: Exemplifying a Successful Strategy” in Illustration Capsule 1.1.
Incorporate our course (Thompson text) work for the week and Develop your analysis by responding to the following questions:
- Does Apple’s strategy seem to set it apart from rivals?
- Does the strategy seem to be keyed to a cost-based advantage, differentiating features, serving the unique needs of a niche, or some combination of these? Explain why?
- What is there about Apple’s strategy that can lead to sustainable competitive advantage?
- Your analysis should be 500 words.
- Incorporate a minimum of at least our course Thompson 2022 Text and one non-course scholarly/peer-reviewed sources in your paper to support your analysis.
- All written assignments must be formatted ini APA, and include a coverage page, introductory and concluding paragraphs, reference page, and proper in-text citations using APA guidelines.
ORGANIZATION, CONTENT, AND FEATURES OF THE 23RD-EDITION TEXT CHAPTERS
Textbook. Chapter 1
serves as a brief, general introduction to the topic of strategy, focusing on the central questions of “What is strategy?” and “Why is it important?” As such, it serves as the perfect accompaniment for your opening-day lecture on what the course is all about and why it matters. Using the example of Apple, Inc., to drive home the concepts in this chapter, we introduce students to what we mean by “competitive advantage” and the key features of business-level strategy. Describing strategy making as a process, we explain why a company’s strategy is partly planned and partly reactive and why a strategy tends to co-evolve with its environment over time. As part of this strategy making process, we discuss the importance of ethics in choosing among strategic alternatives. We introduce the concept of a business model and offer a clear definition along with an illustration capsule that provides examples from the real world of business. We explain why a viable business model must provide both an attractive value proposition for the company’s customers and a formula for making profits for the company. A key feature of this chapter is a depiction of how the value-price-cost framework can be used to frame this discussion. We show how the mark of a winning strategy is its ability to pass three tests: (1) the fit test (for
internal and external fit), (2) the competitive advantage test, and (3) the performance test. And we explain why good company performance depends not only upon a sound strategy but upon solid strategy execution as well.
