Strategic Analysis - Brasseries Kronenbourg

Outline the main resources and competences of “Brasseries Kronenbourg”, identifying the ways in which they contribute to its strategy.

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Rather than immediately delving into an analysis dealing with resources and competences, attention first turns to Brasseries Kronenbourg’s strategy. No reference to concepts of strategy would be complete without referring to Michael Porter who in his article �What is strategy’ comments that the

Essence of strategy is in the activities – choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities to rivals .

From the onset therefore it is clear that a company’s strategy should be what �distinguishes it from the rest of the crowd’, that which gives it that �edge’ over its competitors. A simple definition of strategy helps put the above into better context.

Johnson and Scholes (2005, pg. 9) define strategy as

The direction and scope of an organisation over the long term which

achieves advantage in a changing environment through its configuration of resources and competences with the aim of fulfilling stakeholder expectations.

The bottom-line of every strategy is wealth creation. Within this context the resources and competences that an organisation can tap into play a very fundamental role. Companies achieving competitive advantage do so because they have “capabilities that the others do not have or have difficulty in obtaining. ” Brasseries Kronenbourg was certainly no exception and achieving competitive advantage was a priority. How successfully it was depended (in part) on how well its resources and competences fed into its strategy and vice versa.

Despite a certain degree of autonomy with regards to operational functioning, Brasseries Kronenbourg was not a standalone business, but a small part of a much larger business. Part of the Danone Group, Brasseries Kronenbourg was the main department of the Kronenbourg SA. We are told that while organisational structure was as �flattened’ as possible to facilitate communication and decision-making, strategy was a centralised