Business Strategies Employed
Jenkson Pharmacies Inc. is a new chain of stores and therefore it has to apply different strategies to establish its position in the market. The company emphasizes both non-prescription and prescription products to meet its profit margin. There are several strategies employed by the company including price strategy, promotion strategy, and managerial strategies among others. All these strategies are meant to increase the sales of the company in all the regional stores as a way of increasing the profit of the company.
To start with, the company employs a managerial promotional strategy where the junior staff is promoted when the vacancy arises rather than employing managers from external sources. This strategy aims to develop the management skills of the junior staff as well as rewarding hard working employees in the company. Ms. Obrien is promoted to the position of a pharmacy department manager to take the position of the dismissed manager.
This makes her more responsible as well as enabling her to develop her managerial skills. Every employee would like to be promoted because of the benefits that come with promotion. As Pergamit and Veum argue, the benefits of promotion include training receipt, increased wages, and supervisory responsibilities among others, which lead to more job satisfaction (1999, p.581). These benefits will motivate staff to work hard hence increasing the profitability of the company. For instance, in this case, Jackson pharmacies Inc. is planning to take Ms. Obrien to further training to improve her managerial skills.
According to Devora and Brookshire, promotion is always associated with wage increase and therefore a good strategy for motivating employees in a company (2007, p.311). The promotion of internal staff to the position of the management will also enable the company to reduce hiring costs, as the company does not need to incur costs in recruiting new departmental managers. The management of the company is committed to overseeing the staffs’ performance evaluation to ensure all the staff is performing as expected. This strategy has led to the dismissal of the former manager of the pharmacy department due to poor performance in his department.
The company is also using marketing as a strategy to increase its sales volume. As noted by Verhoef and Leeflang, marketing plays an important role in determining the performance of the company (2009, p.14). This argument is supported by Varadarajan who argues that marketing strategy is very crucial to the outcome of the company (2010, p.119). The products of the company are competitively priced as a way of attracting new customers to its products.
A low price strategy is also followed by heavy advertising to convince potential customers to buy their products. Pricing is one of the marketing strategies applied by different companies to increase their market share. As Elmaghraby and Keskinocak point, “marketers in many industries use pricing as a strategy to compete with rival companies” (2003, p.1289. These strategies may include offering various kinds of discounts to the consumers as well as lowering prices to attract more consumers. Lewis argues that offering a variety of discounts to consumers will help to build an optimal relationship with the customers (2005, p.986).
The company has also been employing heavy advertising strategies to reach more customers with their products. According to Feng and Li, advertising plays an important role in the pharmaceutical industry for its ability to add value (2010, p.85). Thus, pharmaceutical companies need to realize the importance of advertising.
First Step in Assuming Control
As Ms. Obrien, I am appointed to head a department that has not been performing as per the expectation of the company, which led to the dismissal of my former boss. Therefore as the new department manager, I have to come up with several management strategies that will help to restore the performance of the company. First, a thorough evaluation of the whole department is necessary to realize the reasons why the department was not doing well under the previous manager.
The evaluation of what has been happening will help the new manager to know the steps that need to be taken to restore the performance of the department. According to Kingsbury, program evaluation is very important when looking for ways to improve the already existing system (2011, p.32). This view is supported by Carman who argues that managers must conduct an evaluation frequently to ensure that they make the right decisions for improving the performance of the organization (2011, p.355).
Performance evaluation will enable the new manager to know what has been happening in the department and the necessary decisions to be taken to improve the performance of the department. According to Korosec, department-level management is more effective than organizational level management since there is a closer evaluation of all the operations in the department (2006, p. 221). It is also important for departmental managers to have performance measures, which are also evaluated regularly (Ge, Coronado, Krishnan 2010, p.75).
After carrying out a thorough evaluation, Ms. Obrien needs to come up with ways of addressing poor results in her department, which may include setting goals, and objectives of the department in which all the staff in the department will work towards their achievement. According to Jarzabkowski, the organization needs to have specific strategies that will help them to achieve their goals (2008, p.621).
For instance, the revenue of the department has been lower than projected, and therefore, setting goals to raise it will be paramount to the improvement of the department. The ratio of the prescription generated and the pharmacists has been very high and lowering it will be one of the priorities of the new manager. This will help in capital utilization as the number of workers and their output is balanced (Anjan 2011, p.23). After the implementation of the new strategies, it is also important for the manager to carry out a frequent evaluation to see whether the set goals are achieved. Good planning will help to raise the performance of the department, which has the power to change the performance of the whole organization (Sheridan, Slocum, Buda, &Thompson 1990, p.578).
This argument is also supported by Gerdin (2005, p.297) who argues that departmental performance may affect the performance of the whole organization. In conclusion, new managers need to come up with strategies that will help to improve the performance of the department. These strategies may be internal and external sourced but the source does not matter; adoption and implementation of the identified strategies play a central role in changing the company’s performance in face of declining performance.
Reference List
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