Marriott is an international business venture, which deals with offering hospitality services to its clients. It has several business units in various countries around the world. Marriott International has been in operation for about 60 years. This has enabled it to spread its wings to 73 countries with over 3700 hotel units. It offers over twenty different brands of hotels, some of which are franchises for instance J W Marriott, The Ritz Carlton and Marriott Executive Apartments.
Most of its customers are business people running business errands in multinational ventures. Mr. Marriott who is the Managing Director, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and proprietor of this group of hotels has actualized a myriad of business strategies that would not only increase the profitability of his businesses but also attract as many customers as possible.
A business or corporate strategy is a long term plan of operation that directs all the activities of an organization, and aimed towards achieving competitive advantage over its competitors. Strategizing also helps a business develop proper ways to utilize its resources within a challenging business environment.
Additionally, it helps a business to meet the diverse needs of its stakeholders for instance; customers, board of directors, neighboring community and government agencies. Marriott International began as a sole proprietorship formerly owned by his family several years ago, but has developed over the years into a world class group of hotels because of these strategies.
The strategies employed include corporate strategies; this can be defined as a future business plan focused at improving the general scope and purpose of the business so that stakeholder’s expectations are met. Secondly, there is the business unit strategy; this is concerned with monitoring how a business competes in the market, its customer expectations and exploiting new business opportunities.
Third, there is a type of strategy that deals with organizing each part of the business such as how the various business units are managed. This strategy is called operational strategy. Marriott International uses this strategy to run its various groups of hotels since they are focused on serving specific customer needs.
Marriott International uses three main components to manage the selected strategies. A thoroughly selected corporate strategy just like that used by Marriott International should have a section for strategic analysis, strategic choice and strategic implementation. Strategic analysis entails conducting a Strength Weakness, Opportunity and Threat (SWOT) analysis of the business in order to determine its operational capabilities.
In addition to identifying favorable internal business factors that will steer the business towards high profit margins, external factors such as threat of entry of new competitors into the market are identified. The market is then segmented as it is the case of Marriott International.
The management of Marriott’s group of hotels appreciates the fact that there are various customers with diverse needs. There are those people who will prefer being accommodated in executive hotel suits while there are those who cannot sustain a luxurious lifestyle. This strategy is called market segmentation where the management of a business decides to fragment the market according to customer convenience. This is why the Marriott groups of hotels run different hotel brands.
After segmenting the market the strategic manager develops a different pricing strategy for all its diverse customers under the 4P’s of international business management. The P’s include place, product, price and promotion. All these factors are then interrelated one after the other in such a way that it achieves not only efficiency but also effectiveness.
The process of strategic choice involves selecting strategy options while considering the stakeholders expectations. Implementation poses the greatest challenge to many organizations since it requires translation of paper work into action.