Introduction
Virgin is a top-labelled venture capital establishment that is among the world’s largely renowned and esteemed brands. Sir Richard Branson envisaged the Virgin group in 1970. It has since grown into incredibly successful businesses touching into various industries such as travel and transportation, mobile networks, financial and advisory services, music, media in addition to gym.
Virgin has formed over 300 branded companies all over the world, which have employed about 50,000 people in around 30 nations (Glenn, 1998). Worldwide Virgin branded revenues surpassed 11.5 billion pounds, which is roughly US $18 billion. This paper seeks to discuss the strategic planning of Virgin Atlantic that will help it achieve organizational success.
Company’s Mission and Vision
Virgin Atlantic in its mission believes that safety, security, and dependable delivery are deep-seated foundations of the whole lot of what they do. It simply states, “To grow profitable airlines, where people love to fly and where people love to work” (Virgin Atlantic, 2009).
The objectives are to identify the different stakeholders of the organization and their requirements towards the organization. Virgin therefore, aims at delivering quality service through employees’ empowerment and progress their customer’s experience by constantly seeking their feedback and through innovation.
The vision of virgin Atlantic is to build equity that incorporate people-friendliness and creativeness, therefore targeting on coming up with an icon of innovation, value and fun. It is simply making difference.
The goal is to re-enter the inactive markets or industries with fresh and innovative ideas as well as developments by offering customers diversified and wide variety of products. Core competencies of Virgin Atlantic include quality brand and image, branch out product and service portfolio, originality and creativity, excellent customer service as well as a distinctive organizational structure.
For instance, Virgin is known for its quality offers for its business class clients outdoing first class services of its competitors (Virgin Atlantic, 2009).
The strategic planning process
Strategic planning determines where the organization is going to be in the coming years, how it will get there, and how it will determine the achievement of the objectives. There are a number of issues involved for instance a SWOT analysis, a plan, goals, objectives and an appropriate model.
SWOT analysis should be carried out both internally and externally to enhance strategic decision-making (Pakhare, 2007). At internal level, the analysis helps in future planning as it articulates present operations. It can divulge trends, indiscretions, limitations, as well as opportunities.
There should be a mission, which the organization is aligning with. There should also be well set goals and objectives to be achieves because of strategy planning. An action plan or an activity is the implementation of the strategic plan where duties are allocated and resources mobilized.
Evaluation should be carried out to establish whether the strategy plan has worked. Strategic consulting can also be used in strategic planning as well as using personality and style match. Rewards and incentives can also be used for both the employees and the customers.
Policies for execution of company’s vision
The planning technique to be adopted depends on the organization’s leadership, organization culture, intricacy of the business environment, organization size and proficiency of planners (Blair and Hitchcock, 2001). The techniques used are goals-based, issues-based, organic and scenario planning.
Goals-based is the most frequent technique and it is initiated from the organization’s mission, values and vision, goals directed to the mission, approach to realize the goals, along with action planning. Issues-based technique regularly initiates examination of issues facing the business, strategies to deal with those issues and action plans.
Organic strategic planning may begin by communicating the business’s vision plus values, and action plans to reach the vision while remaining on those values. Planners can go for a particular approach like appreciative inquiry (Glenn, 1998).
In addition to this, Virgin Atlantic’s vision is to build equity that incorporate people-friendliness and creativeness, therefore targeting on coming up with an icon of innovation, value and fun. It is just making difference (Virgin Atlantic, 2009). The goal is to re-enter the inactive markets or industries with unmarked and innovative ideas on top of developments by offering customers diversified and wide variety of products.
Company’s stakeholders
Just like many other organizations, Virgin Atlantic has several stakeholders some of which include, its customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and competitors just to mention a few. Virgin Atlantic is keen to ensure that its employees are satisfied with terms of their employment as well as appreciating the working conditions.
The aim of Virgin is to deliver eminent service through employees’ empowerment and enhance customer’s experience by always seeking their feedback and increased innovation. Secondly, Virgin Atlantic boasts of outstanding core competencies in terms of quality brand and image, branch out products and service portfolio, innovation and creativity, first-rate customer service as well as a distinctive organizational structure.
For instance, Virgin is recognized for high-end quality offers for its business class clients outdoing first class services of its competitors (Virgin Atlantic, 2009). This ensures that their customers get value for the money they spend on Virgin Atlantic services and products.
Virgin Atlantic has made great strides towards ensuring their customers that they care about the environment in terms of energy, pollution, sanitation, recycling papers, vending cups, cartridges and amenity kits as well as aluminium cans. It is also taking energy conservation measures by making efforts to reduce fuel consumption, for instance by 30% by 2020 and 10% by 2012.
It also intends to enhance capacity to fuel all its main UK sites by 2020. The Company is also known to practice healthy competition by not acting in ways that could affect the existence of its competitors. The shareholders of the company earn dividends from the profits generated since the company is not only profit oriented but looks into the wellbeing of the shareholders.
Conclusion
Virgin Atlantic has created a name for itself over the years and in various industries. It has touched different industries and it is clear that it requires strategic planning as it seeks to face competition and venture into new markets. Overexpansion could be a problem but with a good strategy, it can enhance its venture and profits (Philip, 2003).
Virgin Atlantic enjoys a comparative advantage in its brand name (Virgin name) as well technology that enables venture into inactive market. There is also a need to involve various stakeholders especially customers and employees and Virgin Atlantic is doing well so far especially through the “hands-off policy”.
However, the challenges in finding new markets need to be addressed if Virgin is to succeed in its quest for a vast empire. It cannot keep on relying on the inactive markets and thus a strategy should be engineered to penetrate the competitive markets. In its attempt to expand, extend, or develop new products it is vital that they carry out a proficient research on the market.
Reference List
Blair, A. and Hitchcock, D. (2001) Environment and Business. London: Routledge.
Glenn, R. (1998). How Richard Branson Works Magic, Strategy and Business. Web.
Pakhare, J. (2007). Management concepts: The four functions of management. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Philip, D. (2003). Designing and managing the supply chain: concepts, strategies, and case studies. New Jersey, NJ: Prentice Hall
Virgin Atlantic. (2009). Virgin Atlantic mission statement.