Midterm Quiz # 6

• It is sometimes called environmental scanning or industry analysis.

  External Audit
• It identifies a firm's major competitors and its particular strengths and weaknesses in relation to a sample firm's strategic position.

  Competitive Profile Matrix
• Major competitors' weaknesses can represent.

  External Opportunities
• It focuses on identifying and evaluating trends and events beyond the control of a single firm, such as increased foreign competition, population shifts to the sunbelt, an aging society, consumer fear of traveling, and stock market volatility.

  External Audit
• These include periodicals, journals, reports, government documents, abstracts, books, directories, news papers, and manuals.

  Published Sources
• Best present estimates of the impact of major external factors, over which the manager has little if any control, but which may exert a significant impact on performance or the ability to achieve desired results.

  Assumptions
• It refers to firms that offer similar products and services in the same market.

  Competitors
• It represents major opportunities and threats that must be considered in formulating strategies.

  Technological Forces
• The strategy of Dunkin' Donuts, the 99cent breakfast wrap called.

  Wake-Up Wrap
• It is the extent to which the type and amount of a firm's internal resources are comparable to a rival.

  Resource Similarity
• These includes customer surveys, market research, speeches at professional and shareholders' meetings, television programs, interviews, and conversations with stakeholders.

  Unpublished Sources
• It is the force that will directly affect both suppliers and distributors.

  External Forces
• They contended that external factors in general and the industry in which a firm chooses to compete has a stronger influence on the firm's performance than do the internal functional decisions managers make in marketing, finance, and the like.

  I/O Theorists
• It is an educated assumption about future trends and events.

  Forecasts
• It can be geographic or product areas or segments.

  Markets
• He contended that organizational performance will be primarily determined by industry forces.

  Michael Porter
• It provides important contributions to our understanding of how to gain competitive advantage.

  I/O Research
• It is a systematic and ethical process for gathering and analyzing information about the competition's activities and general business trends to further a business's own goals.

  Competitive Intelligence Programs
• They advocated that external factors are more important than internal factors in a firm achieving competitive advantage.

  I/O View
• It allows strategists to summarize and evaluate economic, social cultural, demographic, environmental, political, governmental, legal, technological, and competitive information.

  External Factor Evaluation Matrix
• It can be defined as the number and significance of markets that a firm competes in with rivals.

  Market Commonality
• Major competitors' strengths may represent.

  External Threats
• It is determined largely by competitive positioning within an industry, according to I/O advocates.

  Competitive Advantage
• Strong misperception about business intelligence is that it is an unethical business practice.

  Intelligence Gathering
• Reveals key opportunities and threats confronting an organization so that managers can formulate strategies to take advantage of the opportunities and avoid or reduce the impact of threats.

  External Audit