A-Level Business: Strategy

A framework earns marks when it is used as an argument and earns none when it is used as a label. So every question here gives you a firm in a situation and asks what follows — which quadrant, which strategy, why the change will be resisted — and the explanations say what each model actually claims rather than restating its name.

Two questions turn on distinctions students routinely blur. A bakery taking its existing sourdough into supermarkets is market development, not product development, because the loaf has not changed and the buyers have. A rope maker that sells only to mountain rescue teams is pursuing focus, not differentiation: it is certainly not competing on price, but what defines the strategy is how much of the market it has deliberately declined to serve — and that is also where its exposure lies, since a focused firm has no second segment to retreat into.

One question is built around what a model cannot do. A firm worried that a competitor will enter next year commissions a PESTLE analysis, and gets a good one. It still does not have an answer, because PESTLE describes conditions as they stand and the question asked for a forecast. Knowing where a framework stops is worth as much in the exam as knowing what it covers.

The rest: why takeovers fail on culture more often than on arithmetic, why a power culture resists a collaborative system, what Kotter and Schlesinger mean by participation, the difference between a global and a multidomestic marketing approach, how a weaker pound hits an importer, and how a stated corporate objective changes which investments get approved.

Every firm named here is invented. Nothing is taken from any exam board specification, past paper, mark scheme or textbook.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with any exam board and it is not an exam centre.

• Place a described decision in the right quadrant of Ansoff's matrix and name the risk that quadrant carries
• Identify cost leadership, differentiation and focus from what a firm actually does, and say where each is exposed
• Explain what being stuck in the middle means and what causes it
• State what a PESTLE analysis gives a firm and what it cannot answer
• Explain why a described organisational culture will resist a particular change, and identify Kotter and Schlesinger's participation approach
• Distinguish a global from a multidomestic marketing approach, and work out the effect of an exchange rate movement on an importer
• Say how a stated corporate objective changes which investment a firm approves

Marlow Rope, an invented firm, makes climbing rope for professional mountain rescue teams and for nobody else. It is not the cheapest rope on the market, and it has never tried to sell into the general outdoor market; it competes by knowing that one group of customers better than any rival does. Which of Porter's generic strategies is this, and where is the strategy exposed? — one of ten questions written for this set.