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Example Of A SWOT Analysis Paper

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SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (Ferrell and Hartline, 2014, p. 39). A SWOT analysis evaluates both the internal factors (strengths and weaknesses) and external factors (opportunities and threats) that create advantages and disadvantages to a company when serving its customers (p. 39). A SWOT analysis is extremely beneficial in helping a company determine areas of improvement (p. 39). Internal factors examine the actual company being analyzed while external factors examine the external market (customers and competition) (p. 85).
Internal strengths and weaknesses include things such as financial performance, organizational communication, product quality and availability, market share, customer perceptions, human resources, and production facilities and capacity (Ferrell and Hartline, 2014, p. 85). External opportunities and threats consist of things like technology, social trends, government regulations, and economic conditions (p. 85). A company can also determine what competitive advantages it has by conducting a SWOT analysis (p. 85). A SWOT analysis is simple and does not require any special training; however, there are several things that must be done to ensure that the analysis is productive (p. 87). Some of these things include conducting separate analyses for each product-market, identifying any current or potential competitors, sharing information across all areas of the company, looking at issues through the eyes of a customer, determining the causes of each issue, and maintaining separation between internal and external issues (p. 88-92).
Four of Ford’s strengths include research and development, a strong position in the United States, strong market share all over the world, and a solid portfolio of automotive products. Ford has an extremely strong research and development capabilities that are helpful in launching new vehicles (Ford Motor Company SWOT Analysis, 2016, p. 6). Ford recorded $6.4 billion of engineering and R&D costs in FY2013 and $6.9 billion in FY2014 (p. 6). In January of 2015, Ford opened a new Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto to speed up developing technologies and experiments regarding customer experience, mobility, connectivity, etc.

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