Strategic Management

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ZARA has their own centralized distribution system to make the delivery process directly from internal and external supplier. This system can make sure the merchandise can be delivery in time. In summer 2003, Because of the industry’s expansion ZARA was contribute the second distribution center and build a warehouse near the local airport at Zaragoza which is greatly improve the capacity of the distribution system.

ZARA’s stores usually allocate in some big shopping mall or the most impressive parts of the city and they use windows display method to introduce their new collection and use their store to promote its market image. ZARA spend less expense on media advertising, only from the start of the sales period at the end of the season. Its new item are first displayed in its store. Besides the traditional new collection display method, ZARA has a unique product display method which is different from other competitors. The manager will carefully select the uniform for the employee. Especially for the sales staff, this is because ZARA’s manager believe that the uniform is a good way for them to display their products. Therefore, the staff uniform from ZARA are changed frequently and the store manager will select the uniforms from the current season’s collection and submitted to headquarters and let them to make decisions (Z14).

ZARA teams believe that only the innovation team is able to keep competitive advantages within the fashion market. Therefore, the sales team of ZARA has sharpen sense of fashion and the store manager have ability to decide whether the product can continue on sale or not. At this moment, the store manager are able to transmit customers’ data and share their own opinion to the design team.

ZARA has always focus on employee’s self-development. Each of the section management of ZARA will provide some training courses for the new employee because they understand that such training courses could improve employee’s performance and increase their operational efficiency (Z14).

ZARA’s international expansion faster than other competitors. Based on their experiences in the home country, ZARA develop themselves and they quickly open a flagship store in major cities (Z15). At that time, flagship store was a new idea. Before ZARA choose to enter to some new market, the commercial team from headquarter will do some research and do the macro and micro analysis then sending to headquarter to do the final decision (Z16). Both macro and micro analysis are necessary when the company want to enter to a new market, specific company should focus on the intersection between macro and micro analysis of resulting new values (Treen. D, 2012).

Conclusion

In conclusion, the key competitive advantages of ZARA are its special retailer strategy and its unique management system and most of the resources from ZARA are meets the requirements of the Resource Value Based theory. For the employees, ZARA provide lots of opportunities to improve their technical ability and working experiences. And these kind of strategies are able to improve organization’s efficiency and based on these competitive advantages the final reason that ZARA achieve success is because ZARA have ability to provide attractive product for the customer in a short period of time.

Reference

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Treen, D. (2012) Overcome Why Strategic Plans Fail, for a Breakout Strategy[online].United states: Trafford Publishing.[Accessed: 23 November 2015]

Wernerfelt, B. (1984) A Resource-Based View of the Firm. Strategic Management Journal, 5:171-180

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