Marketing

Porter's 5 forces

The five-forces model, as developed by Micheal E. Porter, illustrates the biggest factors that may enter into the strategic decision-making process. These are, on a vertical level, suppliers and customers, on a horizontal level, competition from products, new entrants (can also be vertical), and rivals. To explain the horizontal/vertical, often when you talk of horizontal, you mean companies and products that are on the same level as you, competing for the attention of the same customers (and suppliers). Vertical relationships are those which a company depends on, either their relationship with suppliers or their relationship with customers. Each of these also operates on their own horizontal axis. The more powerful players on that level become, the more they can affect players on the other levels. There are different levels of importance per force, depending on the context and type of the firm. When a company is more powerful horizontally, a market-leader, even a monopolist, it does not have to worry about suppliers as much, and is perhaps able, financially, to integrate vertically, taking over some of its suppliers and/or some of the middle-men that stand between the company and its customers. Vertical integration can be important when you want to control the supply chain for some reason, e.g. to increase the level of quality of your products. It can also become important if competition on your horizontal axis is threatening or may become so in the future. 3 examples You can see this play out in a number of retail-situations. Apple, which is strictly focussed on design and marketing, outsources the manufacturing of most of its products, but is fairly vertically orientated towards the customer-side, doing most of its business in its retail-locations and online stores. Because of this concentration of power in the middle and proximity to the customer, it also has more power over its suppliers, able to make strong demands, and it's also better equipped to compete with horizontal players like HP or Sony, who are not as vertically integrated towards the consumer. The added benefit of a close customer-presence is also that you can use this as an opportunity to create customer-focussed products, something a lot of non-verticallly integrated players are not so good at. Another fascinating company is Amazon, who spotted an opportunity to surpass brick & mortar stores, by becoming a distributor with a web-based store-front. Traditionally, the book-industry was organised as follows. A book gets printed, it then gets distributed, it then lands in a store, and then the customer buys it. Amazon integrated three of these functions: distribution, store, and customers (four, if you include ebooks into the formula). The end-result was that the customer became empowered: he could review books, even sell books second-hand. Which disempowered other stores where this was not possible, and publishers, who were before able to simply push out best-sellers downstream. Publishers are still powerful of course, essentially acting as a gatekeeper to writers, but this will change as soon as online publishing can be consumed comfortably. A final example is Ikea, which is surprisingly similar to Amazon. It also started as a distributor, back in the day when a store-front was a newspaper-advert and phone-line. Ikea saved money, by working closely together with manufacturers in Poland, even building and buying machinery for them. The end-result were standardised designs, at low costs, and produced on a massive scale.