Business Integration For Internal And External Analysis: Case Study Of Roots Canada

Background of the Company

Discuss about the Business Integration for Internal and External Analysis.

In today’s world, there are numerous organizations under a similar form of market. It is quite essential for that particular company to contain some specific attributes that acts as their advantage over the other companies in the market (Pinder, 2014). These companies trade their products and services in the market, by focussing on their strengths and overcoming their weaknesses. This helps them in promoting their products and raising the demand among the customers (Castillo, 2017).  In order to analyse the comparative advantages of a particular company, about the others in the same field, an extensive internal and external analysis of the particular company is quite necessary.

This report aims at analysing the comparative analysis of a Canadian based apparel company, Roots. The report at first presents a background of the company, which helps n acknowledging the history of the organization, followed by an internal and external analysis of the organization. This would help in gaining the appropriate scenario in which the organization prevails. Followed by the analysis, a comparative analysis is done, based on the competitors. By analysing the competition, some recommendations is listed at the end of the report.

As stated in the official website Roots Canada. (2017), Roots Canada limited is a private brand of Canada since 1973, which deals with the production of apparels, footwear, leather bags and other athletic wears along with home furnishing products. the workhouse of the organization is situated in Toronto, Ontario. The firm has so far employed 1600 individuals. Till now, Roots Canada has been able to operate 210 stores all over Canada, United States and some parts of Asia till now. It has been successful in shipping its products to 50 countries online. This thereby shows that the organization has been aiming to raise their market share internationally. It does not believe in confining itself to the boundaries of the home country.

Initially, Roots Canada has been founded by Don Green and Michael Budman for producing footwear. They were under the name of negative heel shoes, before they planned at expanding their products to other sectors of the market. In the year 1976, Roots Canada had contributed to the Olympic Games, which provided the organization with the promotional facility of their products. Since, then, the organization has continued its expanded involvement in the Olympic Games. Currently the organization has been sold to Searchlight Capital LP, whereas, the previous owners are now considered as the minor stakeholders of the firm.

Internal Analysis

In order to analyse the internal environmental conditions of the organization, SWOT analysis would be conducted that would help in framing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the firm.

The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the Roots Canada can be summarized to frame the tows analysis, which would help in stating how the organisation must improve or facilitate its future activities. In order to do so, TOWS analysis would be conducted:

The TOWS analysis of the firm helps in gaining a clear view of how the future prospects of the organization must be undertaken. This would provide them with the scope of improving their productivity and thereby raising their market share (Choi, 2014).

In order to analyse external environment of the organization, PEST analysis has been conducted below:

Political – Roots Company is established in Canada, which is considered as one of the developed countries of the world. The country has a fast developing background concerning the commercial market. The fashion sector of the country is quite competitive in nature. Various new companies have evolved in recent years, with multiple domestic and international brands (Fleisher & Bensoussan, 2015). Hence, it could be stated that the competition faced by the organization is quite strong in nature.

Economical – Canada is a well-developed country, which thereby shows that the per capita income of the individuals is quite high in nature (Loureiro, 2017). Therefore, the organization would be efficient enough to generate high sales growth in the economy.

Social - the Roots Canada has been quite socially acknowledged by the people of the country. It has contributed the footwear products to the Canadian athletes of the Olympic Games. This has been quite influential for the firm to promote its brand all over the world.

Technological – Roots Canada has been able to introduce its products all over Asia by introducing an online retail application. This helped the firm to promote its products at a wider scale.

After attaining the pest analysis, the external environmental analysis can be easily stated for the organization.

According to the various new and old organizations in Canada, the competitive analysis of the retail outlets could be framed in the form of three subheadings based on market commonality vs. resource similarity. There are three aspects, which could be framed based on this context, namely, indirect competitors, direct competitors and potential competitors (Tiedemann, Ide & Schöbel, 2015).

External Analysis

Direct competitors: The direct competitors of Roots Canada are The Gap Inc and American eagle outfitters. Both the organization sells the same products as that of the concerned from and focus on the same kind of price strategy. The quality maintained by all firms is of the same category.  

Indirect competitors: The indirect competitors of the organization are various new competitors in the market such as Raised by Wolves, Philip Sparks, Klaxon Howl, etc. these brands have the same approach towards the customers, with slightly differentiated products.

Potential competitors: the potential competitors of the Roots Canada are the international brands who have the ability to enter the Canadian market and raise their market share in the country (Liu & Tyagi, 2016).

Based on the competitive analysis of the Roots Canada, it could be stated that the organization being one of the oldest and a vital firm of the country has a considerable amount of market share in the retail sector of Canada. The main drivers for the competitive behaviour of the organization are that it has promoted its products by taking part in the Olympic Games. This has provided the firm, a wider platform for its products unlike the other companies. Hence, it has strong competitive powers over the other, being an old brand.

The promotional activities have changed with the upcoming years. New firms have acknowledged various different techniques of promoting the products (Li, et al., 2015). The Roots Canada are affected by such competitive attack. The competitive advantage of the organization is that it focuses on a wide variety of products and services, rather than focussing on a single type. Hence, this gives them the opportunity to focus on a larger segment of population.

In order to improve the competitive advantage of the Roots Canada, the company must utilise various new techniques of promoting its products worldwide and highlight its wide variety of goods available with the help of online retail store (Ngai, et al., 2016). This would provide them with the superiority in the market mong the new competitors and the existing ones.     

Conclusion

The Roots Canada is considered as one of the most important organization of Canada which specialises itself in a wide variety of apparels both domestically and internationally. On conducting the internal and external analysis, the competitive analysis of the organization has been successfully framed which shows the drivers of comparative advantage for the organization. With the advances to be made with respect to their promotional activities of the organization, the Roots can overcome the discrepancies from the competitors in the market.

Reference

Castillo, J. (2017). The Relationship between Big Five Personality Traits, Customer Empowerment and Customer Satisfaction in the Retail Industry.

Choi, T. M. (2014). Fashion branding and Consumer Behaviors. Hong Kong: Springer.

Fleisher, C. S., & Bensoussan, B. E. (2015). Business and competitive analysis: effective application of new and classic methods. FT Press.

Li, E., Liu, W. S., Yuan, V., Lam, E., & Lam, M. (2015). Democratization of Fashion: a Study of Co-Creation of Cultural Heritage. NA-Advances in Consumer Research Volume 43.

Liu, Y., & Tyagi, R. K. (2016). Outsourcing to convert fixed costs into variable costs: A competitive analysis. International Journal of Research in Marketing.

Loureiro, S. M. C. (2017). Fashion Luxury Brands: Bridging the Gaps Between Cutting-Edge Fashion and Corporate Social Responsibility Concerns. In Luxury Fashion Retail Management (pp. 185-198). Springer Singapore.

Ngai, E. W., Lam, S. S., Poon, J. K. L., Shen, B., & Moon, K. K. (2016). Design and Development of Intelligent Decision Support Prototype System for Social Media Competitive Analysis in Fashion Industry. Journal of Organizational and End User Computing (JOEUC), 28(2), 13-32.

Pinder, C. C. (2014). Work motivation in organizational behavior. Psychology Press.

Roots Canada. (2017). Roots Canada. Retrieved 22 February 2017, from https://Rootsinformation.com/

Tiedemann, M., Ide, J., & Schöbel, A. (2015, February). Competitive analysis for multi-objective online algorithms. In International Workshop on Algorithms and Computation (pp. 210-221). Springer International Publishing.