Mgmt 499:  Cases in Strategic Management

Individual Case Assignment – Due 11:30pm, Sunday, August 8

Case 7:  Coach Inc. in 2012:  Its Strategy in the ‘Accessible’ Luxury Goods Market  (C-73 through C-83).

This assignment is an individualassignment, worth 15 out of the 100 pointsfor the semester.  Present your analysis from the point of view of a consultant hired to advise the Chairman of the Board. Thus, your audience is familiar with all the facts of the case; do not waste time restating case data. Your objective is to analyze, interpret, draw conclusions, make recommendations and projections that are unique and must be explained and justified.

The following guidelines should help you in writing this case study

• The time period is the one covered by the case as reported in the textbook. No outside research is allowed.  if you quote something, put it in quotes, and list the page number after the quote.
• Make use of concepts and theories from the text and class discussions. You need not cite the text directly nor should you explain/develop the concepts or theories. Please assume that I have knowledge and understanding of management theories. Simply make the logical connections between the concept or theory and the case issue to which it applies.
• The case must be typed, 11 or 12-pt. font, double-spaced, with one-inch margins.  It will probably be six to ten pages in length (excluding appendices), but it can be shorter or longer if you wish.  No cover page is needed. Use section headers in your report – the section header for each section is italicized in the list below.   
• Your report should be well organized, succinct, and well written. The report should read as a unified piece of work and flow smoothly. Number pages consecutively from beginning of document to the end.
• PROOFREAD! In addition to content, grammar, spelling, and style are important! I will take off points for not following these guidelines and for submitting sloppy reports.
• See my note about plagiarism at the end of this document.

Note about appendices:I have listed the five appendices you must include.  Remember to be as complete as you can in your appendices, so that when you discuss a few of the items in your text, you can be confident that they are the key items to mention.  I suggest you create the appendices first, even though they appear last in your report.  They are intended to give you data to justify your conclusions in the text of the report.  I will give you general feedback on two of your appendices (your choice of which two) if submitted to the DropBox for this purpose by April 16.  I will return comments by April 19, so that you can make updates before submitting your full paper on April 26.

For each item below, I use the following rubric in my scoring:

Each of the following items is worth one or two points for a total of 15 for the analysis:

Deductions will be taken for typos, word usage, grammar, or incomplete sentences.

Plagiarism:

I take plagiarism very seriously and routinely use plagiarism software as a precaution for major assignments where many people are writing about similar topics or with respect to course materials that may be available online.  As stated in the student handbook, "In simple terms, plagiarism is using another person's words or ideas and presenting them as your own, without acknowledging the original source. This is a serious academic offense. Academic sanctions can include receiving a failing grade for an assignment or an entire course."  In this class, you risk failing (getting a 0) on the paper, but not failing the course (unless a 0 on the paper makes you fail). 

I submit all papers to turnitin.com and then view each originality report to see if there is any obvious copying of materials or minimal changing of words from someone else's work.  Remember to put quotes around anything that is directly copied from the case (and put the page number in parentheses after the quote).  No external data gathering is required or allowed. 

Sometimes people inadvertently plagiarize, so I am giving you the option of seeing what I will see with respect to your paper.  If you wish to view your own originality report before you submit your paper to the DropBox, you need to create a student account in turnitin.com.  Here is the link to the directions to do so.  

http://turnitin.com/en_us/training/student-training/creating-a-new-user-profile

You will need two pieces of information:  The class id:  7355568 and the enrollment password:  20132014.  Once you have created a profile and log in, you will see the folder that is set up for you to submit your paper and view your Originality Report. 

I much prefer taking actions to reduce or eliminate plagiarism, as well as inform others about what constitutes plagiarism than deal with an incident after it happens.

SWOT Analysis

Instructions (remove these instructions in your final document):  State all of these as full sentences (not just a phrase).  Pick only the top 5 or 6 for each box, and place in priority order – the most important item should be listed first.  You may not need all the categories in the Strengths box – in other words, if you have enough (5 or 6) distinctive competencies and core competencies, you do not need to list other competencies and / or resources.

When describing the external opportunities and external threats, be sure to identify both the opportunity or threat, as well as the trend (or industry force) that is creating that opportunity or threat.

Examples:  Due to the increasing strength of the economies in those countries, Company X could expand into developing countries such as Brazil, India and China.

Company Y is threatened by the consolidation of the industry because this will increase rivalry due to the likelihood of price wars.

Value Chain Analysis                                                          

Summary, including:

• Describe conclusions that you can draw – do they have a distinctive competency? 
• Also, are there any Distinctive Competencies that are due to their integration across multiple areas of the value chain?  In other words, capabilities that are not by themselves distinctive competencies, but become distinctive competencies (capabilities and activities that they do better than any of their competitors, as far as you know) due to their integration across the value chain?
• Discuss sustainability – anything fit all 4 criteria?
• Any areas they could develop into a distinctive competency? 
• Which is stronger – their strengths, or their weaknesses?

Macro Environment Analysis

Industry definition:  

Summary paragraph describing what you think the most influential trends are, and why they will potentially have a significant impact on the industry you are analyzing.

Selected Financial Ratios for Coach Inc., 2007-2011

Data can be calculated from case Exhibits 1 and 2.  For formulas to use in the calculations, see pp 83-86 in Chapter 4 of the text.  These pages also tell you how to interpret the data.

Include a summary of trends over time – How is Coach doing?  Are there significant changes over various years, or against standard benchmarks (see pp. 84 and 85 for what constitutes a “good” value for most of these).