The retail mix analysis for Zara in uk Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

The retail mix analysis for Zara in uk - Essay Example Competitive Advantage in Zara Zara in the United Kingdom is a successful Fashion that has been in existence for over five years and has kept a high profile as a supply chain. The administration of Zara has been reporting the contributing factors to the retailer’s achievements as the use of modern information exchange. The first element of competitive advantage of Zara is majorly proper monitoring and study of the dynamic consumer needs. Zara through the Marketing Department conducts systematic research on the specific needs of the fast fashion consumers in order to provide relevant services and design items (Tadros, 2010). This has led to sustainable business due to unique designs and fashions for customer orders. The second aspect of competitive advantage is Financial Leveraging. Zara through partnership with other fast fashion retail chain stores in the UK manages to access adequate funding for its production and operational costs. This enables Zara to triumph against its cl ose competitors such as Top-Shop and Mango. Partnership enables Zara to spread its financial obligation and deficits that may arise to the partners and eases the financial burden of entire organization (Laermer & Simmons, 2007). Thirdly, Zara has a systematic and strategic implementation of the fast fashion model, which allows flexibility of decision making by allowing members staff to get involved in decision making indirectly through contribution of ideas. As this takes place, and indeed, it really happens, it applies creativity, technicality and excellence in production among other departments through the sharing of information. Fourth, Zara exercises teamwork (Pahl & Mohring, 2009). As they work in a big team, the members of staff nurture the potential to make valid decisions and at the right speed. It also becomes easier to implement the emerging needs for changes in the manufacturing sector in a profound fast fashion system. The team building takes the decision makers through the ordinary models to construct aspects of flexibility in the lines of production. Finally, there is a perpetual accessibility of information, which makes Zara to predict the future market needs based on the changes in fashions and styles in the rapidly transforming markets and the changing trends of economic development. 2. SWOT Analysis of Zara 2.1. Strength Zara has a number of strengths that enables it to have an upper hand against its competitors. First, Zara is able to access large quantities of stock based on its leveraging and access to finances. It is a boosting factor for its production targets, by which it stands to gain through the economy scale. Majority of its competitors do not have stable cash flow, hence they do not hold as much stock as Zara (Kardes et al., 2011). An Example of such competitors is Mango. The second strength for Zara is the establishment of market and research through which it produces relevant and fast moving products and services. Zara keeps a go od track of the market products and identifies the relevant needs and specifications of customers. Zara does a proper market study through its marketing promotions and gathers the consumer opinions to enable the production sector to adopt the emerging customer requirement. Fast fashion business has thus favored Zara since it began its implementation of flexibility in production brands. 2.2. Weakness Zara, like other fast fashion chain stores in the UK has its weaknesses, which poses a risk of losses and a