Attracting Business to Florida

Part One: Market Analysis

Florida is a state well known for setting up small businesses. A region where the business individuals enjoy tax advantages over small businesses in other states. More so, housing several startup hubs which offer ready access to investors. However, the region is characterized by seasonal highs and lows of Economy, a need to have a strategic plan. The plan should primarily focus on evaluating the competitiveness of businesses. This section is a research that will embark on evaluating the growth of businesses and industries and the attraction of new businesses and industries in the State of Florida (Giudici et al., 2020). This analysis will be made successful by using Porte’s Five Forces to examine the competitive strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in attracting and growing business and industry.

Before setting up a new business, it is essential to conduct a market analysis. The primary purpose of the analysis is to carry out an industrial analysis specifically aimed at assessing the general industry environment in which the industry will be competing. More importantly, conduct a target analysis where the industry or the business identifies and quantifies the target customers for their products and competitive analysis where the business or industry identifies its competitors and analyses their strengths and weaknesses (Öneren et al., 2017). Primarily, this paper is concerned with the Five Forces and SWOT analysis, with a central aim of determining the attractiveness of an industry in Florida State. This analysis aims to provide a starting point for the formulation of strategies and to understand the competitive landscape in which the company operates.

Porter’s Five Forces analysis helps develop a framework that helps analyze the levels of competition within a certain industry. This framework is essential when starting new businesses or when entering a new industry sector. Our area of concern in the State of Florida, on attracting new businesses using this framework. However, it is essential to understand the strengths of opening a new business in Florida State when dealing with this framework. Florida is a state that sets strengths, which attract new business people and industry investors; being the largest state in the US makes it possess more possibilities to engage in business. Additionally, other strengths include lower living costs, which results in improved quality of life. These efforts combined with five forces are deemed to increase competition as well as the number of competitors. Other strengths that help attract new businesses in Florida include favorable tax structure, local governments’ pro new business, and a population with many cultures and high tourism rates (Dalton, 2019). These collective strengths and forces are essential in determining an industry's profit potential, which directly translates to its attractiveness. It is also important to note that, when the forces are intense, almost all the companies will not earn any attractive returns on investment; however, there is room for higher returns with mild forces.

However, there have been many weaknesses in setting a new business in Florida. One of the weaknesses is unhealthy competition from rivals in the Florida marketplace. In this force, the initial step is to identify the number of existing competitors and what each competitor can do best. This form of competition is highest when only a few businesses sell a product or a service, more precisely, experienced when the industry is growing (Porter, 2008). The reasons attributed to these weaknesses are low education levels, which are also a result of underpaid teachers, and lack of unionized workforces. Another weakness is deemed to originate from lower instants of high-technology industries.

For the business to improve their performance, they need to embrace the opportunity. Some of these opportunities include the bargaining power of the customers, which examines the customers' influence and the impacts they impose on pricing and quality of goods and services. The power of the customers is greatest when they are few, and the sellers are plentiful, which offers them a wider variety of options to shift to. On the other hand, the power is minimal in instances where the customers purchase products in small amounts and the seller offers products that are different from those of their competitors. This is an opportunity for the business to provide the customers what they need best; this is an opportunity to improve the companies performance.

The Bargaining power of suppliers is an analysis of the power compelled by the business suppliers and the control power over the rise of its prices. This is attributed to a direct decline or lower of business profitability. This is also aimed at the assessment of the number of raw materials and other available resources. If the market has few suppliers, they possess great power, which directly impacts businesses. These businesses will greatly benefit when there are multiple suppliers. The diversity of supplier’s base is a limitation to the suppliers' bargaining power, providing an advantage of diminished supplier’s leverage.

On the contrary, Florida has been with threats that affect the business investors. These are externally sourced challenges that face business individuals. One of the threats to new entrants in business is measured in terms of how easy or difficult it is for rivals or competitors to join the marketplace. When the joining of the marketplace is easy for new competitors, there are high risks of established business markets shares getting depleted. However, the existence of a barrier to entry, which ranges from access to inputs, absolute cost advantages, strong brand identity, and economies of scale, is a limitation to the entry of new players into the market (Pádraig, 2017). This limitation is evident due to the large capital needed in branding and advertising as well as creating product demand.

The threat of substitute products or services: This analysis is done to determine the ease of customers switching from a business’s product or service to those offered by a competitor. In this analysis, various analyses are conducted with the first targeting to examine the number of available competitors, comparing the price and qualities of products or services of the business being examined, and the amount of profit earned by the competitors. These are the efforts that need to be analyzed to determine if the business can lower its costs even more.  The threat of substitutes is addressed through informed switching of costs, either immediate or long-term, also considering customers' inclination to change.

Moreover, after the analysis, it is essential to develop strategies for success. These are strategies aimed at expanding the business’s competitive advantage. Some of the strategies developed include cost leadership, where the business focuses on increasing profits by reducing costs. This is achieved by charging industry-standard prices or increasing market shares by reducing sale prices while embracing profits retention (Kung’u, 2017). Another strategy is differentiation, where the business has to make its products better than those of its competitors; this can be achieved through research and development and ensure effective sales and marketing. More precisely, the business needs to focus on niche markets where they can sell their goods. This can be harnessed through a robust understanding of marketplaces, sellers, buyers, and the available competitors.

Part Two: Strategic Positioning Analysis

Creating new businesses needs a strategic positioning for its success. This is through embracing effective and efficient strategies that keep the business operation competitive. The relative positioning of a business or industry is paramount in determining its performance. Strategic positioning is key in reflecting its choices to build its value relative to its rivals or competitors. In this strategy, the ultimate goal is to achieve a premium price or lower costs for the company (Haseeb et al., 2019). This section’s central focus is on creating strategies for Florinda’s Unique Selling Points and the strategies recommended by the civic leaders to ensure that the businesses maintain a sustainable competitive advantage in growing the existing businesses and industries and attracting new businesses to this state.

Some of the strategies that I would highly recommend to the civic leaders concerning sustainable competitive advantage are discussed in the context below. These recommendations and ideas target the growing businesses and attracting new ones to this place. These strategies focus on ensuring a long-term performance that is considerate of all the stakeholders and customers. Ensuring a sustainable competitive advantage focuses on cost leadership, where the company should be directed to produce and sell products and services at a price relatively lower than that of the direct competitors (Cantele & Zardini, 2018). With this in place, the lower-cost leader is enabled to earn above-average profits, and this strategy works best with relatively bigger companies. For smaller and mid-sized, cost leadership is not a practical strategy; this is because the strategy requires high investments to achieve economies of scale.

Another promising strategy is differentiation, where companies distinguish their products and services by their features and benefits from competitors. This strategy focuses on creating products or services that customers perceive as unique in the business. The business operations are thus able to charge the premium price and earn profits with above-average margins. This strategy stands out as the most common and viable for many companies, both small, medium, and large enterprises (Haseeb et al., 2019). This is to some extent because there is only one cost leader in an industry, although there can be various business operations that would help differentiate features and benefits. Although this can be an expensive strategy, this strategy requires extensive research, product development, and marketing that would help in broadening the customer segment to help achieve sustainable leadership.

Additionally, the focus is a strategy that enables businesses to dominate a niche; through the focus, company strategies understand the market dynamics. Companies that succeed focus on unique customer needs of the market niche, developing and promoting niche of products and services that can attract a higher share of customers in the market segment than their competitors. This strategy aims to ensure that the business earns above-average profits, thus reducing the threat of competitors in the market. The focus has a central concern on a narrow target market; this strategy aims to offer a greater chance of becoming a leader of the niche. This effort is achieved when the target segment is less vulnerable compared to the substitutes or where the competitive landscape is weaker. The choice of the customer segment is based on market trends, demographics, psychographics, and customer needs.

The efforts towards this strategy should decide on the best types of products and services and offer a solution to sell in this market niche. These strategies also focus on a narrow target market, which makes it possible to contain costs. In this effort, the business and industries are capable in to conduct advertisements and promote their and their services in media that directly focus on the target groups. This strategy of focusing on a narrow market has been globally evident to be one of the world’s successful strategies for the majority of the companies. This is due to increasing the customers' share, expanding the market, and becoming a leader. Another promising strategy that helps in sustainable competitive advantage is developing intimacy with customers. This strategy is achieved by getting into close contact with customers to find out much about each customer segment (Arslan, 2020). After getting a clear understanding of the customers, the products and services can be tailored to them, offering them solutions to their problems. Over time, this strategy leads to stronger trust and customer loyalty, which induces more purchases by the same customers and referrals to new customers.

Additionally, using limited promotional channels is a strategy that helps companies advertise and promote products through many types of media. Advice to the new business and industry is to focus on a few advertising channels and thus getting hire opportunities from the limited resources such as money, time, and staff. Thus it is essential to master and get the most mileage from a few types of media. More importantly, the company needs to advertise the brand based on the location of customers relative to the product or service. Commonly, the business should have a central focus on long-term success, which enables the company to earn profits in both the short and long term (Cantele & Zardini, 2018). The focus strategy is highly profitable, as opposed to a strategy that only supports expansion. More precisely, the bottom line is to focus on a niche where you can create and sustain a competitive advantage, which will enable a new business or industry to rule over its competitors.

Part Three: Executive Summary

• This analysis will be made successful by using Porte’s Five Forces to examine the competitive strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in attracting and growing business and industry.
• Porte’s Five Forces and SWOT analysis has a central aim of determining the attractiveness of an industry or business in Florida State.
• Analyzing internal factors, strengths, and weaknesses as well as external factors, opportunities, and threats, are essential in ensuring success in growing and creation of new business and industry.

Strategic positioning analysis helps in reflecting the choices that the company makes to build its value relative to its rivals or competitors. These strategies are recommended to the civic leaders to ensure that the businesses maintain a sustainable competitive advantage in growing the existing businesses and industries as well as attracting new businesses to Florida State. These strategies focus on ensuring a long-term performance that is considerate of all the stakeholders and customers.

• First is ensuring a sustainable competitive advantage focuses on cost leadership, where the company should be directed to produce and sell products and services at a price relatively lower than that of the direct competitors.
• Secondly, is differentiation where companies distinguish their products and services by their features and benefits from their competitors. This strategy stands out as the most common and viable for many companies, both small, medium, and large enterprises.
• Lastly, it ensures that businesses and industries focus on the unique customer needs of the market niche, developing and promoting niche products and services that can attract a higher share of customers in the market segment than their competitors. This strategy aims to ensure that the business earns above-average profits, thus reducing the threat of competitors in the market.

These strategies also focus on a narrow target market, which makes it possible to contain costs. Another promising strategy that helps in sustainable competitive advantage is developing intimacy with customers. Advice to the new business and industry is to focus on a few advertising channels and thus getting hire opportunities from the limited resources such as money, time, and staff. Thus it is essential to master and get the most mileage from a few types of media.

References

Arslan, I. K. (2020). The Importance of Creating Customer Loyalty in Achieving Sustainable Competitive Advantage. Eurasian Journal of Business and Management, 8(1), 11-20.

Cantele, S., & Zardini, A. (2018). Is sustainability a competitive advantage for small businesses? An empirical analysis of possible mediators in the sustainability–financial performance relationship. Journal of Cleaner Production, 182, 166-176.

Dalton, J. (2019). SWOT analysis (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats). In Great Big Agile (pp. 249-252). Apress, Berkeley, CA.

Giudici, G., Milne, A., & Vinogradov, D. (2020). Cryptocurrencies: market analysis and perspectives. Journal of Industrial and Business Economics, 47(1), 1-18.

Haseeb, M., Hussain, H. I., Kot, S., Androniceanu, A., & Jermsittiparsert, K. (2019). Role of social and technological challenges in achieving a sustainable competitive advantage and sustainable business performance. Sustainability, 11(14), 3811.

Kung’u, A. M. U. (2017). Effects of selected porter’s five forces on competitive advantage in steel industry: a case of flat-steel segment (Doctoral dissertation, United States International University-Africa).

Öneren, M., Arar, T., & Yurdakul, G. (2017). Developing competitive strategies based on SWOT analysis in Porter’s five forces model by DANP. İşletme Araştırmaları Dergisi, 9(2), 511-528.

Pádraig, B. (2017). An Analysis of Michael E. Porter’s Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. Macat Library.

Porter, M. E. (2008). The five competitive forces that shape strategy. Harvard business review, 86(1), 78.