The Body shop
Strategy Field Project
The Body Shop
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Today "The Body Shop" is one of the best and well-known brands available in the Cosmetics industry especially in the natural product category. The company founded in 1976 by Anita Roddick, has presence in 51 countries with 2000 stores worldwide in the year 2004. The company operates in 4 markets; Americas, Europe, Middle East/Africa and Asia.
The company is into the industry that is on the verge of maturing though it throws the opportunity to expand the horizon into fast growing markets like Eastern Europe, Brazil and Asia where the purchasing power is increasing rapidly. The company has deep pockets and has a visible brand image that can help it to establish strong presence in these markets.
The company uses differentiation strategy with regional self-contained structure for its existing business units in the four markets. The company has come out of bad performance it had showed during late 1990's and has performed well in the year 2004. For consistent performance and growth, the company will have to fill up the gap wherever it exists internally or externally and will have to bring consistency in its operations and should look at integrating vertically.
Some of the details are confidential and are not available as the company is publicly listed only in the UK and not in other regions such as USA. Thus, the best effort has been put forth to get the information from various sources. Wherever information was not available to fuller extents, some assumptions was formulated from the available material.
Overall, this report is an endeavour to provide the outline of the company's internal and external activities, finding out the factors that can be instrumental in achieving long term and continuous growth, suggesting the strategy to be used to achieve this growth, and finally an action plan to be implemented and recommendations for success.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary ii
Backgrounds Information 1
The Body Shop
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Today "The Body Shop" is one of the best and well-known brands available in the Cosmetics industry especially in the natural product category. The company founded in 1976 by Anita Roddick, has presence in 51 countries with 2000 stores worldwide in the year 2004. The company operates in 4 markets; Americas, Europe, Middle East/Africa and Asia.
The company is into the industry that is on the verge of maturing though it throws the opportunity to expand the horizon into fast growing markets like Eastern Europe, Brazil and Asia where the purchasing power is increasing rapidly. The company has deep pockets and has a visible brand image that can help it to establish strong presence in these markets.
The company uses differentiation strategy with regional self-contained structure for its existing business units in the four markets. The company has come out of bad performance it had showed during late 1990's and has performed well in the year 2004. For consistent performance and growth, the company will have to fill up the gap wherever it exists internally or externally and will have to bring consistency in its operations and should look at integrating vertically.
Some of the details are confidential and are not available as the company is publicly listed only in the UK and not in other regions such as USA. Thus, the best effort has been put forth to get the information from various sources. Wherever information was not available to fuller extents, some assumptions was formulated from the available material.
Overall, this report is an endeavour to provide the outline of the company's internal and external activities, finding out the factors that can be instrumental in achieving long term and continuous growth, suggesting the strategy to be used to achieve this growth, and finally an action plan to be implemented and recommendations for success.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary ii
Backgrounds Information 1