SWOT Analysis Of The Tows Matrix As The Main Strategic Strategy

Introduction
As the world economy growth has been predictably fluctuating over the last decades, businesses around the world has found more and more harsh time competing with each other to survive. Moreover, the nature of conducting a business, especially international firms, has been dramatically changed because of the rapid process of globalization. Constrained by those challenges, nowadays entrepreneurs are desperately demanding for tools which can generate long-term vision to help them deal with internal and external changes. Thanks to strategists, there are several available tools, terminologically referred as strategic techniques, that business owners can apply to take advantage of the own capabilities and opportunities and reduce weaknesses
Besides that, PESTEL analysis will also be taken into account not only as a remarkable tool to analyze business environment but also as a supportive technique to utilize SWOT analysis. Moreover, this essay will shortly touch upon the Tows matrix as a sophisticated upgrade to SWOT analysis. However, the ultimate purpose of this essay does not stop at covering definitions and features of those analyses but suggest readers a vertical linear combination of the three tools to introduce a more sufficient way of applying strategic techniques.
Analysis
PESTEL
There are several layers of environmental factors that drive the nature of doing business and PESTEL analysis is critically used to discover the broader layer named ‘The macro-environment’. As the abbreviations of each letter from this analysis reveal, it guides users to look up for any influences from political, economic, social, technological, environmental or legal view, which can affect the considered business. Through this broad examination, entrepreneurs are provided with very fundamental information about the environment in which
Addressing that problem, strategists have built up a simple but effective technique called the SWOT analysis to gather and summarize information into four boxes: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. The box names are literally straight forward to describe the expected content in each box. Opportunities and threats are the two categories belonging to external analysis which can be conducted through PESTEL or other environmental analyses which were briefly introduction in the previous section. On the other hand, strengths and weaknesses are the internal factors which need more intensive frameworks such as VRIN to be addressed. When getting enough support on gathering information from other strategic techniques, the crucial function of the SWOT is truly simple and straight-forward as taking advantages of their strengths and opportunities to establish comparative advantage over rivals and neutralizing weaknesses and threats. The simplicity and generalization characteristics of the SWOT analysis are the significant advantages making it favorable among business owners for decision-making. However, some scholars may argue that the SWOT is too simple and general that it could not reflect the actual circumstance leading to the possibility of