Strategic Management and Ikea

1) How has IKEA succeeded in expanding across the world using a standard range of products and a standard strategy in the home furniture and furnishings industry, in which divergent cultural influences are likely to be at their strongest?

First of all, seems reductive say that IKEA provides a standard range of products having regard to the incredible width of this range (which allows, therefore, to offer many variables of many types of heterogeneous products: in this way is almost completely bypassed the limit traditionally connected with the offer diverse depending on the country of destination). In fact, the product range is so vast ("The IKEA products on offer Exceed 12.000 items in number") to allow a lack of diversification for export market: every type of consumer that is part of the target audience can find products of his choice, ignoring the others (which will be desirable by other consumers focused on other features). In this way this strategy exceeds its traditional limit. As it is written in the text under consideration "IKEA has achieved the impossible, to create a range of products attractive to consumers everywhere, in countries with very different cultures, and to apply a formula for presentation and sale of those products which reinforces the attractiveness" . With regard to the standard strategy used by IKEA in my view its success relies on a few points well described in the article. First, the target is well defined (and wide, and in all countries without exception). "It may sound corny but the self-proclaimed focus of IKEA is ‘young people of all ages’. In reality the market is primarily young people, who are well educated, liberal in cultural values, white collar, but with limited means because of their stage of career and family cycle, and in the process of setting up or expanding their homes because they are having children". The second successful point of the unitary strategy of the company is the interest to achieve and maintain a cost