Strategic Management: Groupon's Competitive Advantage

Running head: STRATEGIC MANAGEMNT
STRATEGIC MANAGEMNT
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STRATEGIC MANAGEMNT
Question 1
I agree with Andrew Mason, that yet having thousands of copycats, Groupon is difficult to
imitate. This is because of several reasons such as it has a huge base of more than 50 million
loyal customers that cannot be copied (Edelman, Jaffe and Kominers, 2016). The more number
of customers better will be the deals that will prevent them to shift to other competitors.
Moreover, it is difficult to imitate and overlook operational complexity. It is not easy to have
thousands of salespersons in the company to interact with local merchants daily which is not an
easy thing to do. It is not an easy task for the competitors to copy its resources and strategies. It
has an advanced technology platform for better targeting of customers which was built via
acquisitions. The resources of an organization should be rare, valuable and non imitable
otherwise its competitors can easily copy and take over its place in the market. Its values
includes it is a expertise in telesales, human assets and cost per acquisition replica. It tends to
take numerous small decisions and socially compound resources which are difficult to copy. Its
rareness lies in network externalities including offers from Google, Facebook and so on. It
includes hybrid model and dual advertising space and offers great deal and discounts to
customers for attainable luxury which leads to expansion and acquisition of new customers.
Question 2
Capabilities of Groupon are the strategic capabilities that add to its long term survival of the
organization or competitive advantage. Resources include suppliers, partners or stakeholders that
is, what they have. The daily deals and offers of Groupon were appreciated by the customers
who have attracted thousands of copycats across the worldwide and the valuable resources
include financial, human, marketing and operations management. The question arises whether