Audi Case Study: Strategic Analysis of a Multinational Corporation

This case study provides a comprehensive analysis of Audi, a German multinational automobile brand. It begins with an overview of Audi, its subsidiaries, financial performance, and management style, emphasizing customer satisfaction and the division of management into economic, authority, an...Read More

Audi-Case study

Table of Contents
1.1 INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................................1
1.2 )The company at a glance..........................................................................................................1
1.3) Management Style....................................................................................................................1
1.4) Locational Strategies................................................................................................................2
1.5) Leadership Style ......................................................................................................................2
1.6) Quality Control ........................................................................................................................3
1.7) Promotion Strategy ..................................................................................................................3
1.8) POLITICAL FACTOR:............................................................................................................4
1.9 )ECONOMIC FACTORS:.........................................................................................................5
1.10) SOCIAL FACTOR:................................................................................................................5
1.12) TECHNOLOGICAL FACTOR..............................................................................................6
1.3) CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................................6
1.4) REFERENCES.........................................................................................................................7

1.1 INTRODUCTION
Audi is German auto mobile brand founded on 16 July 1909 by August Horch. Audi is a
complete subsidiary to its parent company Volkswagen Group. The production of the brand is
carries out at 13 location across 10 countries. It is a famous multinational brand with a very well
brand image for its performance and price worthy auto mobiles. Headquarter of the company is
based in Ingolstadt, Germany and its various division include a list of nation wide operated brand
branches, Audi Germany, Audi Mexico, Audi Russia, Audi India, Audi do Brasil are some its
well performing division.
1.2 )The company at a glance
Although Audi itself is a subsidiary but the brand further has quite reputed brand as its
own subsidiary like Lamborghini, Ducati and Audi sport GmbH. The brand deals with the
luxury segment of auto mobiles with their price ranging from medium to high end for a
developing country. As of December 2019 the brand has a total of 90,783 employees working
happily for the company. In 2019 the total revenue of the company was 55.68 billion Euros with
a total approximate earning of 3.94 billion Euros. The company has been performing well on the
international market and these stats clearly depicts the reality of it.
1.3) Management Style
For a company to be successful across the globe and that too in a extremely competitive
market of automotive industry, it is crucial that the management of the company perform at its
peak for constantly bringing out the operations of the company. In case of Audi the management
is heavily focussed on the customer satisfaction(Le-Khac and et. al., 2020). The management of
the brand is relied upon its quality control for achieving the customer satisfaction. In a constantly
evolving automotive industry, competing for the top spot managing requires undivided focus on
the internal and external factors that affect the market, this involves looking after all the
resources of the company from human resources to technical resources and production.
Management in terms of Audi is divided into mainly three divisions of supervision. These
three division are economic division, system of authority division, class and system division.
The economic division deals with the economy of the region served and based on this the labour
and workers management varies. The system of authority department deals with the management
of the operational level and the hierarchy in which the operations is managed. The third division
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of class and system focuses on the constant evolution of the auto mobiles offered by the brand
through its research and development which ultimately helps in maintaining the class and image
of the brand in the market.
1.4) Locational Strategies
Audi serving the premium segment of the auto mobiles in the market has to be very
calculative and peculiar about using the locational strategies (Dremel, C., Herterich, M.M., Wulf,
J. and Vom Brocke, J., 2020). It is because of the locations served the sales and ultimately
revenue of the success depends upon. Audi has an effective strategies for choosing the areas
where it will be serving, this is through the following techniques,
Demographics: It is through the analysis of the economy of different regions around the
world that gives a general idea about the people of that region. This analysis evolves looking at
the economic conditions like average earning or the area, government's role in the industry i.e. by
taxes interest rates etc. Such a demographic analysis process out to be crucial in short-listing the
areas on the world map for the availability of the potential customers.
Psychographics: This step involves the analysis of the mentality and general tendency of
the people in the potential target area (Michalos, et. al., 2018). Through this analysis the
company gets sure about the availability of the potential customers. The key factors in this
analysis involves expenditure pattern and a general outlook towards the particular industry.
Through the application of these strategies Audi can clearly find out the precise potential
region to serve. It is due to the strategies that the company has a high unit sales and revenue
generated over the years.
1.5) Leadership Style
Audi being a multinational company with a huge number of employees focus on its
leadership style with heavy priority. Although the company doest always work with a specific
leadership style and because of its multinational status, the brand has to adapt to the nations and
culture of different regions accordingly(Andreou, et. al., 2018). Democratic style of leadership is
one of the most often seen. As the company always has the best recruitment of employee with
talent, knowledge and innovating skills. It is important to make such employee feel valued by
knowing their opinion.
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The working structure of the company is made in such a way that employee at every level
feel valued. For this the company makes sure that each employee feels free in sharing their
opinion with their superiors. This helps the company in keeping their employee satisfied along
with getting innovative suggestions an ideas.
1.6) Quality Control
Audi has always kept its objective clear i.e. gaining customer satisfaction through
maintaining the quality at its best. With quality as the factor to achieve customer satisfaction the
company has designed its manufacturing and installing level as one of the best in the
industry(,Geronazzo, M., Spagnol, S. and Avanzini, F., 2018). Through the use of best in line
technology and continuous research and development the company has made sure that it delivers
the best quality to its customers. It is not just the production of high quality auto mobile which
satisfies the managerial level but the various level of test the complete model of an automotive
goes through that finalises the quality of production.
The key factors on which the quality check is depended is the comfort level, safety and security,
technical functioning of the model, performance at different physical condition, carbon footprints
etc. It is after the testing of the a unit from a same line of production an auto mobile clears the
quality check. Audi has been very serious about maintaining the quality and through these
various level of quality check, the brand justifies its moto.
One of the incident is just another example of the quality seriousness when the company
called back its 6758 sold unit because of a small fault that was later observed in the functioning
of its software. It is because the company wanted to make sure any customer never faces a
quality issue.
1.7) Promotion Strategy
Audi being a worldwide serving brand that offers the premium cars to the customers. It's
promotional strategies are accordingly beneficial to the company. Promoting without advertising
or appealing to the mass because as a premium company and has to find ways to appear
premium through its promotion as well(Kassem, M., Ali, A. and Audi, M., 2019). Following are
the several ways in which the company promotes in brand among the target customers performs.
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Logo: The four ring logo of the company is undoubtedly among the most recognized
logo's of the world, not only does it deliver the image of the company but also promises the
quality and the luxury.
Sponsors: The brand sponsors the sports team around the world of various games and
primarily targetting reputed clubs (Liu, G., Gao, P., Chen, F., Yu, J. and Zhang, Y., 2018). World
famous clubs like Realm Madrid are one of the famous Audi sponsored teams, their players are
asked to arrive and leave the club duties in the Audi cars. This displays the famous and royalty.
This promotions projects an image that high class people drive Audi and ultimately attracting
customers,
Launches the brand through high profile starts: Another brilliant method of brand
promotion is the launch of cars through high profile models of respective country. Audi has
focused on making highly respected starts brand ambassadors which directly attracts and
influences the potential customers of that region.
Campaigns: Though social media and digital media marketing the brand has kept itself
engaged in campaign related to social issue or cultural awareness(Mau, S., Pletikosa, I. and
Wagner, J., 2018). For various potential regions the company initiated campaigns to spread
awareness and provide a message to the people in general, this way the company reached a lot
many people without directly appeal. For example during the Covid-19 lock down period the
brand made its logo's ring at a distance in order to promote social distance which was appreciated
all around the world.
1.8) POLITICAL FACTOR:
Pestle analysis of Audi is helps to analyse the specified brand by using their business
strategies. Audi pestle analysis helps in several external factors like, political, economic, social,
and technological this also gives an impact on business legal as well as environmental factors. In
the context of Audi pestle analysis is as follows,
Audi is operating its brand in more than 100 regions. So, the working dynamics is always
changes in every different countries, because every other countries have their different terms and
conditions followed by the government(Gerster, D., Dremel, C., Brenner, W. and Kelker, P.,
2020). The trade war that recently happened in china and USA created a serious problem in the
sales of Audi. These trade war between the countries affected their economies. Now, apart from
the trade wars here are some political factors that influenced the Audi.
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Political stability:there is the high changes of political stability that is providing a stable,
good and friendly business environment with the power to analyse the future growth trends. This
factor also helps to analyse who are the investors and what factor causes the harms of
stakeholders in the company.
Changing policies:sometimes changes in the policies of government can affect the
business performance by increasing the uncertainty of environment.
1.9 )ECONOMIC FACTORS:
As the economic development of the country that have direct impact on organisational
performance. This is really important to understand the company life cycle and opportunities for
the Audi. Here are some influencing factors of Audi that affects the economic situation.
Inflation in employment:the GDP growth rate will help to analyse the Audi capability to work
on its long- term growth strategies. And the high unemployment always shows the availability of
extra labours because of lower wages.
Financial markets efficiency: the national and global expansion strategies of the Audi are
affected by the financial market capabilities as this has operating in the really effective financial
market as improved their position and extend their ability for entry in the new market.
1.10) SOCIAL FACTOR:
It is for the changing in the field of population, migration, trends have the importance in
the international business organisation like the brand like Audi. Studying the demographic
characteristics of people can also help the Audi to understand the peoples attitude towards the
Audi (Bőczén-Rumbach, P., 2018). Factors influencing the Audi social factor is as follows:
gender roles:Audi is in need to study the tradition gender roles to improve the its marketing and
and communication to the peoples. And also helps to make the strategies towards the tradition
and society with the help of clearly identifying the gender roles that is totally different from
society.
1.11) LEGAL FACTOR
Audi must have to follow some rules for the employees health and safety laws as some
regions have very strict regulations to protect the labour safety (Marchal, et. al., 2019). And also
need to be careful about human resources practice against employer harm the organisational
image also affect the organisation ability to attract the talent. Audi must have to follow these
legal factor to consumer protection laws.
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Consumer protection laws:the protection of data is an important problem of the consumers
privacy and also for the security concerns. Audi has need to study the data protection laws to
protect the customer data and privacy.
1.12) TECHNOLOGICAL FACTOR
Technology is the fourth factor of the Pestle analysis. This factor is important to
understand the technological terms during the time of strategic decision making process (Myers,
M.D., 2019). This technological terms also have certain advantages such as it helps in increasing
the profitability, making innovations, and also helps to increase the business performance of
Audi. Here are some factor that is influencing for the technological terms.
Social media marketing:the development of communication in the technologies has create the
innovation in the marketing techniques to enhance the relationship with customers. Because of
the use of social media marketing this helps to improve the business tactics.
1.3) CONCLUSION
It is concluded from this report that the opted company manages its business functions
with high priority. From the leaderships styles to the promotional strategy opted by the company
are among the best results giving in the world. The company's pays attention to every external
factor that could potentially affect the progress of the brand and through a well directed analysis
the company works towards making the external factors opportunities which could benefit the
the brand image. s
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1.4) REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Andreou, et. al., 2018, February. Investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: A
case study of Facebook's explanations. In NDSS 2018-Network and Distributed System
Security Symposium (pp. 1-15).
Bőczén-Rumbach, P., 2018, August. Industry-oriented enhancement of information management
systems at AUDI Hungaria using MaxWhere’s 3D Digital Environments. In 2018 9th
IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications (CogInfoCom) (pp.
000417-000422). IEEE.
Dremel, C. and et. al., 2020. Actualizing big data analytics affordances: A revelatory case study.
Information & Management. 57 (1). p.103121.
Geronazzo, M., Spagnol, S. and Avanzini, F., 2018. Do we need individual head-related transfer
functions for vertical localization? The case study of a spectral notch distance metric.
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. 26 (7). pp.1247-
1260.
Gerster, D., Dremel, C., Brenner, W. and Kelker, P., 2020. How enterprises adopt agile forms of
organizational design: a multiple-case study. ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE
for Advances in Information Systems. 51 (1). pp.84-103.
Kassem, M., Ali, A. and Audi, M., 2019. Unemployment rate, population density and crime rate
in Punjab (Pakistan): an empirical analysis.
Le-Khac and et. al., 2020. Smart vehicle forensics: Challenges and case study. Future
Generation Computer Systems. 109 .pp.500-510.
Liu, G. and et. al., 2018. Technological innovation systems and IT industry sustainability in
China: A case study of mobile system innovation. Telematics and Informatics. 35 (5).
pp.1144-1165.
Marchal, et. al., 2019. Audi: Toward autonomous iot device-type identification using periodic
communication. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. 37 (6). pp.1402-
1412.
Mau, S., Pletikosa, I. and Wagner, J., 2018. Forecasting the next likely purchase events of
insurance customers: A case study on the value of data-rich multichannel environments.
International Journal of Bank Marketing.
Michalos, et. al., 2018. Seamless human robot collaborative assembly–An automotive case
study. Mechatronics. 55 . pp.194-211.
Myers, M.D., 2019. Qualitative research in business and management. Sage.
Rong, et. al., 2018. Locality-sensitive hashing for earthquake detection: A case study of scaling
data-driven science. arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.09835.
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