BUS101: Business Environment Analysis of Marks and Spencer Report

This report provides an executive summary and detailed analysis of the business environment of Marks and Spencer (M&S), a leading retailer in the United Kingdom. The report examines the application of Porter's Five Forces model, resource audits, and stakeholder mapping to understand M&S's market position, strengths, weaknesses, and stakeholder relationships. It explores the benefits, limitations, and practical applications of each model. The report includes a reflective section using Gibbs' model to evaluate the author's learning experience throughout the project. The analysis covers competitive forces, resource management, stakeholder engagement, and the impact of these factors on the company's performance and strategic decision-making. The report aims to provide insights into the business environment and strategic management within the retail sector, specifically focusing on the challenges and opportunities faced by Marks and Spencer.

INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
ENVIRONMENT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The report deal present the overview of Marks and Spencer and it also present the
benefits, limitations and application of porter's five force model, resource audit and stakeholder
mapping. The report also present reflective report by using Gibbs model of reflection and how
this all models will help in every organizations.

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
1. Presenting Porter's Five force model.......................................................................................3
2. Presenting Resource Audit......................................................................................................4
3. Stakeholder mapping...............................................................................................................6
4. Reflection................................................................................................................................7
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................8
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................9

INTRODUCTION
Business environment plays an important role. The report deal with Marks and Spencer
which a leading retailer company in United Kingdom. It also presents Porter's Five Force Model
and Resource Audit, Stakeholder Mapping that helps an organization for the growth and
development. The report also presents the benefits, limitations and application of all model and
also explain how this model will help in an individual real life.
1. Presenting Porter's five force model
Porter's Five Force Model helps in identifying the market situation for Marks and
Spencer and this is discussed below:
Illustration 1: Porter's five force model
Rivalry Competition: Marks and Spencer faces tough competition in market because it
serves its products and services at very low and affordable prices (Porter five force model of
M&S, 2018). It has been analyzed that M&S uses cost differentiation strategy in order to provide
best quality of products. The company faces tough competition with Tesco, Asda etc.
Threat of Substitute: M&S faces high threat of substitutes and as a result, it lowers
prices as compared to its rivals. However, M&S food can be substituted by products from other
retailers.

Threat of New Entrants: the company faces low threat of new entrants. As the company
has a strong brand name and even it offers the best services to their customers that is why it faces
low threat (Calabrese and et.al., 2018).
Bargaining power of Buyers: the company faces high bargaining buying power. As the
economy of UK slightly slows down which force company to cut down its prices and complete
the needs of their customers.
Bargaining power of suppliers: M&S faces low bargaining power of suppliers. As the
company wants to reach large customer base but with low power of suppliers, the company did
not offer its best products to other demographic regions (Ayden, Demirbag and Tatoglu, 2018).
Benefits of using Porter's Five Force Model
 This model helps to analysis the simple market structure.
 Using Porter's Five Force models, Marks and Spencer easily identifies the competition in
market.
 It easily examines the structure of market.
 Using this model, Marks and Spencer easily identifies new products or services are enter
in a market and which one will substitute (Zindiye, 2018).
 Porter's five force model provide the exact and suitable environment of market.
Limitations of using Porter's Five Force Model
 This model, ignored non- market forces.
 This model is not able to provide best preventive actions to overcome many problems.
 Porter's five force model also faces difficulties in integrating with today's market.
 The model did not help in making inter- relations with different market segments.
 The wide variety of products in an organization will also creates difficulties as they did
not provide the meaningful services to their customers (Sanyal and et.al., 2018).
Applications of using Porter's Five Force Model
Porter's five force model helps us to identify competitive advantages of a company and
this model allows a systematic analysis of market structure as well as identifies the competitive
situations. Every industry faces different competition in market and as a result, they applies
various strategies in order to overcome from this. The impact of this force varies and it depends
on the companies (Mohapatra and Sahu, 2018). Therefore, it is necessary to determine the scope

of market and on the other side, it is also not necessary to determine all the elements of the
competitive forces with same depth.
2. Presenting Resource Audit
Resource audit helps to understand strengths and weaknesses of resources. In other
words, quality of resource is available to implement strategy and this is actually known as
resource audit. In the context of Marks and Spencer, it has various resources such as physical
resources which include building, machines, equipment etc. Another resource is humans which
include employees, their skills, inventory etc. and last resources are financial resources that
include use of working capital, debtors, bankers etc. Another term used is Competence, that
means that the process that critically undergo in the competitive advantages.
Benefits of using Resources Auditing:
 Using resource audit, management can easily identify contribution of entire resource
department of an organization.
 Helps to improve the image of overall organization.
 Resource auditing helps to select the best options out of many (Solodilova, Malikov and
Grishin, 2018).
 It also encourages the uniformity of all policies and practices.
 Resource audit also help in identifies the best resource out of many.
 Physical resources help to identify which place is best in order to run a business in better
place.
 One of the best use of using resource audit is to how the intellectual property will help in
the organization to functions.
Limitations of using Resources Auditing
 It is not easy that all resources are easily available.
 There is a chance that after selecting human resources they leave Marks and Spencer.
 There is a chance that selected resources are not liked by the employees and sometimes, it
may create conflicts in between staff.
 There is a chance of failure of resource auditing (Lopez-Acevedo, Medvedev and
Palmade, 2017).
 If the auditing is failed then the entire system is affected adversely and as a result,
profitability of an organization is affected.

Applications of using Resources Auditing:
 in the context of Marks and Spencer, resource management help to gain best relationship
with their employees and measure the performance level of all the employees at
individual level (Calabrese and et.al., 2018).
 The scope of using resource audit is that it exactly examine the compliances with the
legal requirement and its policies in order to identify the problems and tries to sort out all
those problems.
3. Stakeholder mapping
Stakeholder mapping is a simple process of analyzing a system and some changes related
to their parties that are stakeholders. It is a basic key part of stakeholder management.
Stakeholders are those persons, groups or institutions who have interest in the project. It is the
visual representation of the analysis of the organization's person who are managed the work
during a project. In the context of Marks and Spencer, stakeholder mapping can be done by four
processes:
Identifying: it is the first step of mapping which help to identify which stakeholders are
best for doing work in various area. They may be owners, customers, employees and
competitors. The list of Marks and Spencer will be changed and this will help while taking a
decision for the better future (Kew and Stredwick, 2017).
Analyzing: once stakeholders are identified, then second step comes that is analyzing. it
is done to understand their relevance and the views of stakeholder which are offer. In the context
of Marks and Spencer, stakeholder always understand the relationship and they analyzes whether
they contributed to the growth of a company or not. It is also assess that whether the stakeholders
are willing to engage (Ayden, Demirbag and Tatoglu, 2018).
Mapping: it is a tool which help to further determine which stakeholders are used in
which areas. The mapping also allows to see where stakeholder are stand and when they
evaluated by same criteria as compared to others.
Prioritizing: it is not necessary that all the stakeholders will be engage in same level of
intensity during all time. In the context of M&S they are always use strategic planning and be
clear while assigning the stakeholders to different parts of a company. Because it will help to
saves money as well as time both.

Benefits of using stakeholder mapping:
 Stakeholder mapping helps to identify the negative stakeholder as well as positive
stakeholder in Marks and Spencer (Zindiye, 2018).
 By using stakeholder mapping, the stakeholder people help to informed about the project
at the time of execution that what are the problems are faced by them and they can also
give a solutions in order to sort of those.
 Stakeholder analysis also help to overcome those risk and reduce the misunderstanding
between them.
 It is done on the regular basis in order to track the changes in the attitude of stakeholder.
 It help to reduce the time and money both which overall maximizes the profitability of a
company (Sanyal and et.al., 2018).
 The stakeholder mapping is tries to increase the area of interest.
Limitations of using stakeholder mapping:
 if Marks and Spencer did not use this analytical tool, then stakeholder are poorly
managed by the team and ultimately it affect the profitability of Marks and Spencer.
 It takes too much time and quite difficult to execute into a business environment.
 It is quite difficult at the time when stakeholder are dispersed at geographically regions.
 The tool is not clearly response and it may leads to have so many opinions and
perspectives (Mohapatra and Sahu, 2018).
 Initially it takes too much time that is why generally not used by many companies.
Applications of using stakeholder mapping:
 stakeholder analysis will help to engage and consult on the area of interest.
 It always try to increase the level of interest among all stakeholders.
 Stakeholders generally focus on the efforts of their employees and try to encourage them
in order to produce more innovative products.
4. Reflection
For reflection, Gibbs reflective model is the best theoretical model that help to present
own experience while writing the report. The model help us to think in systematical way about
different phases of an experience. The model consist of five stages which are mention below:
Description of experience: I have learn from this project report that porter's five force
model is help to identify the competitive advantages of a market (Solodilova, Malikov and

Grishin, 2018). Generally, there are so many companies which uses this model in order to
identify the competition in market. Further, I also analysis that resource audit is also helpful to
select which resources are useful for the company and which are not. Next, I also learn that
stakeholder mapping is another important tool that help to identifies best stakeholder for a
company because they are those person who share their experience and suggest some positive
thing in order to run a business and achieve further level of success.
Feeling: while I conduct this report I am quite excited to know different tools and there
uses in the market or in industry. But when I actually start this project, I faces some difficulties at
the time of collecting information related to resource audit. Because this tool is used by many
companies but it is hard to find best out of many, this will make me hesitate while finding the
sources. But when I finished the project, I feel happy because I collect all the information which
is sufficient in order to complete my report (Lopez-Acevedo, Medvedev and Palmade, 2017).
Other people such as my family, friends motivate me for conducting this project and feel proud
while leading the project.
Evaluation: when I conduct this project, I felt so many difficulties but at the same time I
was excited too before the project. When I go further to first step I feel that porter five force
model is so easy to understood but at the same time, I faces so many issues related stakeholder
mapping model. Because there are so many difficult terms which are used while conducting the
project. Which is quite difficult for me to understand.
Analysis : in this fifth stage of reflection, I take some steps in order to analysis those
problem and take further actions while conducting this project report (Kew and Stredwick,
2017).
Action plan for the future: from the above report, I feel both positive as well as
negative things but in order to improve all the negative things it is necessary to take future steps
which help to learn many different things. Such as to learn critical terms I start learn typical
terms and that should be used in my routine work so that I did not face any difficulties while
conducting any further reports.
CONCLUSION
By summing up above report it has been concluded that business environment plays an
important role in Marks and Spencer. From the above report, porter five force model is help to
identify the market competitiveness and through resource audit, M&S can easily select best

human resource out of many and that will be helpful for the future success of the company.
Further the report also present the importance of stakeholder mapping which is also used by the
Marks and Spencer in order to identifies best person to overcome different types of problem. It
also present reflection which help to share my experience and take some suitable actions in order
to overcome those problems.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Ayden, Y., Demirbag, M. and Tatoglu, E., 2018. Internationalization of the Turkish Business
Environment: Historical Evolution and New Realities. In Turkish Multinationals (pp. 11-
32). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Calabrese, M. and et.al., 2018. From mechanical to cognitive view: The changes of decision
making in business environment. In Social Dynamics in a Systems Perspective (pp. 223-
240). Springer, Cham.
Kew, J. and Stredwick, J., 2017. Business environment: managing in a strategic context. Kogan
Page Publishers.
Lopez-Acevedo, G., Medvedev, D. and Palmade, V. eds., 2017. Business Environment
Challenges Continue to Weigh on Firm Performance.
Mohapatra, M. and Sahu, P., 2018. Building a Sustainable Talent Acquisition Model in a
Dynamic Business Environment. International Journal of Human Capital and
Information Technology Professionals (IJHCITP). 9(3). pp.42-52.
Sanyal, M. K. and et.al., 2018. A Proposed Model to Integrate Business Intelligence System in
Cloud Environment to Improve Business Function. In Information Systems Design and
Intelligent Applications(pp. 282-292). Springer, Singapore.
Solodilova, N. Z., Malikov, R. I. and Grishin, K. Y., 2018. Potential for development and
limitations of regional business environment. R-Economy. 1(2).
Zindiye, S., 2018. Success Factors of Franchise Entrepreneurs Operating in a Volatile Business
Environment: A Case of the Fast Food Industry Harare, Zimbabwe. The Social
Sciences. 13(4). pp.908-915.
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