Free Business Dissertations - This Essay Seeks To Provide A Critical Review Of The Bowman’s Clock
This essay seeks to provide a critical review of the Bowman’s Clock strategic management technique. The technique will be applied to the Airline industry, with particular reference to the Easyjet organisation.
The essay is structured as follows; firstly the technique will be defined, and a critiqued will take place in terms of its strengths and weaknesses based on current academic thinking. The next section will apply the strategic management technique to the Easyjet and the industry. Then a conclusion will bring together all the findings to give an overall review of the Bowman strategy model.
There are a number of definitions put forward for the Bowman Strategy Clock. A good overview provided by Johnson and Scholes (1999) states that it is a market based model of generic strategy rooted in the question of what is of value in the product or service to the customer or user? Essentially the Bowman Clock is concerned with competitive strategy and finding the most advantageous position in an industry. Using the technique, organisations seek to develop a generic strategy and establish a profitable and sustainable position against competition.
The Bowman’s clock according to Johnson and Scholes (1999) provides a choice to customers (assuming quantity available is constant) between those organisations i) pricing lower than competitors (cost leadership basis, reflected in lower price) or ii) providing better perceived added value (differentiation).From these two areas (Cost and Differentiation), the Bowman clock consists of nine routes to competitive advantage for satisfying customer needs.
Porter (1980) believes strongly that organisations need to make a choice regarding they type of competitive advantage and position or risk becoming stuck in the middle, with the consequence of below average profitability for the industry.Wit and Meyer (1998) believe that the choice of generic strategy is vital, making the difference between an organisation improving or eroding a position within an industry.
Many academic writers (Johnson and Scholes (1999), Wit and Meyer (1998), Lynch (1999) believe that the Bowman’s Clock technique can support organisations in their strategy formulation for understanding the most favourable competitive position within the industry. The technique explores the industry and its characteristics based on two important factors within corporate strategy the role of cost reduction and the use of differentiated products and services to meet the needs of customers.
Other strategic management tools, view competition in a different way, not from the characteristics of the industry, but as Lynch (1999) proposes, the uniqueness of the company through a resource or competency based appraisal. There is some debate over which method is more effective in understanding competition.
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