International Strategic Leadership: Case study of Benetton Group

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,7, University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer, language: English, abstract: In times of globalisation, engineering progress and extremely aggressive competition as well as continuous growth of dynamic and complexity within business, strategic changes are crucial for organizational surviving. Consequently, organisations have to be permanently harmonized with their environments to react to external developments effectively and to form the business proactively so they are operated in timely.1 As an excellent example for global expansion by successful management of strategy changes, the Benetton Group is classified.

Benetton is an Italian producer of high quality design clothing, which is active since the early 1960s. The company started as a family business and until today, the family of Benetton has the control over the firm. The company is not only famous for its high quality and sophisticated design, as it is known for its advertisement campaigns against racism, discrimination and ine-quality. In the 1980s, the Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani started to work for the Benet-ton Group as the designer for the marketing campaigns. Within several years, the advertise-ments of Benetton were not only about cloths, as the fight against racism and discrimination became almost more important than the clothing itself. The company did even change its name in order to express their fight against inequality in the world, into United Colors of Benetton.2

Major aim of this report is to clarify the essential importance of strategic change management on the basis the successful story of Benetton Group. The report contains several chapters that highlight the strategic changes of the company in the past and in the future, which gives infor-mation about the Benetton Group and shows the strengths and weaknesses of the company in comparison to the market. Thereby, chapter two contains information about the past and future strategic development of the company.