The SWOT Analysis

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,0, University of Applied Sciences Berlin, language: English, abstract: Marketing offers numerous valuable tools to analyze a company¿s current situation. Though, most of them have the weakness of providing only a very isolated view that is not suitable for a long-term entrepreneurial decision. The SWOT analysis, however, pursues an integrated approach including key company and environmental variables. The objective is the confrontation of the company¿s internal strengths and its weaknesses as well as company-external business opportunities and risks in order to generate possible strategic options.

The SWOT analysis particularly supports a combined and integrated approach of the current company situation enabling well-balanced and comprehensive decisions. One main benefit is thus the reduction of complexity through the integrated approach, leaving the key factors and strategies as analytical residue.

In practice, the SWOT method is a well established tool to analyze business units in larger companies and smaller start-ups in particular during their launch.

The SWOT analysis though reveals limited possibilities when analyzing all business units of large companies. For this task other, more holistic, approaches as the share-holder-value concept or the portfolio analysis are appropriate. However, this large field of tools will not be treated in this assignment. The SWOT analysis is though, despite its disadvantages, one of the most important instruments for the internal analysis of a company¿s situation that - in every case - delivers a pretty comprehensive and resilient foundation for further entrepreneurial decisions and strategic planning.