Question

In a 200 words essay select a product or a service or a brand that either failed to survive or is surviving in today's competitive environment, analyze the reasons of failure or survival from Barney Model of competitive advantages (VRIO) analysis.

Answer 1

Brand Name - Google

It's a well known fact that Google is one of the most powerful brands in the world, and its success stems from a sustained competitive advantage in the area of human capital management. If we break down Google’s VRIO framework from the Human Resource perspective, we get the following analysis:

• Value: Google uses human capital management data to hire and retain productive and innovative employees. These employees arr quite consistent in creating some of the most popular consumer services and products in the world.

• Rarity: No other company uses data-based employee management so extensively as compared to Google.

• Imitability or Non-substitutable : Data-based human capital management not only costly but even difficult to imitate, at least for the near future. Organizations need to build the software and invest in training their Human Resource staff on the new strategy and technology.

• Organization: The IT department of Google has the skills to gather and maintain the data, while Human Resource and team leaders are trained on how to use the data to hire, manage, promote and improve performance of employees.

Having a VRIO framework in place allows brands like Google to take completely different approach to human capital management and helps them in making decisions using massive amounts of objective data. For example, Google’s People Operations team set out to recognize the characteristics that make a great manager. The data used to examine this included performance evaluations, surveys and great-manager nominations. Google even conducted double-blind interviews with the lowest and highest rated managers of the company. By determining the qualities of a great manager, Google is able to strengthen its internal team and the foundation of its sustained competitive advantage.