Walgreens Business Strategy Essay

a. Basically, corporation strategy demonstrates a corporation’s overall direction in the light of its general mindset toward growth and the management of its businesses and product portfolios. There are three crucial categories, which are stability, growth, and retrenchment, that involve within corporation strategy. Additionally, business strategy often occurs at the business unit or product level, and it highlights the improvement of the competitive position of a company’s products and service in the particular market segment served by the business unit. Competitive and cooperative strategies are two main categories that match within business strategy. Furthermore, functional strategy is the method that through a functional area to

accomplish corporate and business unit objectives and strategies by maximizing resource productivity. The key purpose of functional strategy is to develop and cultivate a distinctive competence to offer an organization or business unit with an effective competitive advantage, and the functions include marketing, finance, R&D, operation, human resources and more. (Thomas Wheelen and David Hunger, 2012).
With all the functional divisions in Walgreens, human resources and marketing strategies are the two necessary factors that impact the overall corporate growth and achieve a differentiation competitive advantage. Due to the competitive environment in the pharmacy industry, the company’s most burning issue is to establish the differential position with customer-driven mindset in the market. Therefore, marketing strategy and human resources are two vital breakthroughs to improve Walgreens’s brand recognition and reinforce customer loyalty.
First and foremost, the overall function’s essential goal for 2016 is to provide friendship customer experiences become an advancing community pharmacy.

To achieve these objectives, in the human resources department, it needs to provide the organization with structure and capacity to reach business demands by managing the most valuable resources—the employees. For Walgreens, the main resources have to be employed to effectively accomplish the goals are the shared services model and HR generalists. The share services model enables recourses to be leveraged cross the company and the providing department efficiently becomes an internal service provider. In Walgreens, its shared service team expresses some services, including relations, recruiting, and HR data services. Moreover, to more convenient share information, the team implements myHR, which is a website that offers employees personalized information with explains to all of their HR-related problems, such as HR policies, people manager, guidance for new hires, and talent management. In addition, this website is easy to access and is confidential. Another key recourse is HR generalists. The company current has HR professionals, who concentrate on evolving strategic, tailored talent plans for each business and assist essential strategy initiatives. Furthermore, Walgreens establishes a cadre of senior HR business-partner elite with generalist support to make sure that every business unit and function has

the adequate experts to maximize its HR value proposition. According to these two recourses, Walgreens integrates its culture beliefs into the business procedures and promote employees’ performance to increase the company’s productivity and provide excellent services to their customers (Geri Tucker, 2014).
Additionally, in marketing strategy, Walgreens focuses on customer shopping experiences.

Walgreens ensures to have high quality products and solutions by making it convenient for clients to get in and out with what they actual need, enhancing its beauty products and stimulate the convergence of health care by putting everything together. In addition, by utilizing over-the counter health service and providing wellness products, the company helps its customer to find more seamless solutions. Employees are trained to make friends and build relationship internally with their customer. Beyond accelerating the products in the physical store, delivering well experiences to customers also need highly engaged employees offer superior customer care in every community. In addition to provide outstanding customer service in retail stores, the company started a piloting program where people are able to order their prescriptions through phone and takes advantage of convenient curbside pick up. In essence, this action partly shifts Walgreens from a retailer to a service based organization. As a result, through the functional strategy in the company, customers can undergo the differential shopping experiences compared to other drugstore in the industry, and the company can improve its positive reputation and customer

loyalty.