Strategies operate on three levels in an organisation:
Corporate Level Strategies: Corporate level strategies or corporate strategies are the plans of top management developed for supervising the overall functioning of the enterprise and achieving the expected level Of performance. These strategies outline the organisational activities and objectives in various areas of an organisation like divisions, product lines, technologies, consumers and their needs, etc, Corporate strategies guide an organisation to become what it wants to be in order to maximise the performance levels. For example, since the effort Of Nokia to launch its own operating System failed, in the year 2011 Microsoft and Nokia formed an alliance in which Nokia agreed to produce smartphones with the Windows operating system. With this alliance, Microsoft was able to access the market of one of the largest cell phone manufacturer. Nokia was able to retain its market share with the help of this merger.
Business Level Strategies: Business level strategies are also called as business strategies or Strategic Business Unit (SBU) level strategies. A Strategic Business Unit(SBU) is based on the idea of recognising the separate market segments catered by the company. Business strategies are formulated differently for each segment due to the differences in their envimnmental conditions. The business level strategies are formulated to satisfy the needs of the customers of different segments and also to provide value to them. Hence, fulfilling the demands of the customers belonging to different segments helps the organisation in Increasing and sustaining its competitive advantage. For example, Domino’s Pizza owes its success to Turnaround strategy that had positive effects due to the organisation-wide efforts Of achieving a simple and clear goal that was, “have a clear Win against competitor in a taste test”
Functional Level Strategies: Functional level denotes the operating division levels and departments in an organisation such as marketing, finance, human resources, R&D, etc. Various strategic decisions at functional levels are associated with business practices and value chain. The functional level strategies are focused on expanding and synchronising the resources for implementing the business level strategies in an efficient manner. Functional level of an organisation provides input to the higher level strategies such as business level and corporate level strategies and converts them into action plans for various departments. These plans are needed to be carried-out for the strategy to be successful. Higher level strategies depend On the functional level for information regarding resources and capabilities on the basis of which strategies at business and corporate level are formulated. For example, marketing strategy can be broken into various functional level strategies such as pricing strategies, distribution strategies, promotion strategies, sales strategies, etc.
