The fast spread of modern communication and information technology, trade-related support services, trade liberalization, and cross-border financial flows are causing unexpected transformations in the global business setting. The globalization of the commercial environment has made it imperative for small and medium-sized businesses to seek out possibilities in overseas markets to obtain and maintain a competitive edge (Osano, 2019). As globalization stretches its muscles, corporations globally can now cover broader overseas markets with more capabilities via the fast use of technology as physical distance and barriers become less significant.
However, as an emerging economic force, women impact the global economy. For the economy, it is essential that women participate in employment generation operations rather than offering work possibilities since companies are more time versatile than being an employee, particularly for women, who often perform many responsibilities (Batool & Ullah, 2017). In this regard, organizations such as Girls Scout Cookies have emerged as significant players in girls’ empowerment. Nevertheless, the firm operates only in the United States. Hence, due to the inherent nature of women’s prejudice since time immemorial, it is prudent of this product to globalize to improve women’s empowerment in the business sector. Therefore, this paper will explore the Girls Scout Cookies organization as it ventures its operations in Guyana, South America.
Girls Scout Cookies Organization Overview
Girl Scouts is the foremost institution for girls’ professional advancement. The group has 2.5, around 1.7 million girls and 750,000 adults (Kauppinen, 2020). Juliette Gordon Low started the Girl Scouts in 1912 in Savannah, Georgia (Kauppinen, 2020). It was created in the Progressive Era, prior to the suffrage of women. The original Girl Scouts broke new ground and reinvented what was feasible for girls and for other individuals. In reality, becoming a Girl Scout benefits crucial ways. Creates a positive sense of identity, demonstrates great morals, pursues out obstacles and gain from failures, develops and maintains mutual trust, and identifies and solves community issues. Furthermore, every girl can exercise management, challenge, and achievement for a lifetime.
Girl Scouts consists primarily of women, many of whom were raised repressed from being assertive and unable to utilize their organizational qualities. Consequently, the greatest advantage has been the empowerment participants have experienced as an enterprise and individuals. Unfortunately, the net revenue for the Girls Scout stream has not been very appealing, with just around $112.2 Million in 2021 of the total revenue and a diminishing customer base (Girl Scouts of the USA Revenue, 2021). This is due to the company’s restricted activities inside the United States. As a consequence, the firm has begun a worldwide growth plan that will result in the extension of its operations in Guyana.
Analysis of the Global Marketplace Expansion
Managers must know that markets, suppliers, shareholders, locations, associates, and rivals may be located in any area of the globe. Leading companies will seize opportunities wherever they exist and will be ready for setbacks. In this climate, effective managers must comprehend the commonalities and contrasts across national borders to capitalize on possibilities and avoid possible pitfalls (Osano, 2019). In designing acceptable global strategies, administrators must consider both the advantages and disadvantages of globalization. A global plan must take into account both international and domestic developments. International strategy is a continuous and comprehensive management approach that enables businesses to function and compete successfully beyond national borders. Top executives often design global plans, but they depend on all levels of management to execute these ideas properly. A variety of approaches are used by businesses to achieve the objectives of these initiatives.
Some firms, for instance, make alliances with foreign companies, while others purchase foreign enterprises and devise goods, services, and advertising strategies to sell to foreign consumers. Organizations must select what goods or services to market, where and how they will create or furnish them, where and how to sell them, and how they will engage with other businesses in the industry based on corporate objectives (Francis, 2017). The formulation of foreign strategy necessitates consideration of factors that rarely if indeed, play a role in the native market. These worrying aspects result from social, geographical, and political disparities. A host economy only requires a company to formulate a methodology that considers known regulatory requirements, one language, and one monetary system (Francis, 2017). However, in the world economy, the firm must decide and strategize for various types and forms and types of regulatory oversight, multiple currencies, and several languages.
In the face of intense commercial rivalry in the global market, frameworks and idea analysis are critical and essential. Consequently, a corporate executive must identify and choose the appropriate operating program to outsmart and conquer the market and customers (Bugador, 2019). Several idea analyses are created for managers to examine the company situation to achieve equivalence and portray a durable competitive edge over their competitors. A network of value-creating actions must be in place to appraise, analyze, and evaluate completed operations that will ultimately generate a company’s competitive advantage (Hill, 2021). Michael Porter highlighted a variety of generic actions shared by a variety of businesses. Consequently, these actions aim to generate value that surpasses the price of supplying the product or service (Hill, 2021). As a result, this will create profits, as buyers want value commensurate with expenditures. Everyone wants the value to be equivalent to cost; thus, value-creating activities are an excellent use of corporate economics.
If only all businesses implemented this roadmap, they would generate a much more satisfied customer base and have a substantially more significant following in the oversea economy. Specifically, inevitable value-creating duties such as warehousing and inbound logistics are vital in creating a headquarters in the oversea market (Francis, 2017). Moreover, direct or indirect deliberate or accidental sales and marketing that have to do with convincing clients to purchase a product, channel selection, marketing, and pricing are crucial for expansion. On the same note, service operations are those with an upkeep and value enhancement effect on the product, such as helpline and repair services. All of these essential activities contribute to developing the firm’s competitive advantage.
Girls Scouts Cookies Case Analysis in Global Market Context
It is hypothesized that the notion of global entrepreneurship serves as the cornerstone for all worldwide commercial activity. In order to thrive in an innovation-driven global economy, local competencies must be robust, yet the creation of these skills is plagued by market and organizational inefficiencies. Consequently, it is crucial to establish tactics for competing in the overseas economy. When growing internationally, Girl Scouts have many organizational structure possibilities. For example, businesses might employ several organizational forms to develop internationally, including value-adding partnerships, joint ventures, strategic alliances, industry consortia, and cooperative agreements (Hill, 2021). Hence, businesses seek out alternative market entrance approaches to establish a lucrative share of the market, distribute risk, satisfy regulatory standards, receive exposure to technology and innovations, and acquire recourse to the knowledge or traits provided by associate organizations.
Accessibility to worldwide markets will be vital for the growth of Girls Scouts in the United States. It is suggested that corporations go global based on a phenomenon known as ‘cultural fluency’ or ‘psychological distance,’ which consists of geographic range, cultural compatibility, and access to markets (Osano, 2019). In this context, the South American setting has placed Guyana much closer regarding trading ambivalence between them and the US, giving US Girl Scouts possibilities to internationalize and expand worldwide. On a global scale, Word Trading Organization will aid Girls Scouts in accomplishing the crucial objectives of market access and rules consistency. In this sense, Girls Scouts must cultivate talents in international markets, commercial intelligence, creativity, and technology. Thence, to foster these abilities’ growth, it may be necessary to stimulate and execute training system changes, retrain the labor force, and promote technical and scientific knowledge and advancement.
Furthermore, authorities must guarantee that administrators get help to grow more market-oriented in their international business practices. Girls Scouts must rigorously evaluate their regions of competitive edge and pursue domestic and worldwide markets to survive. The organization ought not to be satisfied with the assumption that they must first comprehend their markets and advertise to local consumption. It is suggested that they must compete with the same global rivals even in their marketplaces. This implies that competitors will gradually push businesses out of their own market until they can act globally (Francis, 2017). It is accepted that the Girl Scouts lack adequate finances to engage with rivals, but this demonstrates the necessity for a niche-player approach that exploits the use of what digital innovations have to give. Girls Scouts have an opportunity to drive innovation and make sound choices fast. Still, they are frequently hampered by the absence of productive intelligence information that multinational corporations possess. Accordingly, they must investigate all market intelligence information access channels to compete successfully.
Global Market Strategy
The necessity to tailor service or product offerings to local circumstances may hinder the execution of this approach. It may not be feasible for a company to achieve the full advantages of economies of scale, knowledge effects, and location economies due to demands for domestic responsiveness. Further, it may not be viable to service the international market from a single low-cost site, creating a worldwide uniform product or service and selling it internationally to get the cost savings related to expertise externalities. In addition, constraints for local responsiveness suggest that it might not be practical to export talents and goods connected with a company’s core competencies from one country to another in their entirety. Frequently, it is necessary to accommodate local circumstances.
In this regard, localization is a suitable method for Girl Scout Cookies. This is because it aims to boost the firm’s financial performance by tailoring its products and services to the needs and interests of Guyana’s markets. Furthermore, localization seems optimal since there are major global disparities regarding customer interests and preferences and cost constraints are not excessive (Hill, 2021). By tailoring the brand portfolio to local needs, the company will boost the sales volume in the marketplace. Nonetheless, due to the redundancy of activities and shorter production runs, customization may hinder a company’s ability to achieve the cost savings connected with a surplus standardized product for national consumption. The technique could make logical sense if the actual benefit linked with regional personalization endorses higher pricing, allowing the company to achieve economies of scale and scope in the local market and reduce costs.
However, businesses will still need to be mindful of expenses. Girls Scouts implementing a localization plan must be economical and, if feasible, capitalize on economies of scale resulting from their worldwide reach. The corporation has discovered, for instance, that it must tailor some of its product offers to local market preferences, for instance, by making distinct cookie variants for US and Guyana customers. In addition, the firm attempts to get economies of scale from its worldwide quantity by utilizing fundamental cookie production platforms and elements across various brands and by producing these frameworks at effectively scaled and ideally positioned facilities. By creating its goods in this manner, the firm can localize its product offering while capturing scale economies, learning effects, and location economies.
The Host Country
Guyana is a good host nation because its economy has traits that attract foreign investment. Consequently, this highlights the level of development of the host nation, which makes its market more appealing to foreign industries. For instance, it has a robust market ideal for Girls Scout products. Moreover, it has a good infrastructure ideal for logistics and supply. At the same time, laws and regulations are practicable for foreign investing. Finally, the country has a sufficient and ready labor supply.
Guyana Market Size
Market size alludes to the present size of the intended audience in a nation or region. The size and expansion of the home country’s market have a crucial impact on influencing the inflow of foreign direct investment in the business (Oboreh & Arukaroha, 2021). Guyana’s economic climate is steady and gives numerous chances for investment. Guyana’s economy expanded by 43.5% in 2020 due to oil and gas development, and Guyana’s government has a budgetary growth strategy (Guyana – Country Commercial Guide, 2021). Guyana’s currency stayed steady, and the average exchange rate for the year stayed fixed at 208.5 to 1 US dollar (Guyana – Country Commercial Guide, 2021). Therefore, it is well suited to attract international investment.
Good Infrastructure
Foreign investors must have access to a solid infrastructure to be profitable. Infrastructure may be a significant driver or impediment to any nation’s influx of foreign investment. Good infrastructure may make a country more appealing to global investors and enhance the quality of local investment. Infrastructure encompasses several facets, including roads, ports, trains, communications networks, and institutional growth (Oboreh & Arukaroha, 2021). Good infrastructure boosts investment efficiency and may consequently encourage foreign direct investment.
Regulations and Laws
Laws and regulations govern the activities of businesses in the host country. The text and meaning of rules and regulations differ. A corporation is subject not just to the laws of its native land but also to the laws of its host state and the expanding corpus of international norms. It is enough for a company functioning at the local scale to adhere to the rules of the land, but companies functioning in several countries must be familiar with and abide by the laws of the home country and the host nations in which they exist. For instance, the government of Guyana views foreign direct investment (FDI) as crucial for economic growth and diversification. Foreign investors are not discriminated against under Guyanese law. Shortly after his inauguration, President Ali pledged to implement an automated, seamless application procedure to accelerate company registration and permit issuance (Guyana – United States Department of State, 2021). This will enhance the country’s rating in the Ease of Doing Business index ion a
Labour Supply
Labour Supply describes the number and accessibility of qualified workforce in a nation. Foreign investors are interested in labor costs together with worker quality. A better-informed labor market can learn and adapt to new technologies more quickly, and training local employees would be less expensive for enterprises operating in the area. Due to cheap labor costs and salaries, investing in emerging nations is seen as favorable. Lower labor costs decrease the cost of manufacturing, yet inexpensive labor supports the movement of a portion of the production process to other nations. As a result of Oil discovery, the growth of Guyana country may be seen in the influx of migrant laborers (Rambarran & Lambert, 2021). During this period, it is crucial to transfer employees from the informal market to the formal economy so that the nation may get a possible advantage from its existing labor. Consequently, people from oil industries might be recruited to assist with the operation of Girl Scout Cookies.
The Entry Strategy
When discussing market entrance, an international corporation must also assess the size of the entry. Large-scale entrance into a market necessitates substantial capital investment and speedy access. The significance of the resultant strategic engagements is correlated with the repercussions of joining on a large scale and entering swiftly (Hill, 2021). A strategic investment has long-lasting effects and is hard to undo. Hence, the decision to join a foreign market on a substantial scale represents a considerable strategic commitment.
For example, quick market entrance on a colossal scale may significantly impact the character of a market’s competition. Accordingly, the optimal exporting plan for Girls Scouts entails exporting commodities and products straight to Guyana. It is the quickest way for certain firms to enter the worldwide market (Hill, 2021). In this instance, direct exporting may also be viewed as direct marketing. This necessitates that Girls Scouts, as business owners in the United States, send their individual sales staff to South America, for example, to connect to consumers. Suppose Girls Scouts anticipates a need for their items and services in the Guyana market. In that case, they may source an importer rather than develop their local retail base in the international market. Girls Scouts may advertise their trademark and goods directly or indirectly via their sales agents or importing wholesalers.
Conclusion
With globalization seeking to consume the weak and unwary, CEOs have several responsibilities. These begin with formulating a vision and purpose, followed by developing the tactics required to realize these ambitions via worldwide growth. Strategies are ineffective if they are not implemented, used, or activated to promote the company’s growth and competitive advantage. Girls Scout Cookies may only successfully expand to Guyana if they apply the strong tactics and structures outlined in this study. This is because gone are the days when firms waited for people to purchase their goods due to monopolies or limited options. Nowadays, business is precarious and dangerous and investing without care, durability, and a competitive advantage results in the overnight loss of hard-earned cash; hence only those with an advantage would endure.
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