Hotel Chocolat's Strategic Choices - Essay Example

The company started as Choc Express and in 2003 rebramded to be the known Hotel Chocolat Company. The firm’s founders have the required knowledge and skills to run the business. For instance, Angus went through the Business Growth and Development course at Cranfield School of Management. Amazingly, today Hotel Chocolat Company operates in more than 33 locations in England with 70% of the customers trading from the firm’s website (Barrow & Molian, 2005). The following is a report on the major strategic options facing Hotel Chocolat Company as well as the potential future strategic position of the firm.

The report also provides specific recommendations in respect to the Hotel Chocolat Company. The report achieves these objectives through three main parts; A, B, and C. Part A The major strategic options facing Hotel Chocolat As a company's business, Hotel Chocolat is faced with many options that can steer up expansion of the company and that of the market sales (Gelderman & Weele, 2002). I will discuss these options one after the other and give an explanation of the same on how they work, when should they be implemented.

The result of this is that it is going to propel the company to a potential future strategic position. . ducts in a unique way than their competitors and providing their customers with their need, wants and desire more effective than others (Bertoldi, Giachino & Marenco, 2012). This model works with the assumption that a customer accepts any product offered based on the apparent value for money. The model is based on the a number of perception of the product and service offered against a price tag such that the same product or service can offer different price depending how it is perceived by the customers.

I recommend the strategic clock model because it combines a low price, low perceived benefit with focus given to a price sensitive market segment. However, there may be price sensitive customers with low purchasing power and who cannot afford to buy better quality products but most customers do not differentiate or value the difference in the goods offered. Also to build on the customer loyalty, the executive group of the Hotel Chocolat Company can introduce loyalty cards which will contain customers with the products of the Hotel Chocolat’s company only (LeBoeuf et al, 2011).

This is achieved by offering frequent customers with loyalty cards and proving them with incentives and discounts when purchasing at any of the stores, outlets and supermarkets particularly selling products of the Hotel Chocolat’s company. Another option that the Hotel Chocolat Company can implement is production differentiation (Gelderman & Weele, 2002). This aims at offering benefits that is completely different from those of the competitors. Of course the Hotel Chocolat Company also faces competitions from other beverage companies which either acts as substitutes or complements to their products such as tea among others.

Therefore, to achieve a competitive advantage than other companies,