First Solar Turns Sunshine into Profits - Case Study Example

Key Marketing Issues As a new entrant to some of Europe’s and North America’s markets, First Solar has some crucial marketing issues to consider. Three of these key marketing issues can be identified as: Identification of marketing forces that would be of greatest advantage to the entry that the company is seeking to undertake Identification of key market competitors and how to develop long term competitive advantages over these competitors How to integrate the advantages of technology into the marketing strategy of the company; so as to have the full benefit of the paradigm shift being created with advanced technology.

1 Which marketing environment forces are likely to have the greatest impact on First Solar? The generalized marketing environmental forces that are likely to affect the competition that First Solar brings on board has to do with external forces that generally inform the decision making cycle of consumers (Marshall, 2008). By this, reference is being made to such factors or forces as economic situation and environmental impacts. First, it would be noted that First solar is operating in a globalised market that is fast becoming concerned with the need to raising market product and service that are highly affordable.

This is because of the increasing hardship that the global economy seem to be recording. Experts believe that there continues to be economic hardships among most consumers of energy products as an auxiliary effect of the global economic crunch that was experienced some few years back (The Gleaner, 2008). Because of this, consumers and clients of various products and services are always looking for value for money. With this situation in mind, there is certainly going to be an environmental phenomenon whereby buyers are going to opt for First Solar’s line of product as they are comparatively cheaper to existing sources of energy such as non-renewable energy.

Again, there is an environmental impact that is largely going to impact on First Solar in a positive way. 2 What types of organizations are most likely to exert the strongest competitive forces on First Solar? Energy companies that introduce products that have alternative resource raw material are likely to face strong competitive force from existing competitors who use the alternative resource raw materials (Baxter, 2005). There is therefore going to be the threat of substitute products or services.

In the case of First Solar, it would be realized that their major resource raw material is the use of solar energy. Meanwhile, there are alternative sources of resource raw materials in the renewable energy production industry. Dominant among these resource raw materials is the use of wind energy. Therefore, there is going to be a competitive force from existing competitors who are into the production of wind based renewable energy. Secondly, new entrants have always acted as major competitive forces to existing competitive who might have had long history of doing business such as First Solar (Marshall, 2008).

This is because new entrants have a number of factors that pull consumers to them. For instance consumers who are on existing companies would like to compare service and product quality and so may opt for new entrants for a while. Again, new entrants come in with new sources of capital and so often have an economic advantage (Brown, Steven and. Sauder, 2008).