Guidelines

Partners will be assigned before quiz1. With your partner, you will choose a company to focus on (see General Instructions) for the course. Once you have selected your company, you need to go to its website and get to know the company better (read its history and what it does). Also, you need to identify the top competitors against which your company competes (please select the top three competitors).

After getting familiar with your company and its competitors, you will need to research the General Environment (more about the General Environment can be found in this week’s assigned reading) and identify important trends (that could provide potential opportunities or threats).

For each of the two segments of the General Environment, identify how the segment is affecting (and will affect) firms in the industry. For this you will need to find and use at least three articles or references in total for the assignment (written no more than three years ago) to validate your assessment. Make sure you provide references for each article. If you can identify more than one source to back your claims (such as an article, comments by the CEO, comments by an industry analyst, etc.), this will provide stronger credibility (and help your grade!). Refer to Ketchen and Short, Chapter 3 for additional insight.

Deliverable

Use the following as your template for creating a Word document that one member of each team will submit in the course space drop box.

Company Name:JC Penney

Competitors (select the top 3):

List the references below that you used for this assignment:

Write a brief assessment (no more than a paragraph) for each of the following segments based on your research. If the segment is largely irrelevant, then note that.

Sociocultural segment

Global segment

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