20 Mar Strategic Planning

Background

Lisa Sedlar, CEO and founder of Green Zebra was preparing for a $10 million raise from venture capital funders, to finance a West Coast expansion of her convenience store chain, Green Zebra Grocery.  Lisa Sedlar describes Green Zebras market positioning is a cross between a Whole Foods and a 7-11.  The mission of Green Zebra is to make healthy, natural, and organic food accessible to all, particularly in dense urban neighborhoods where there are fewer fresh and organic grocery options.

Urban convenience stores dedicated to food retailing was a growing trend among the incumbent operators such as Kwik Trip Inc., Quick-Trip Corp., and 7-Eleven. These firms were responding to competitive pressures in the urban convenience store market as Walgreens, Amazon, and discount retailers began to test various convenience store formats.  Shortly after her press release announcing plans to expand the Green Zebra chain, Amazon announced a 3,000-store national expansion of Amazon-Go.  

Sedlar needs evidence that would validate her current value proposition, or she needed to make the decision to revise her customer value proposition, and demonstrate that Green Zebra offered a differentiated advantage in the convenience store market.  Sedlar could not conduct a full-scale customer survey to validate her current customer value proposition, so she used social media content (online product reviews, Instagram photos, or blog posts) as the source of data to develop customer insights. 

What to do

Answer the following questions:

1. Describe the themes that were extracted from user-generated content, and used to analyze Green Zebra and its competitors. (10 points)

2. Create a SWOT framework to compare Green Zebra to Amazon Go and 7-Eleven.  Identify the major areas for improvement that would require addressing weaknesses of Green Zebra. (20 points)

3. What are the areas of improvement based on user-generated content? (10 points)

4. Describe the convenience store market using Porters 5 Forces framework.  (10 points) 

5. What is the customer value proposition of Green Zebra?  Do the data support the customer value proposition?  Explain specifically why or why not. (25 points)

6. Should Sedlar pivot her strategy? Explain specifically why or why not.  If she pivots, what assumption/uncertainty should she test first? (25 points)