title: CORPORATES ABILITIES TO REALIZE E ARLY WARNING SIGNALS OF MARKET DISRUPTIONS, E MERGING NEEDS, &amp; TRENDS- CASE OF SAUDI WATER BOTTLE MARKET-
Creators: name: Habis, Amr
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2022

description: Commodity market resembles one of the most challenging competitive spaces across the globe, where some studies suggest that the nature of such competitiveness is driven from aspects such as low profitable margin, volatility, market size, and large capital inflows into such a space in the past two decades (Ding, 2021). The water bottle industry is considered one of the largest commodity spaces, since according to a recent study carried out by M2 Presswire (2021), the market is expected to grow from $217 billion in 2020, with 11% Compound Annual Growth Rate “CAGR” to reach $505 billions by 2028. In which, proper management is highly needed to maintain corporates’ competitive advantage, or even surviving the competition. In Saudi Arabia, the water bottle market is not less attractive nor less challenging. Likewise global market, the market is subject to potential disruption, emerging consumers’ needs, new trends and entrants. In which, corporates’ abilities to strategizing and acting may play a significant role in deciding corporates’ future. The importance of studying such market dynamic is not in isolation to studying interlinked managerial, corporate’s culture, and decision makers aspects, in which, understanding the dynamics and the nature of both -market and market players- may play a significant role in re-arranging the competitive forces within the competition spectrum. With such complexity in the Saudi water bottle market, AVON, stood out as a major incumbent with even more additional set of complexities. Hence the external environment poses additional layer of challenges to almost all the competitors in the sense of new entrants, regulations, products, and customers’ needs, AVON has its own internal challenges that are driven from its immediate corporate dynamics, in addition to even a unique set of challenges that are driven from being owned by a parent company called OG. Nevertheless, OG has its own dynamics that directly and indirectly impact AVON. Therefore, AVON management had to deal with these multiple challenging forces, unlike other competitors. In 2016 AVON started to experience a poor performance, as the employees’ turnover rate grew and sales started to decline, in addition to losing market share to a new entrant called Bryan. In which, OG, tried to address these sets of issues in the past, but failure was the motto. Consequently, OG decided to investigate the holistic situation to thoroughly understand the reasons behind such a performance before attempting to approach the issue again. In which, the researcher, also the insider, had seen an opportunity to conduct a study using an Action Research “AR” methodology in a unique complex-system and to help the company unfolding the hidden realities, therefore, to help addressing the solutions. Thus, through the lens of the mentioned realities, this study primarily aims to explore a Saudi Arabian company’s ability to realize the early warning signals of market disruptions, emerging needs, and trends, and most importantly, the company’s ability to understand and observe itself in relation to the external context. Consequently, to explore the impact of such realization on company’s performance. The study also aims to add to the knowledge in this field by exploring the applicability of several theories to the Saudi market. Finally, it was an opportunity for the researcher and the corporate they worked with to conduct multiple AR’s for a real practice-based problem, in which, this thesis aims to examine workplace-based issues through the lens of the theories discussed. The context had drawn the researcher to critically think of the most appropriate research question that would help uncovering the realities and aspects intended about observing and decrypt early warning signals of market disruptions. Additionally, the researcher had chosen to capitalize on their presence, knowledge, access to certain information, inability to access certain information, available data, and relationship with key actors within the systems. Consequently, the researcher had mainly conducted the research using observation and questionnaires within a research framework inspired by ethnographical qualitative methodology. Therefore, the study could be expanded using more lengthy and comprehensive research approaches. Nevertheless, the study was conducted in the Saudi Arabian market in the commodities sector and focused on a particular company operating under a conglomerate parent company. The same study could therefore be extended to cover a broader scope. This study examines the reasons behind the inability of a market incumbent in the water bottle industry to decrypt an early warning signal of market disruption. By contrast, a new entrant was able to recognize the emerging need and fulfil it faster than the incumbent. As a result, this study reveals several findings and actionable knowledge -that had been conducted already and proven high level of success-, such as the dynamic capability of the company in question and how much of the available resources were being used. Also, the study reveals that disruption innovation might not necessarily take place at the lower end of the market. Additionally, the disruption process may take place in paradigms other than those of a technological nature. For example, action and inaction by management and Boards of Directors “BoD” can lead to disruption. The study also examines the company in question from the perspective of system actors and aims to understand why it lost market share to the new entrant. The findings of this study also suggest a potential framework that can be used with daughter companies to enhance parent companies’ value-add. It also suggests a potential dynamic capabilities framework that may help daughter companies to craft disruptive strategies, and that in the sense of activating unused resources, enhancing bottom-up and cross functional communications, and observing organizational behaviour. Additionally, companies need to observe the entire space they operate in, in which they may need to adopt new mindsets including re-engineering their Resources, Values, and Processes “RVP”, and conducting back-casting that may help them redefining their responsive tactics to certain dynamics. Keywords: JTBD, Disruptive Innovations, Disruptive Strategies, Dynamics Capabilities, CPR, Parent Companies, Daughter Companies, Water Bottle Industry, Back-casting, VRP