Carnival Case Analysis

Case 13 - Carnival

After reading the case, I believe that the success of Carnival Corporation & plc is clearly due to its effective strategy cooperated to a desirable macro environment. As the environment is changing rapidly, the company did change its directions to fit into the macro environment in hopes of growing and leading in the cruise industry. For example, it envisioned new alternative vacations that complemented the increasing affluence of Americans, and hence kept on enhancing shipboard experience with a large variety of activities in order to attract more customers.

Therefore, I believe if a company would like to achieve success and maintain its operation for distant future, it should conduct a detailed analysis about the macro environment, and then keep on updating the strategies with the changing environment.

People of all ages and backgrounds enjoying the cruise experience caused by the television’s Love Boat series during the 1970s was surely the socio-cultural factor which provided the opportunity for cruise industry to grow and expand. However, it did not mean that the Carnival Corporation could survive without paying efforts since other competitors may also take this chance to develop their business and defeat others. Therefore, Carnival grasped the opportunity and kept on building more activities and developing more entertainments on its ships to enhance new shipboard experience of the customers, which made it capture the largest market shares and become the market leader in the coming years.

Socio-cultural factors do not only provide opportunities, but also threats. Failure to consider the socio-cultural factors may bring about fatal consequences to a business if the company did not pay attention to it. A classic example can be referred to the failure of KFC in India in 1997. Cow is worshipped by Indians as it is a Holy Animal in Hindu culture. However, KFC did not take this into consideration seriously at that time and launched beef...