The business sustainability of an automotive refinish paint distributor

摘要

From a broad overview of business management literature, the proposition emerged that strategic conditions within an organisation can translate into sustainable business development outcomes. However, in the rapidly evolving business environment, the quest to grow or sustain competitive advantage demands that business practices become more proactive, creative and innovative. Globalisation and technological advances drive the need for innovation within a business context and the resultant rapid pace of change demands that businesses adopt a customer-focused entrepreneurial orientation to accommodate this need for innovation. This study investigated whether the principles of marketing, business management tools and management of the customer-base could be incorporated as key drivers to develop innovative and creative tactics that could serve as viable solutions to sustain business development strategies of automotive refinish paint distributors. An initial step in this research comprised a theoretical overview of the internal business environment as a system of the enterprise that aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the organisation, which could be applied to support strategic business goals and objectives. The literature review further entailed an investigation and explorations regarding best practices that automotive refinish paint distributors could follow in order to identify, focus on and develop their source of competitive advantage, sustainability and profitability. From the literature review, a methodological framework was developed that could be applied to specific success indicators, moulded to produce distinctive competencies in the automotive refinish paint industry; defining a significant foundation from which the objectives of this study could be researched. The study adopted the qualitative research approach and focused on a single case of a refinish paint distributor. The reason for selecting the case study method is that an entire organisation could be investigated in depth with particular attention to detail. A detailed questionnaire was drawn up in order to conduct face-to-face interviews with selected respondents, based on the profound expertise of the selected personnel. This was done to enable the researcher to assess the prevalent elements of business sustainability applied by the automotive refinish distributor to enhance their competitive advantage. The design of the empirical element of this study, aimed at providing a blueprint that would enable the researcher to structure the research problem in such a way that the outcome of the study would be valid, objective and reliable. Due to the qualitative nature of this study, the results are interpreted through inductive reasoning, observations, projective and participatory approaches all of which are integrated into a comprehensive model indicating key drivers to promote, improve and facilitate the business sustainability of the automotive refinish paint distributor. A range of recommendations and managerial implications extracted from the results of the empirical study are presented in the final chapter.