Dress Palate is the UK’s leading fashion retailer. It sells women’s clothing, handbags and fashion jewellery. It also sells clothing for men and children. Dress Palate currently has over 200 stores located across the UK. It has captured about 10 per cent of the fashion retail market in the UK. It manufactures its own merchandise as well as sources merchandise from external vendors. The company is making considerable profit, but recently its top line growth has slowed down. The company has been facing severe competition from e-commerce fashion retailers, and this has led to a decrease in the speed of Dress Palate’s growth. In addition, several independent stores that sell apparel and accessories of different qualities and at different prices have opened. The company’s board of directors has been in talks with the management accounting team. They have agreed that the fashion industry is a competitive industry and product differentiation is a strategy that can help Dress Palate to lure customers and regain its growth pace. As the competition grows, differentiating your retail product from your competitors’ product can make a stronger impact on your potential customers. Product differentiation would require the company to do some amount of market research. The board has concluded that they need to establish a balanced scorecard system to help Dress Palate improve the key processes in their value chain.

Required
1. According to Miles and Snow’s strategy model, what category would Dress Palate’s decision to pursue production differentiation fall into?
2. Discuss the differences between a defender and prospector, as discussed in Miles and Snow’s strategy model.
3. Identify a drawback of the differentiation strategy for Dress Palate.
4. In accordance with the balanced scorecard model, identify the performance indicators in Dress Palate’s balanced scorecard.
5. Identify which factors would be part of Dress Palate’s value chain analysis.
6. Identify the performance measures that Dress Palate could use to assess internal business processes.
7. Identify the customer perspective performance measures for Dress Palate.