Better World Case Analysis

Angelica Alvarez

PID: 3986767

MAN 4720

Professor Grigoriou

Better World Books Case

1). What are the vision, mission, and values of Better World Books? Critically evaluate them. Are they helpful to the company’s leaders in formulating strategic intent? Why or why not?

The introduction of Better World Books was the idea of Xavier Helgesen, Chris Fuchs, and Jeff  Kurtzman,  three  2001 graduates of the University of Notre Dame in which they came up with the idea of selling books online with a parallel mission of non-profit “as mission to fund literacy initiatives around the globe” The core values of BWB are customer focus, people matter, doing the right thing, passion for literacy and sustainability. BWB is driven to provide customers with a highly-valued experience, and one that allows them to align their actions with their values. They seek out talented people who work hard and invest in them. As part of their values respecting each individual, rewarding achievement, and celebrating team success is important. BWB Fosters Innovation by looking for new ideas and bold moves while embracing and creating change. Their Passion for Literacy strives and believes that every person should have the chance to achieve their potential and participate fully in society.

All in all, they are more than just a business. Through the business BWB strives to enable people to make sustainable positive changes in this world. The company continuously made efforts to achieve social, environmental, and economic sustainability. It directly donated books and gave financial support to literacy initiatives worldwide. Moreover, a percentage of each sale was given separately to the individuals, libraries, or colleges as well as literacy partners chosen by them. BWB did not advertise in the media about collecting and selling books; awareness about its business model was mainly spread through word of mouth. The company made efforts to achieve social, environmental, and economic sustainability. The company’s strategic intent is measured in three areas: PEOPLE, PLANET, and PROFIT.

2). Analyze the ways in which BWB strives to achieve a triple bottom line. Is this business model sustainable in the long term? Why or why not?

As a for-profit social enterprise, Better World books’ follow a triple bottom line philosophy, basing their economic activities on the elements of people, planet and profits. They aim to create and deliver value for customers, employees, shareholders and most importantly, the illiterate population by selling, receiving and donating used books. With social responsibility and community involvement at the core of their value proposition, the world can become a more literate and better place. Although a rosy but attainable ideal, such proposition can have its’ weaknesses including the volatility of inventory, the distribution of profit and the ignorance of minority towards social issues. A weakness arising from the planet element of BWB’s value proposition is the reliance of donations to supply majority of the total inventory. Since donation levels are not always consistent, inventory levels fluctuate creating a degree of constant uncertainty. Also if they wanted to, they can donate straight to the non-profit organization instead. BWB must thus emphasize how their brand fulfils their needs to read and save money, builds on their values why illiteracy is an issue and imply urgency so that action can be taken today. As part of the people and profits element, BWB returns a percentage of their profits to its investors, partners and shareholders. The difficulty with this is how it is distributed. BWB management needs to frequently be aware of issues relating to customer perception and reassess the percentage they give to stakeholders. In addition, how much they set aside towards literacy initiatives need to be in line with investment returns because low returns mean lower attractiveness for further investment in BWB. This could have unfavorable effects for future growth. Lastly, when balancing the profits and people elements of their value proposition, financial incentives need to be taken into consideration to attract talented labor to further develop the company.

3). Utilize Porter’s five forces framework to analyze the used book industry. Is this an attractive industry? Why or why not? Which force(s) have the strongest influence?

Porter’s Five forces constitute of threat of entry; power of suppliers; power of buyers; threat of substitutes; rivalry among existing competitors. This analysis is a framework that attempts to analyze the level of competition within an industry and business strategy development.

For BWB the threat of entry is the sudden growth of e-books and Google’s recent agreement with authors and publishers to create online libraries holding digital copies of books.  Google has sought to share with authors and publishers a percentage of the revenues it gets from books selling, digital library subscriptions, and online advertising.  Will Google seek to replace BWB? Other socially motivated used book sellers could enter the market seeking to overcome BWB niche. As for the power of buyers, impersonators like Books4Cause runs book-donation campaigns and sells or donates the most usable books to support nonprofit literacy programs.