Guess Jeans

Guess is a company that has specialised in designing, manufacturing and licensing of custom men and women apparel (Guess 2009). The materials used to design them consist mainly of cotton and denim. There are also varieties of knit wear, which form an increasingly major part of their clothing merchandise. The items are essentially sold in a number of factory and retail establishments located mainly in the United States and Canada (Guess 2009). The company also utilises online sale portals via its company website. Guess jeans being an established cloth line and brand name can successfully build on its strengths to establish a stable market with less competition variables.

Guess jeans is essentially a consumer product since the final customer uses it. The customer core value therefore determines the number of sales and the product’s trend of use. It therefore falls under the speciality products since the customer takes into account many factors such as suitability, price, quality, and style. Guess jeans offers product support by answering inquiries via its toll free line provided on their website (Guess 2009). Here it is an augmented product, which comes after it has been bought. The real product has quality-enhanced features regarding denim use and design aspects.

Strengths

Guess jeans being an established cloth line and brand name can successfully build on its strengths to establish a stable market with less competition variables. Some of the strengths that guess jeans can exploit include the following:

1. Guess jeans can enhance its innovative designs by further developing better prototypes that will enable it relinquish their competitor’s market position. For instance, its expertise in developing unique accessories for men and women wear with regard to fashion forward apparel, handbags, watches, and shoes .
2. The company has its expanded its distributor points and retail stores globally, a factor that has seen it increase its presence worldwide. The company can therefore exploit this enhanced market presence in such a manner that it overshadows other global brand names. It also gives it the advantage to introduce innovative designs into the market domain.
3. The company is a global brand name and enjoys enhanced licensee relationships. This will enable the company to enact practical expansion strategies that can propel its growth to unreachable heights among the many players in the industry. The fact that the company has well-established licensee relationships implies that it is placed strategically market wise. This enables it to distribute its merchandise without the any hindrances presented by government trade regulations. It will also enable it to navigate the trade legal systems in a much easier way. 
4. Guess has perfected its denim wear jeans brand in a revolutionary manner. Since its inception majority the company, denim was its first success at a time when most of the companies were seeing these as an old-fashioned material. The company can therefore strengthen its already established association with denim wear in a manner that develops consumer faithfulness.
5. The company has a diversified product portfolio that includes handbags, watches, belts and other accessories. This is advantageous as it gives Guess customers a wide choice of accompaniment with regard to the accessories that all of them can effectively access.

Weaknesses

Guess jeans has a well-established market domain. However, several factors have contributed to the company’s failure in several instances with regard to achieving its perceived business goals and initiatives.

1. There is a general lack of focus by the company when it comes to protecting the company product line against counterfeits. For instance, recently there has influx of fake guess jeans in several of its target market domains. In one instance Guess, Calvin Klein, and Levi Strauss & company launched a combined effort that saw them seize many imitation pairs of jeans from specific vendors.  This joint effort came late after the companies especially Guess jeans had suffered economic consequences because of the compounded effects, which further saws it sack its employees because of dwindling profits.
2. Another perceived weakness is associated with the company’s notable absence with regard to advertising of children wear. This omission has a negative effect when it comes to capturing the youth market that are more acquainted to fashion accessories since there is the chance that some of them already have developed faithfulness of a different brand.
3. Marketing strategies employed by the company are very expansive and these has seen the company use some of the most established celebrities in its market branding strategies, a factor that has seen it spend a lot of revenue in advertising alone against other less expensive strategies that can be employed by its management.

Opportunities

There are many diverse opportunities that the Guess jeans can exploit in order to maximize its sales and grow into a great establishment. Some of them include:

1. The company has over the years developed a global market through its numerous and rigorous expansion programs. This is an opportunity the company can exploit to enhance supply of newer version of products. The company is constantly trying to satisfy its clientele produced constantly to reflect changing trends.
2. Guess managers can promote performance by exploiting the constantly changing trends in the online marketing domain. Currently there are many online marketing domains like eBay and yahoo. Guess’s presence in this domain is limited due to its initial geographical expansion strategy. The management should therefore consider using virtual options like eBay as opposed to relying on its online stores. This is because there is a general feeling of better bargains available in such domains.
3. The company can exploit the current economic slump by instituting special price cuts for most of its merchandise. This will be rely upon the company’s recognition of unique fashion tastes and style possessed by its customers while trying to find a balance between fantasy of fashion and the reality of life
4. The company has a vast resources base due to its long presence in the fashion industry. It can therefore exploit the economies and diseconomies of scale presented by the virtue of it being a major player in the industry. This gives it significant advantage above its competitors especially when it comes to initiating large projects. 

Threats

Guess has many threats, which mainly emanate from different economic situation and geographical dispositions. They are as follows:

1. The presence of other players in the market has made Guess to relinquish some of its previously established and faithful market to competitors. Some of the strategies employed by the competitors include the use of price cuts to very low levels. For instance, rivals set considerably low prices in the online stores like eBay.
2. There are also social cultural concerns, which are affecting the performance of the Guess products in certain geographical entities. For instance, in Asia there are communities that do not allow women to use some of the trendy outfits because of the socio – cultural barriers. This discourages sales in these countries, as supplies tend to overstay in the counters of majority of stores. This however, has less impact on the sales of men trendy wear. It therefore has an impact when introducing some of the newer trends in these markets.
3. The ongoing global financial crisis has had an overarching effect on the company‘s sales. This is because there is a general shift in focus people’s attitude towards luxury items as prices for basic household commodities continue to rise. Guess jeans has limited alternative hence they have to produce cheaper options and institute price cuts for its luxurious jeans wear.
4. There is an ensuing situation in the traditional market domain of Guess whereby new entrants are producing Guess imitation jeans models, which are being sold at relatively low price indices compared to the authentic merchandise. This has subsequently affected its growing customer base resulting on low sales.