Link across concepts, tools, or points that you are making and ensure you are providing insights into the business strategy of your chosen company.

Describing the environment for instance, or who the main competitors are, is ultimately of little value unless it is then related to strategy. Link across concepts, tools, or points that you are making and ensure you are providing insights into the business strategy of your chosen company.
This is general advice on the assignment provided by the professor: 1) You can choose any company, successful or failing, including recent failures. 2) Try not to go too far back in time however. Choosing to focus on a company from early-mid 2000s is somewhat pointless given the economic and competitive conditions we find ourselves in these days. 3) You can use any strategic framework/theory/analysis tool we cover in the module (and beyond if you wish). 4) You should use at least 3 to 4 analysis tools in your assignment so that you give yourself enough potential for analysis and to be able to generate sufficient strategic insights. 5) The key to good marks is ‘analysis’, and not ‘description’. Describing the environment for instance, or who the main competitors are, is ultimately of little value unless it is then related to strategy. Link across concepts, tools, or points that you are making and ensure you are providing insights into the business strategy of your chosen company. 6) Use academic references as well. Most of your information sources will inevitably be the business press (FT, BBC Business News etc), online interviews of managers/executives, available case studies, and business services such as Mintel, FAME. however, you should also be looking at introducing academic work into your report. For instance, through integrating concepts to explain strategy or for purposes of critique. 7) Remember the basics: your work should be readable, have good presentation, be proof-read prior to submission and consistent. 8) Remember to make strategic recommendations for your chosen company. Put thought into this as it is an important aspect of the assignment. 9) Do not just choose random strategic analysis tools or frameworks. Only choose ones that you can use that will help you to explain the business strategy of your chosen company. Remember, the key to obtaining marks in this assignment is to provide explanation, detail and insights into the strategy. It is hard to obtain marks merely from describing (e.g., describing the external environment through a PESTEL or 5 Forces alone).