Verizon Wireless & Blizzard Entertainment an Environmental Scan
University of Phoenix
Strategic Management
MGT/498
Jeff Portsche
May 26, 2015

Verizon Wireless & Blizzard Entertainment an Environmental Scan
Verizon Wireless and Blizzard Entertainment are both companies that provide a service to their customers in a highly competitive field. As such they both must actively engage themselves in the process of environmental scan to ensure the long term health of their companies in their respective markets and future markets. These environments are especially complex with these two companies since there are both external environments and internal environments. It is through the process of environmental scan that these companies can determine what their competitive advantages are in the present as well as in the future. Each company must look to the future and determine what measurement guidelines they will be using to measure their success in the next five to ten years. The effectiveness of their measurement guidelines must be examined as well. In the end, a company is only as good as its ability to examine itself from the inside and out.
The external environments of both Verizon Wireless and Blizzard Entertainment are complex. This is due mostly to the fact that both companies are in a highly competitive and ever changing market. In addition to the change, both are in a highly regulated market by the governments they deal with. Verizon Wireless must abide by the laws in multiple countries in North America and Europe. Blizzard Entertainment has managed to expand its market to North America, South America, Europe and Asia. The laws and regulations in each region differ vastly and create a very complex external environment for both companies to find themselves in.
The internal environments of Verizon Wireless and Blizzard Entertainment are forced into a complex state mainly due to the complexity of their respective external environments. The internal environment of Verizon Wireless is one in which it must look inward for tomorrow’s leaders within the company. Through this selectiveness Verizon Wireless has the opportunity to shape its future by having seasoned and experienced people in the right places who have come up through the company’s culture. In regards to how they determine where the company moves, the company has a think tank group whose entire responsibility is to challenge their business practices to become more efficient as well as to challenge what will be the next thing that Verizon Wireless can provide its clients with ("Verizon Innovation," 2015). This is not limited to devices in the sense of a cellular telephone. This ranges anywhere from cloud computing to real time video and communications from human to human, human to machine, and even machine to machine communications. Verizon Wireless has the daunting task of keeping companies in touch with assets as well as military families in touch with their loved ones when they are separated. Verizon Wireless has one of the largest United States Government contracts when it comes to wireless communications and as such is a target for the constant barrage of security breaches that must be thought of ahead of time and accounted for. It is through their internal environment that Verizon Wireless can prepare for these types of shifts that can occur at any given moment in time.
Blizzard Entertainment has a complex internal environment as well. Blizzard must take into account the different intellectual property laws amongst dozens of countries and figure out how it is best to protect itself. From within the company the officers have to interview programmers and determine the direction that the company will go in the next year as well as years to come. For several years, the company survived on its record breaking subscription based video game, World of Warcraft (Sullivan, 2008). In recent years the company has found that the subscriptions to the game have started to dwindle and has had to look beyond the present to prepare for the future. Through the development of its staff and the use of environmental scan, Blizzard Entertainment has sought to explore other options for the future of the company with some promising success in their attempts. Diablo III has proven to be a game that retains the interest of its players with less upkeep than World of Warcraft. It is through Blizzard Entertainment’s and Verizon Wireless’s ability to look beyond the present and near future that they are able to create a competitive advantage.
Through their business strategies the two companies have moved beyond their competitors by remaining on the forefront of their industries when it comes to the next advancement in their respective fields. By maintaining an eye on the next products to release and where technology allows both of these companies to serve their customers they can sustain a competitive advantage through their strategy of being at the forefront of technological advancements in both entertainment through video games and wireless communications. Verizon Wireless uses a churn rate to measure its strategic effectiveness. As a premium wireless services provider, the rate in which they can retain customers as opposed to just churning through them is very important. With some of the lowest churn rates in the industry combined with the constant focus on the customer experience, Verizon Wireless has achieved profits in each and every quarter of their existence and has thus far proven that their measurement guidelines are extremely effective.
Blizzard Entertainment has chosen to measure its value and sustainability in a different manner. They are choosing to broaden their horizons to a different game platform from the role-play game that has launched Blizzard into the success it has since experienced. The measurement guidelines that Blizzard Entertainment has chosen to utilize in order to verify its strategic effectiveness is the measurement of new customers who come to their games and retain a subscription for 6 months or more versus the measurement of those customers who purchase their vanity items on their digital marketplace. These measurement guidelines are not the most effective manner in which the company could be measuring its strategic effectiveness. Instead Blizzard Entertainment could be looking at how likely customers are to refer their products and services to another non-customer through a small reward program for current subscribers.
In summary, through the use of environmental scan, both Blizzard Entertainment and Verizon Wireless have evolved themselves into a unique position amongst their competitors and catapulted themselves forward, giving them a competitive advantage. The challenge for both companies is retaining that competitive advantage while maintaining customer satisfaction with their products and services. It is through their ability to look inward as well as outward beyond what can be easily seen that will ultimately determine the likelihood of their success.

References
Sullivan, J. C. (2008, February 13). 2008 Blizzard Entertainment worldwide invitational is set for June. Wireless News, 1. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.contentproxy.phoenix.edu/docview/210157172?accountid=35812
Verizon innovation program powering the future. (2015). Retrieved from http://innovation.verizon.com/ http://innovation.verizon.com/. (n.d.). http://innovation.verizon.com/