The Vrio analysis for Whirlpool is based on four main attributes which essentially helps the company gain competitive advantage. These four attributes include, valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable and organized to capture value. With these four, you can determine how the company shows competitive advantage.
When determining whether resources are valuable, the company must show strategies that defend the company from major threats. Customer satisfaction is also another way that resources can be proven valuable, because it increases customer value. Value can come from increasing differentiation in products or decreasing the price. If the necessary requirements are not met then this may lead the company to a competitive disadvantage.
When determining whether the firm is rare, they are measured based on the resources that are not used by any other company. With valuable and rare sources, you can gain a lot of competitive advantage. Another way firm’s resources can be rare is if more than of a few companies use the same resource and show the same amount of consistency then they are also rare resources.
The resources of the firm can be identified as costly to imitate when, other existing organizations can imitate it. It is done in one of two ways. The first way would be duplicating the direct imitation, and the second would be substituting the indirect imitation. If a firm has valuable, rare, and costly to imitate resources, then they put themselves in a good position to be competitive advantage. Historical conditions, vagueness, and social complexity lead to the resources being costly.
For a firm to be competitive and show different advantages they must be organized. Resources alone cannot provide this. Whirlpool must have its, policies, strategies, systems, and process organized, in order to to exploits the company’s latent talent to be valuable, rare, and costly to imitate.