The Three Types of Strategies

There are three main types of strategies:

1. The corporate level strategy identifies the portfolio of businesses that in total will comprise the corporation and the ways in which these businesses will relate;
2. The competitive strategy identifies how to build and strengthen the business’s long-term competitive position in the marketplace; and
3. The functional strategies identify the basic courses of action that each department will pursue to contribute to the attainment of its goals.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Role of Government

In general, government has three basic economic functions. First, government provides a legal foundation and an appropriate social environment for the conduct of economic activity. Second, government both encourages competition in the marketplace and controls it. This is accomplished through legislation and government agency rules and regulations. Finally, government redistributes income from some segments o the economy to others. Government acquires revenues through taxation—taxes on income, property, sales, and payroll. These revenues are channeled back into the economy through spending and transfer payments to veterans, the aged, welfare recipients, and others in society. In short, government is a consumer of goods and services and not producer of them.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Price: A Measure of Value

Prices in the marketplace are a rough measure of how society values particular goods and services. If consumers are willing to pay the marketplaces, then apparently they feel they are getting at least their money’s worth. Similarly, the cost of labor and materials is a rough measure of the value of resources used in the production of goods and services to meet these needs. New consumer needs that can be served profitably—not just the needs of the majority—will probably be met by some profit-minded businesses.

In a market-directed economic system the prices in both the production sector (for resources) and the consumption sector (for goods and services) vary to allocate resources and distribute income according to consumer preferences. Over time, the result is a balance of supply and demand and the coordination of the economic activity of many individuals and institutions.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Bargaining Power of Suppliers

Increasing prices and reducing the quality of products sold are potential means through which suppliers can exert power over firms competing within an industry. If a firm is unable to recover cost increases through its pricing structure, its profitability is reduced by its suppliers’ actions. A supplier group is powerful when:

• It is dominated by a few large companies and is more concentrated than the industry to which it sells;
• Satisfactory substitute products are not available to industry firms;
• Industry firms are not a significant customer for the supplier group;
• Suppliers’ goods are critical to buyers’ marketplace success;
• The effectiveness of suppliers’ products has created high switching costs for industry firms, and
• Suppliers are a credible threat to integrate forward into the buyers’ industry. Credibility is enhanced when suppliers have substantial resources and provide the industry’s firms with a highly differentiated product.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Technological Change and Diffusion

Both the rate of change of technology and the speed at which new technologies become available and are used have increased substantiality. Perpetual innovation describes how rapidly and consistently new, information intensive technologies replace a competitive premium on being able to introduce new goods and services quickly into the marketplace. In fact, when products become somewhat indistinguishable because of the widespread and rapid diffusion of technologies, speed to market may be the only source of competitive advantage.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Services Marketing

As the forces coincide and evolve, those involved realize that there is something different about marketing services and managing services. When a firm’s core offering is a deed performed by an employee, how can the firm ensure consistent product quality to the marketplace? As services businesses begin to turn to marketing and decide to hire marketing people, they naturally recruit from the best marketers in the world. People who move from marketing in packaged goods industries to marketing in healthcare, banking and other service industries find their skills and experiences are not directly transferable. They face issues and dilemmas in marketing services that their experiences in packaged goods and manufacturing has not prepared them for. These people realize the need for new concepts and approaches for marketing and managing service businesses.

Service marketers respond to these forces and begin to work across disciplines and with academics and business practitioners from around the world to develop and document marketing practices for service industries. As the field evolved, it expanded to address the concerns and needs of any business where service is an integral part of the offering. Frameworks, concepts, and strategies developed to address the fact that services marketing is different. As the field continues to evolve into the 21^st century, new trends are developing that will shape the field and continue the need for services marketing concepts and tools.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Required Organizational Performance

Required organizational performance demonstrates that the same levels of performance will produce markedly different levels of success for different organizations; and in return, that the same degree of success can be achieved by different organizations putting in different levels of performance.

Required organizational performance is based on the interplay between two key variables and suggests that by linking these two variables we can predict the level of performance that an organization must deliver to succeed.

• Duration of competition, defined as the period of time that an organization is actively planning for, that is to say the time they willing to wait until the benefits of their decisions start to materialize. Every decision that we make comes with an attached time scale – are we willing and can we afford to invest three years in a project, or do we  want results within the next three months or even the next three days?
• Degree of competition, which reflects the openness of the marketplace  to new entrants and how fiercely other organizations are competing for the same customers. The degree of competition is determined by the market conditions.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Direct-mail Marketing: Checklist

• Is there a perceived need for the product or service?
• Is it practical?
• Is it unique?
• Is the price right for your customers or prospects?
• Is it a good value?
• Is the markup sufficient to assure a profit?
• Is the market large enough? Does the product or service have broad appeal?
• Are there specific smaller segments of your list that have a strong desire for your product or service?
• Is it new? Will your customers perceive it as being new?
• Can it be photographed or illustrated interestingly?
• Are there sufficient unusual selling features to make your copy sizzle?
• Is it economical to ship? Is it fragile? Old shaped? Heavy? Bulky?
• Can it be personalized?
• Are there any legal problems to overcome?
• Is it safe to use?
• Is the supplier reputable?
• Will backup merchandise be available for fast shipment on reorders?
• Might returns be too huge?
• Will refurbishing of returned merchandise be practical?
• Is it, or can it be, packaged attractively?
• Are usage instructions clear?
• How does it compare to competitive products or services?
• Will it have exclusivity?
• Will it lend itself to repeat business?
• Is it consumable, so that there will be repeat orders?
• Is it faddish? Too short-lived?
• Is it too seasonal for direct mail selling?
• Can an add-on to the product make it more distinctive and salable?
• Will the number of stock keeping units – various sizes and colors – create problems?
• Does it lend itself to multiple pricing?
• Is it too readily available in stores?
• Is it like an old, hot item, so that its success is guaranteed?
• Is it doomed because similar items have failed?
• Does your mother, wife, brother, husband, sister, or kid like it?
• Is direct mail the way to go with it?
• Does it fill an unfilled niche in the marketplace?

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Beyond Customer Satisfaction

Satisfying the customer is no longer the ultimate business virtue. Companies need to look for ways to create and increase customer loyalty. The key to this new loyalty-centered approach to customer relationships is creating and managing the customer value package – the combination of factors (price, product quality, innovation, and company image) that creates what the customer perceives as superior value. Five steps are recommended:

1. Clearly define and communicate your objectives. The company needs to make sure that every stakeholder clearly understands the importance of  creating and delivering customer loyalty and knows how to make it possible.
2. Let customers define, in their own words, their criteria for quality, price, image, and value. The company needs to distinguish between basic requirements and loyalty builders. Meeting the basic requirements will get the company on the approved vendor list, but generating loyalty will encourage a customer to stick with the company during difficult times.
3. Conduct a critical need and value assessment. The company must set priorities among important customer requirements and determine the relative importance of these aspects of the customer value package.
4. Develop an action plan and move to implementation. This turns management of customer loyalty into a way of doing business. The company must make sure that the voice of the customer becomes the principle around which the business processes are organized.
5. Monitor the marketplace and organization results. Managing customer value is not a one-time effort, so all the loyalty-building components of customer value have to be monitored regularly with a focus on the relationship between customer value, customer loyalty, and financial performance.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

The Right Thing for your Company

Make sure that the outcomes you define for your people are in line with your company’s current strategy. With the dizzying pace of change in today’s business world, it is sometimes hard for managers to keep track. The key distinction is between mission and strategy. A company’s mission should remain constant, providing meaning and focus for generations of employees. A company’s strategy is simply the most effective way to execute that mission. It should change according to the demands of the contemporary business climate.

Although the constant reassessment of strategy is vital to the health of the company, it does place managers in a rather difficult position. They are the intermediaries, charged with explaining the new strategy to the employees and then translating it into clearly defined performance outcomes.

Often this can be as simple as telling your salespeople that with the new company strategy focused on growing market share rather than profit, each salesperson will now be encouraged to focus on the outcome, ‘sales volume,’ rather than the outcome ‘profit margin per sale.’

However, sometimes the changes in strategy are more radical and the pressures on managers to refocus employees on different outcomes are more acute. For example, the most effective strategy for many high-tech companies used to be innovation. Hence the large R&D budgets, the hordes of dishelved but creative software designers, and the unpredictable, slightly unfocused work environments. For the major players who dominate the marketplace, critical mass—getting your product to be accepted as the standard—is now more important than innovation. Innovation can be brought from the smaller boutique houses. Thus these larger companies need to change the way they operate to ensure that virtually everyone’s efforts are focused on spreading the new language/platform/product into the marketplace. This means that managers in these companies will have to hustle to redefine the desired outcomes and find new definitions of success. Number of users, for example, may now be more important than revenue per user.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.