Good Pricing Decisions

Pricing decisions draw on many areas of marketing expertise. It requires a comprehensive understanding of the forces that shape the market, including competitive  interactions, technology and consumer psychology. Sometimes these forces interact and are likely to put downward pressure on prices, such as substitutes, technological advances, price-driven competition, customer experience, and changes in internal focus, such as sales forecasts. Customer makes it difficult to raise prices, as repeat customers’ ability to perceive incremental value of a company’s product or service diminishes over time, especially as substitute or competitive products emerge. Increased internal expectations in the form of expected sales increases or new budgets can send prices on a downward spiral. Customer price sensitivity may also serve  to keep prices in check, especially in the presence of available competitive substitutes or among a company’s marginal customers.

Even in a deflationary economy, there are opportunities for keeping prices from dropping or even for raising prices. However, customers must perceive that these enhancements deliver a genuine, meaningful benefit, or they will continue to seek lower cost alternatives.

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.

Human Resource Strategies

Human resource strategies are functional strategies, like any other—financial, information, marketing, procurement. Any functional planning effort follows a pattern complete with its variations. In many companies, long-term functional planning (for human resources, finance, information systems, technology, etc) is a mandated element of the long range business planning process.

Human resources strategies are different, however, in that they are inter-twined with all other strategies’ management of people is not a distinct function but the means by which all business strategies are implemented. If anything, human resources planning ought to be an integral part of all other strategy formulation. Where it is separate, it needs to be closely aligned..

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.

Efficiency versus Competition

Is big business efficiency more important than preventing competition? Many big companies claim that their large size makes possible many operating economies.  Today’s complex technology, far-flung markets, complicated financial systems, and transnational competition make bigness essential for survival and efficient operation. Placing restrictions on today’s corporate growth just to preserve a competitive ideal formed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seems to make little economic sense. On the other hand, others point out that competition stands at the heart of private enterprise ideology and that small businesses, consumers, and workers should be protected against big business expansion even though it may mean a loss of efficiency.

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.

Modern Retailers

Economies of scale and information technology have given top retailers enormous power. Sophisticated computer systems can tell retailers instantly what they are selling in each of their numerous stores, how much money they are making on each sale, and, increasingly, who their customers are. They no longer are lumbered which stock they may not be sold, or run out of items customers want to buy.

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 Dark Side of Technology

Although there is clearly great potential for technology to support brand new product concepts, provide new ways of delivering service, and enable consumers and employees in achieving better quality products and services, there are potential negative outcomes as well. There are many paradoxes of technology products and services for consumers. Technology can assimilate people while isolating them; it can provide a sense of control and at the same time feelings of ineptitude.

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.

Synthesis of Two Sciences

Biometrics is a field that integrates biological science and computer science. One application of this new field of knowledge involves identification procedures. Scientists know that no two persons have the same fingerprint. This makes fingerprints a nearly foolproof method of identification. In the past, an individual’s fingers were coated with ink, and impressions were made on paper, then compared with impressions made by others. Laboratories kept files containing thousands of fingerprints. In time, computers enabled researchers to digitalize fingerprints and reduce them on computer screens. This enabled searches to occur much faster once fingerprints were on the file. Biometrics has now made possible the next step in this evolution of identification science. New scanners enable a person to place his or her finger on an imaging surface and instantaneously receive confirmation that the fingerprint matched that of the owner of an identification card. This technology of identification has been used to speed healthcare identification, eligibility for welfare benefits, and credit-card approvals.

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.

Managing Technology

A significant organizational challenge confronting managers today is the set of issues involving the management of technology. Technology is the mechanical and intellectual processes the organization uses to transform inputs (raw materials, parts, cash, facilities, people) into products or services. Managing technology is essentially a reactive process. Whenever a supplier came up with a new piece of equipment to replace an old one, the organization buys it and trains its workers in how to use it.

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.

Employee Demand

Demand for workers is linked to the economic cycle increasing in boom times and decreasing in recession. Other factors include the adoption of new technology, productivity, improvements and changing skill requirements. Superficially, calculating employment supply and demand seems easy. In practice, the combination of variable consumer demand, development of new products and technology, and economic turbulence make it extremely problematic.

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 Concept Lifecycle

The new products process essentially turns an opportunity (the real start) into a profit flow (the real finish). It begins with something that is not a product (the profit). The product comes from a situation and turns into an end.

What we have, then, is an evolving product, or better, an evolving concept that, at the end, may become a product. There are stages, like individual frames in a movie film:

• Opportunity concept-a company skill or resource, or customer problem.
• Idea concept-the first appearance of an idea.
• Stated concept-a home or technology, plus a clear statement of benefit.
• Tested concept-it has passed an end user concept test; need is confirmed.
• Full screened concept-it passes the test of fit with company situation.
• Protocol concepts-a statement (product definition) of the intended market user.
• Prototype concept-a tentative physical product or system procedure, including features and benefits.
• Batch concept-first full test of fit with manufacturing; it can be made. Specifications are written, exactly what the product is to be, including features, characteristics, and standards.
• Process concept-the full manufacturing process is complete.
• Pilot concept-a supply of the new product, produced in quantity from a pilot production line, enough for field testing with end users.
• Marketed concept-output of the scale-up process either for a market test or full scale launch.
• Successful concept (new product)-it meets the goals set for it at the start of the project.

Some firms have as many as three production models or prototypes. So, the idea that a new product suddenly “emerges” from R&D-like a chicken from an egg-is simply incorrect.

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.

Entrepreneur

Most businesses start as a dream in somebody’s mind. An entrepreneur is a person with an idea. He or she also is someone with the energy and drive to turn that idea into a business. An entrepreneur needs these characteristics because in a young firm he or she must often do everything at once—manufacture the product, sell it, find enough money to keep going, and manage few employees.

The entrepreneur must be willing to take great risks, too, for most new businesses fail within a year. The odds against success are stiff, partly because many business ideas simply are not very good. After all, whoever wanted to buy paper dresses or quadraphonic sound. Factors that create special risks for new businesses are those over which entrepreneurs have little control. Also, technology has become highly complex and many new products—a filter to remove the salt from sea water, for example, require many years and teams of scientists and engineers to develop. Then, too, a vast array of government regulations creates additional burdens of time, energy, and expenses for owners of new businesses.

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.