Global Marketing Place

Several factors have forced countries to extend their economic views to events outside their own national borders. First, international agreements are being negotiated in attempt to increase trade among nations. Second, the growth of electronic commerce and related computer technologies brings previously isolated countries into their marketplace for buyers and sellers around the globe. Third, the interdependence of the world’s economies is a reality since no nation produces all of the raw material and finished goods purchased by its citizens or consumers of all its output without some exporting to other countries. Evidence of this interdependence is illustrated by the introduction of the Euro as a common currency to facilitate trade among the nations of the European Union and the creation of trade alliances.

Service firms also play a major role in today’s global marketplace. In many cases, global marketing strategies are almost identical to those used in domestic markets. Rather than creating a different promotional campaign for each country, marketers use the same ad with spectacular results.

Domestic marketing strategies may need significant changes to adapt to unique tastes or different cultural and legal requirements abroad. It is often difficult to standardize a brand name on a global basis.

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.

Creative Marketing Program

Motivate your audience to do something; Marketing is not creative unless it sells. You can pretty much ensure that you’ll end up with creative marketing if you start out by devising a creative strategy. Such a strategy is similar to a marketing plan, but limited to advertising only, and defined solely at the content of ads and/or commercials. If you think there’s a simple formula for establishing such a strategy, you’re absolutely right.

Follow following steps:

• Find the inherent drama within your offering;
• Translate that inherent drama into a meaningful benefit;
• State your benefits as believably as possible;
• Get people’s attention;
• Be sure you’re communicating clearly;
• Measure your finished advertisement, commercial, letter or brochure against your creative strategy.

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.

Consumer Sovereignty

Mainstream economics uses some simple starting points; it believes that they are the best possible. First is that agents have more wants than they can attain, so that they feel scarcity; in fact, for practical purposes, wants are assumed to be endless. Second, third and fourth are that agents are self-interested, rational, and the best judges of their own well-being. These four assumptions are indeed usually good starting points, rather than starting by assuming that agents are completely fulfilled, altruistic, irrational, and not well-placed to evaluate their own situation. They are not equally good as finishing points. Sometimes good arguments exist for not accepting them.

An assumption that agents are the best judges of their own well being is less questionable for businesspeople and corporations, given the resources they have for analysis. Debate focuses more on consumers. The phrase consumer sovereignty is sometimes read descriptively, to mean that consumers are sovereign, in that procedures are induced via profit-seeking and competition  to provide what consumers want. Sometimes it is read normatively, to mean that consumers should be sovereign, their wishes should prevail concerning what is good for them. The normative claim can rest on three different bases: that consumers do make good choices; that the alternative stance is worse – to use someone else’s judgments and estimates of what is good for a person and how good it is; or quite differently, that people have the right to make their own choices and mistakes.

Consumers will not make good choices automatically and unconditionally. Our wants are not simple; for example, some are wants to not to have other wants (such as the desire to smoke or a compulsion to gamble). Establishing a mature balance between wants involves skills. Choice is also unlikely to bring satisfaction if taken on the basis of weak information. Markets often do not provide consumers with full and reliable information, for it is hard to exclude people from information and therefore to ensure payment for it, so its market supply is weakened. Instead, in a commerce-dominated society, one of the main types of information that adults get will be images that say the good life is obtained through high consumption of commodities; there is too little counteracting public information.

The issue of consumer sovereignty goes beyond whether choices are good for the chooser. Other people are affected. Some wants may thus be unacceptable, notably wants that bring harm to others, including even wants to harm others. Mainstream economists have unfortunately often taken a don’t-want-to-know approach to ethics in which they confuse acceptance of all wants with a value-neutral stance.

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.

Global Sourcing & Operating Guidelines

Levi Strauss & Company developed the following policy to guide the firm through the maze of international business and maintain its high standard of ethical integrity. Levi Strauss & Co., has a heritage of conducting business in a manner that reflects its values. Because the company sources in many countries with diverse cultures, it must take special care in selecting business partners and countries whose practices are not incompatible with its values. Otherwise, its sourcing decisions have the potential of undermining this heritage, damaging the image of its brands and threatening its commercial success.

Business Partner Terms of Engagement

Terms of Engagement address issues that are substantially controllable by our individual business partners.

We have defined business partners as contractors and subcontractors who manufacture or finish our products and suppliers who provide material (including fabric, sundries, chemicals and/or stones) utilized in the manufacturing and finishing of our products.

i.            Environmental Requirements: We will only do business with partners who share our commitment to the environment and who conduct their business in a way that is consistent with Levi Strauss & Co.’s Environmental Philosophy and Guiding Principles.

ii.            Ethical Standards: We will seek to identify and utilize business partners who aspire as individuals and in the conduct of all their businesses to a set of ethical standards not incompatible with our own.

iii.            Legal Requirements: we expect our business partners to be law abiding as individuals and to comply with legal requirements relevant to the conduct of all their businesses.

iv.            Employment Practices: We will only do business partners whose workers are in all cases present voluntarily, not put at risk of physical harm, fairly compensated, allowed the right of free association and not exploited in any way. In addition . . . . specific guidelines [are provided in the areas of]: wages and benefits, . . . . working hours, . . . . . child labor, . . . . prison labor/forced labor, . . . . health and safety, . . . . discrimination, [and] . . . . disciplinary practices.

v.            Community Involvement: We will favor business partners who share our commitment to contribute to the betterment of community 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.

Why have Contracts?

Contracts are probably a necessary device in any kind of market economy where goods and services are exchanged by people acting in their own interest. People might not enter into agreements that call for some future performance unless they know some means exist to force other people to honor their promises.

It is also true that it would probably be impossible to have an industrialized, market economy without contracts. A manufacturer would be unable to do the kind of planning necessary to run a business if he could not rely on agreements with suppliers to finish the raw materials he needs to make the products. Similarly a manufacturer might not be willing to commit herself to buy raw materials or hire employees if she could not rely on buyers’ promises to buy her products.

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.

Deadlines

Our emphasis on speed and deadlines is often used against us in business dealings. In Far Eastern countries such as Japan, the Americans may be asked how long he or she plans to stay at the first meeting. Then negotiations are purposely not finalized until a few hours before the American’s departure, when the Japanese know they can wring extra concessions from the foreigner because of his or her haste to finish and return home on schedule.

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 Utilities Created by Marketing

 

All of marketing’s functions are performed to move goods from products to consumers. During this process, marketing adds utility (value) to goods and services. There are five types of utilities: 1) form, 2) time, 3) place, 4) possession, and 5) information.

1)      Form utility: refers to the changing of raw materials into a finished product. Taking grains and turning them into cereal is an example of form utility. Form utility is usually considered a production function rather than a marketing function.

2)      Time utility: it helps consumers by making products available when the consumer wishes. Supermarkets that are open 24 hours a day provide time utility. Making fresh fruit available in the winter is also a form of time utility.

3)      Place utility: it makes sure that the goods and services are conveniently located where consumers want them.

4)      Possession utility: it helps make the exchange of goods between buyers and sellers easy.  Anything that helps complete the sale – delivery, installation, warranties, credit – is considered part of possession utility.

5)      Information utility: it informs buyers of the product’s existence, how to use it, the price, and other facts. Such information is provided through advertising, salespeople, and packaging.

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 Inventory

Inventory is an area where financial managers can fine-tune the firm’s cash-flow. Inventory sitting on the shelf represents capital that is tied up without earning interest. Furthermore, the firm incurs expenses for shortage and handling, insurance, and taxes. And there is always a risk that the inventory will become obsolete before it can be converted into finished goods and sold.

The firm’s goal is to maintain enough inventory to fill orders in a timely fashion at the lowest cost. To achieve this goal, the financial manager tries to determine the economic order quantity or quantity of raw materials that, when ordered regularly, results in the lowest ordering and storage costs. The problem is complicated by the fact that minimizing ordering costs tends  to increase storage costs and vice versa. The best way to cut ordering costs is to place one big order for parts and materials once a year, while the best way to cut storage costs is to order small amounts of inventory frequently. The challenge facing the financial manager is to find a compromise that minimizes total costs.

That is why many businesses today are turning to just-in-time inventory control. Businesses—and even divisions within companies—link up through computers with their customers and suppliers, thereby automatically ordering only as much as is necessary for a given period of time.

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 vs. Effectiveness

It is said that the difference between efficiency and effectiveness is the difference between’ doing things right’ and ‘doing right things.’ It should encompass both efficiency and effectiveness. That is ‘doing right things right.’

Imagine that you visit your friend. As you are chatting, your friend asks his wife to bring coffee. A little later a tray with milk, sugar, coffee powder and cup is placed before you to prepare coffee of your taste, light or strong, with or without sugar, etc. and you prepare coffee and drink it.

On some other occasion, you visit another friend. As you are chatting, your friend’s wife brings coffee in a cup (before being asked by your friend). Coffee is already prepared. As you take the first sip, she enquires if the sugar is enough. As you say, ‘its ok’ and drink coffee, she stands there. After you finish, she takes the cup and goes off.

In these two cases of serving coffee, it could be seen, that the purpose was served. In the first case it was done in a ‘5-star’ style. No one can find fault with it. But in the second case, there is an additional component attached to it, namely the personal touch. This definitely had its role in creating an ‘impact.’

The first can be said to be an efficient way of serving coffee and the second an effective way. Efficiency is all about how the ‘producer’ has felt and effectiveness is all about how the ‘user’ has felt.

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.