This practical guide, published by Business Expert Press, leads readers through the issues they will face in developing new marketing opportunities in foreign markets. Chapter 2, Global Market Opportunity Assessment, summarizes the six activities associated with Global Market Opportunity Assessment (GMOA). Firms regularly encounter favorable combinations of circumstances, locations, or timing that offer prospects for exporting, investing, sourcing, or partnering in foreign markets. GMOA is an approach for analyzing these opportunities in order to choose the most appropriate ones to optimize company performance.
This practical guide, published by Business Expert Press, leads readers through the issues they will face in developing new marketing opportunities in foreign markets. In Chapter 3, Fundamentals of International Market Opportunity Research, the authors explain the fundamentals of international market research, the types of information needed in international research, and how these are gathered and converted into useful, managerially relevant information. They also address the merits and limitations of primary and secondary data, and offer suggestions regarding online resources. They then discuss the nature of buyer behavior. Finally, in a special section called "Food for Thought," they examine research on perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and values, all of which strongly influence buyer intentions to purchase.
This practical guide, published by Business Expert Press, leads readers through the issues they will face in developing new marketing opportunities in foreign markets. In Chapter 4, Customized Research Using Primary Data, the authors examine research using primary data, particularly regarding survey research. We also address focus groups and the challenges of conducting these. As Food for Thought, we offer a three-phased approach to conducting international market research composed of macro-, micro-, and cultural analysis.
This practical guide, published by Business Expert Press, leads readers through the issues they will face in developing new marketing opportunities in foreign markets. In Chapter 5, Methodological Considerations in International Market Research, the authors address methodological considerations in international market research. They examine the challenges of research validity, reliability, and equivalency in developing measures and assessing constructs. They also highlight the institutional environment in which international market research takes place. As Food for Thought, they offer a deeper discussion of some of the measurement issues that researchers face in international studies, especially survey research in multiple countries, and they suggest coping mechanisms that help to overcome these issues.
This practical guide, published by Business Expert Press, leads readers through the issues they will face in developing new marketing opportunities in foreign markets. In Chapter 6, The Research Process and an Example (the final chapter of the book), the authors present an extended example of a market research situation involving Acme Motor Company, based in the United States. Acme seeks to market its line of fuel-efficient automobiles to France and other countries in Europe. The authors weave into this example important research issues, such as properly modeling the research question, developing hypotheses, constructing the relative measures, and sampling and data collection. They also address data analysis through research methods and reporting research findings in a managerially relevant manner.
Economic incentives become counterproductive when they undermine what Adam Smith called "the moral sentiments," such as the desire to be esteemed by others and to be viewed as ethical and dignified. Organizational and social policy makers, take note.
Below $10,000 per capita, a country's income can grow even in the absence of good institutions. But at higher income levels, as China will soon discover, institutional quality starts to matter quite a lot.
Unlike traditional market researchers, who use highly targeted questions to extract information from customers, corporate ethnographers observe and listen in a nondirected way. Their method may appear inefficient, but it can yield rich data about product use.
The best business books from the past 30 years offer simple yet profound advice for overcoming five recurring challenges. The lessons are strikingly similar to those learned by the heroes of mythology and popular culture.
When there's limited cash for financial rewards, praise becomes an acutely valuable management tool. Through careful positive feedback, you can induce employees to chain several good efforts together into a pattern of excellence.
If your innovation efforts need a shot in the arm, try emulating the medical researchers who seek cures for diseases by examining cells for unexpected commonalities. You might find answers to some of your most confounding business problems by looking for relationships among wildly different products or solutions.
The chairman and CEO of DineEquity, the restaurant company that owns the Applebee's and IHOP brands, says the key to managing for performance across more than 3,300 sites is to turn the workplace into a classroom. "When employees feel like they're learning," she says, "they become more enthusiastic about their work, and that shows through to the customer in a hundred different ways."
This case is set in 2008 and examines the challenges facing Amit Mehra, Managing Director of Reuters Market Light (RML), a newly formed unit within Thomson Reuters, as he tries to grow the business amid organisational and market upheaval. RML represented a creative venture by Thomson Reuters to leverage its competences and make money at the bottom of the pyramid. Specifically, RML was set up in 2007 to offer customised, localised and personalised weather forecasts, crop prices and local agricultural news via short message service text messages on mobile telephones to rural Indian farmers. To do so, it had to develop an appropriate business model that allowed it to make money in rural India. The case is therefore a perfect vehicle to discuss three interrelated themes: (1) corporate entrepreneurship - how big established companies can grow new ventures next to the established core; (2) playing two games at the same time - how established companies can compete with dual business models; and (3) scaling up a new business - how to grow a new business while protecting it from rival attacks and internal politics.
Astrigo is in trouble. The home improvement chain has missed its earnings forecast badly and sales are falling. A 10% reduction in staff looks like the only choice. Layoffs, however, would undermine the retailer's longtime commitment to employees and the ability to provide its famed customer service. But tapping cash reserved for strategic acquisitions goes against the firm's values, too. What should the CEO do? Four experts comment on this fictional case study in R0903A and R0903Z. Board advisers Laurence J. Stybel and Maryanne Peabody, of Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire, suggest that the company borrow a page from McDonald's and declare Astrigo's intention to focus on the interests of long-term shareholders. This move would establish a framework that would help management make tactical decisions with more clarity and flexibility. The company could then use its cash to buy a little time to study the options. If Astrigo can't avoid layoffs, a last-in, first-out approach would be the least costly. Former CEO Jurgen Dormann understands the challenge Astrigo faces. When he took over ABB, the company was in deep distress. After shaking up his executive committee, Dormann personally reached out to all 180,000 employees to enlist their help. They came back with ideas that saved $1.6 billion - and rescued the company. Management professor Robert I. Sutton thinks too many executives assume that layoffs are the best way to reduce costs. They don't factor in how long it takes to realize the savings from job cuts, the costs to hire and train people once business picks up, or the damage to morale and productivity. Astrigo's executives should consider alternatives such as pay cuts, reduced benefits, unpaid time off, and incentives for departure. If layoffs are in-evitable, Astrigo should do them quickly, and firing the bottom 10% of employees would be the worst approach.
Over the past eight years Brazilian energy giant Petrobras has transformed itself from a notorious environmental offender into a global leader in sustainability. In this article the CEO, a onetime leftist activist who believes business should drive social improvement, describes how the company turned itself around. When Gabrielli took the reins, Petrobras was coming out of a tumultuous period. The state-owned monopoly had become a publicly traded corporation competing in an open market, and its operations were expanding rapidly. During this time a series of disastrous oil spills and accidents took place. In response, Philippe Reichstul, one of Gabrielli's predecessors, launched a $4 billion program for environmental and operational safety, comprising more than 4,000 projects. Under Gabrielli's stewardship, the company approached environmental performance issues in three ways: improving its own culture and operations, influencing its suppliers, and championing renewable-energy development. At the center of its strategy is a program built on a set of requirements for performance in 15 areas. Among them is the stipulation that Petrobras's managers lead by example. Environmental policy is a boardroom consideration, and the company's top managers visibly demonstrate their commitment by joining the teams that go out into the field to audit health, environmental, and safety compliance. Promoting environmentally sound behavior outside the company is another key requirement. To this end, Petrobras is pitting the firm's thousands of Brazilian suppliers against one another in a battle to see who's greenest. The company has devised a system to measure and monitor their environmental performance - and awards contracts to the high scorers. It has also set its sights on becoming a world leader in biofuel, building a huge R&D network that stretches across Brazil and around the globe.
Even as discretionary budgets are drying up, some B2B vendors have found a way to reach their customers' resource owners and motivate them to buy. They do this by identifying a thorny issue in the customer's company or industry and developing an original, compelling point of view about it. They pitch this point of view to a carefully chosen line executive in one crucial meeting and then prove its worth with a short diagnostic study. This is the essence of what the authors, all managing directors at TCG Advisors, call provocation-based selling. Sybase, a data management and mobility company, was successful with this approach in the summer of 2008, as it tried to pry business out of financial services clients that were severely cutting their operating costs. Instead of probing for what those clients thought they might need, Sybase salespeople pointed out what they should be worried about: an industrywide failure to manage risk comprehensively. By revealing the scale of the threat and the opportunity, Sybase was able to sell its Risk Analytics Platform, a new tool for integrating risk management. Provocation-based selling doesn't align with the customer's outlook; it provides a new angle on the situation. It doesn't identify and respond to the customer's "pain points"; it outlines a problem the customer hasn't yet put a name to. Framing a provocation creates a readiness to listen, and a diagnostic study converts the dialogue into a contract. The provocation-based sales cycle is resource intensive but appreciably shorter than that for solution-based selling - and it leads to significant business opportunities.
Managers have gone overboard with process standardization. Many processes - such as leadership training or auditing - are more art than science. Imposing rigid rules on them squashes innovation, reduces accountability, and harms performance. Tuck professors Hall and Johnson advise companies to rescue artistic processes from the tide of standardization with a three-step approach. 1. Identify what should and shouldn't be art. Companies need art in variable environments (if, say, raw materials aren't uniform) and when customers value distinctive output. If those two conditions aren't present, mass processes (which eliminate variation) or mass customization (which controls it) will be required. Steinway & Sons, for instance, uses artistic processes to make concert pianos. Not only does the wood used in soundboards differ, but professional musicians appreciate the instruments' unique "personalities." Ritz-Carlton adopted an artistic approach to service after discovering that tightly defined procedures weren't meeting the needs of its diverse customer base. Once employees were allowed to improvise, customer satisfaction improved. 2. Develop an infrastructure to support art. Artists require proper training and metrics that help them maximize value for customers (such as continual customer feedback). Scientific processes can provide a stable platform for artists to work upon, but art and science should never be intertwined. Firms also must institute ways to mitigate failures, which are inevitable with variation. 3. Periodically reevaluate the division between art and science. Managers must ask: What new technologies can make a science of art? Do my customers value variation? How do the costs and opportunities of art and science stack up? Art and science both have important roles to play in business processes. They need not be at odds but must be carefully harmonized.
In tough economic times, some companies have outmaneuvered rivals to become market leaders through value-for-money strategies. That is, they have enabled recession-hit consumers to economize (do less and spend less), become more efficient (do the same for less), or become more effective (do more but spend no more). To implement such a strategy, argue this British professor and Chinese academic, companies must go beyond refining cost-cutting capabilities to develop expertise in cost innovation. That may not be good news for many U.S., European, and Japanese corporations, because multinationals from emerging markets, which have long experience with value-conscious customers, have already built cost-innovation capabilities that are unlocking mass markets in both developing - and developed - countries. Some, like battery maker BYD, have learned to sell high-tech products profitably at mass-market prices through a combination of lower labor costs and manufacturing innovations. Others, like drinks purveyor United Spirits, have dominated industries by blanketing sizable niches in their home markets with a full range of products or customized options. And still others, like appliance manufacturer Haier, have used low-price offerings to turn small, unguarded niches into mass markets in developed countries. In response, the authors argue, Western companies should turn to developing countries for vital lessons in lowering the cost of building brands and developing and manufacturing products. They should enter into alliances with emerging giants to gain cost-innovation capabilities. And they should use their superior financial strength to beat emerging giants at their own game of growing mass markets in developing countries. Multinationals that fail to learn from emerging rivals are unlikely to weather the recession well - or stay competitive for very long.