Concepts of Throughput Accounting and Theory of Constraints

Financial Management

Kaizen – Understanding the Japanese Business Philosophy of Continuous Improvement

Operations Management

Role of Leaders in Shaping Organizational Culture

Management Principles

Organizational Culture – Development and Importance

Management Principles

Five Important Organizational Cultural Models

Management Principles

Solomon Model of Comparison Process – Model of Consumer Behavior

Solomon Model of Comparison Process explains some of the issues that are addressed during each stage of the consumption process (Prepurchase issues, Purchase issues, Postpurchase Issues). The ‘exchange’, in which two or more organizations or people give and receive something of value, is an integral part of marketing. He also suggested that consumer behavior involves many different actors.   The purchaser and user of a product might not be the same person. People may also act as influences on the buying processes.   Organizations can also be involved in the buying process. Much of marketing activity, they suggest, concentrates on adapting product offerings to particular circumstances of target segment needs and wants. It is also common to stimulate an already existing want through advertising and sales promotion, rather than creating wants. The value-expressive function is employed when a consumer is basing their attitude regarding a product or service on self-concept Continue reading

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Brand Licensing

Licensing is a contractual agreement whereby a company allows another firm to use its brand name, patent, trade secret or other property for a royalty or a fee. Licensing also assists companies in entering global markets with minimal risk. Essentially, a firm is ‘renting” another brand to contribute to the brand equity of its own product. A strong brand often has associations that may be desirable in other product categories. To capitalize on this value, a firm may choose to license its name, logo or other trademark item to another company for use on their products and merchandise. Traditionally, licensing has been associated with characters such as Garfield the cat, Barney the dinosaur, and Disney’s Mickey Mouse or celebrities and designers such as Maratha Stewart, Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger. Recently more conventional brands such as Caterpillar Harley Davidson, Coca-Cola and other have licensed their brands. Licensing can be quite Continue reading

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Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) – Definitions, Process, Importance and Barriers

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is a marketing concept of the 1990’s. It will be necessary for survival in the 21st century. The advent of integration is causing marketers to take a fresh look at all the components of marketing, specifically the unique dimension that public relations bring to the marketing mix. Public relations people in turn are seizing the opportunity that integration offers them to make a difference where it counts most to their companies and clients — on the bottom line. IMC is the culmination of the shift that began in the post — World War II period, from selling what the companies make to making what the consumers want. IMC is focused on what to know about product and services, not what the marketers want to tell them in order to sell them. Integrated Marketing Communication is defined as the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tool, Continue reading

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Business Value of Cloud Computing

In this article  business value of cloud computing will be discussed. In deciding whether hosting a service in the cloud makes sense over the long term, it is argues that the fine-grained economic models enabled by Cloud Computing make trade-off decisions more fluid, and in particular the elasticity offered by clouds serves to transfer risk. As well, although hardware resource costs continue to decline, they do so at variable rates; for example, computing and storage costs are falling faster than WAN costs. Cloud computing can track these changes and potentially pass them through to the customer more effectively than building one’s own datacenter, resulting in a closer match of expenditure to actual resource usage. In making the decision about whether to move an existing service to the cloud, one must additionally examine the expected average and peak resource utilization, especially if the application may have highly variable spikes in resource Continue reading

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Limitations of Budgetary Control

Every business firms have main objective to maximize the profits and to minimize the costs. No organisation can survive in this competitive market without the minimization of costs. Budgetary control system is very helpful in bringing economy in the business. Budgetary control is defined by the Institute of Cost and Management Accountants (CIMA) as, “The establishment of budgets relating the responsibilities of executives to the requirements of a policy, and the continuous comparison of actual with budgeted results, either to secure by individual action the objective of that policy, or to provide a basis for its revision”. Management must consider the following limitations of  budgetary control  as a device to solve managerial problems: Budgeting is not an exact science; its success depends upon the precision of estimates. Estimates are based on facts and managerial judgment. Managerial judgment can suffer from subjectivity and personal biases. The efficiency of budgeting thus depends Continue reading

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E-Service Orientation

The traditional e-commerce paradigm based on e-tailing, commodity goods, and transaction sales, has largely failed and taking the international stock markets down with it (Dotcom bubble). Those organizations that have survived this meltdown have one thing in common – they learned quickly to embrace the e-service paradigm. The new e-service paradigm takes advantage of the inherent nature of the online environment to feature information flows and computation, as a means of learning more about customers and building long-term customer relationships. Its profitability model is based more on revenue expansion than on cost reduction, and those revenues come from enhancing the service experience rather than just replacing people with automated systems. E-service is a customer-centric concept, and thus, the strategic and tactical components of an e-service orientation focus on increasing value defined at the customer level. An e-service orientation is all about taking advantage of the electronic environment and the technology Continue reading

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