Marketing Channel Conflicts

Conflict is an inherent behavioral dimension in all social system including the marketing channel. In any social system, when a component perceives the behavior of the other component to be impending the attainment of its goal or the effective performance of its instrumental behavior pattern, an atmosphere of frustration prevails. When this frustration is not resolved by the other component, a stage of conflict may exist. More over if the other component also perceive it as the blockage in its attainment of goal then both the components become objects of each other frustration and the conflict arises. In distribution channel, the same is also applicable. Here the conflict may be sales man versus distributor, distributor versus wholesaler, wholesaler versus retailer and so on. Some time in bigger organizations the conflict may arise between product company versus supply company, sales department versus production department. This type of channel conflict are more Continue reading

Sales Promotion – Definition, Purpose, Objectives and Types

Sales promotion is one of the most loosely used terms in the marketing vocabulary. We define sales promotion as demand stimulating devices designed to supplement advertising and facilitate personal selling. In other words, sales promotion signifies all those activities that supplement, co-ordinate and make the efforts of personal selling and advertising more effective. It is non recurrent in nature which means it cant be used continuously. Concept of Sales Promotion Sales promotion consists of diverse collection of incentive tools, mostly short-term designed to stimulate quicker and / or greater purchase of a particular product by consumers or the trade. Where as advertising offers a reason to buy, sales promotion offers an incentive to buy. Sales promotion includes tools for consumer promotion (for example samples, coupons, prizes, cash refund, warranties, demonstrations, contest); trade promotion (for example buying allowances, free goods, merchandise allowances, co-operative advertising, advertising and display allowances, dealer sales contests); Continue reading

Lean Thinking – Concept and Principles

Concept of  Lean Thinking Lean Thinking originated from manufacturing methods used by Japanese automotive manufacturers, especially from Toyota.  Lean thinking is basically about getting the right things, to the right place, at the right time, in the right quantity while minimizing waste and waiting time and being flexible and open to change. A term coined by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones in their book “Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation”  to describe an exceptionally focused, efficient, agile and  successful organisation. Lean thinking provides a way to specify value, sequence value-creating actions in the best way, conduct these activities without interruption whenever someone requests them, and perform them more and more effectively.   Lean thinking means doing more and more with less and less resources while providing customers with exactly what they want. “Becoming ‘lean’ is a process of eliminating waste with the goal of Continue reading

Ethical Hackers and Ethical Hacking

An ethical hacker is a security professional who helps organization to take defensive measures against malicious attacks and usually the process he doing to find those vulnerable point is called Ethical Hacking. Sometimes this is also known as Penetration Testing or Intuition Testing. In this case, the ethical hackers are getting into the minds of computer criminals; think like them to find about innovative ways the hackers may use to get into the systems. Then organizations can take required actions to avoid those vulnerabilities. It has identified that the almost all computer systems have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a hacker to come to do damages. This can be due to an unpatched application, a misconfigured router or a rough network device and it will be not able to detect unless penetrate the networks and assess the security posture for vulnerabilities and exposures regular basis. As the hacking is Continue reading

Case Study: Why Woolworths Failed as a Business?

The British Company, Woolworths is normally categorized as a variety store dealing in retailing of a range of varying products. Historically it was established as a subsidiary of an American Company F.W. Woolworth &Co, in 1879 by Frank Winfield Woolworth It was incorporated in England on 23rd July, 1909 as private limited company with initial capital of 50,250 pound sterling. It, first time floated a new idea of selling all the products at a cost not more than five cents. This idea gained popularity amongst the customers resulting in fast growth of the subsidiary. Its first shop at Liverpool attracted about 60,000 people in first two days because of attractive one penny, three penny and six penny products put at sale. It continued to open new shops at various cities that attracted heavy rush of customers and visitors. It was company’s policy to purchase the products directly from manufacturers, who Continue reading

Case Study on Information Technology Management: Frito-Lay’s Long-Term IT Plan

Because the rate of technological change is so rapid, most people see IT through the narrow lens of short-term, silver-bullet solutions. IT vendors want you to believe that their important new technologies will blow away what has come before. You can’t blame a salesperson for trying to sell, or CIOs for having a queasy buy-or-lose feeling, but this attitude is precisely the opposite of the one companies should be taking. We would argue that because the winds of change affect IT more than any other area of the organization, IT benefits most from a long-term, disciplined, strategic view, and a square focus on achieving the company’s most fundamental goals. For example, Frito Lay’s strategic goal has always been to make, move, and sell tasty, fresh snack food as rapidly and efficiently as possible. That goal hasn’t changed since 1930s, when founder Herman Lay ran his business from his Atlanta kitchen Continue reading