Sources of Attaining Competitive Advantage by a Business Firm

When a firm sustains profits that exceed the average for its industry, the firm is said to possess a competitive advantage over its rivals. A competitive advantage is an advantage over competitors gained by offering consumers greater value, either by means of lower prices or by providing greater benefits and service that justifies higher prices. Competitive advantages are capabilities that are difficult to replicate or imitate and are non-tradable. Pitts and Snow define a competitive advantage as “any feature of a business firm that enables it to earn a high return on investment despite counter pressure from competitors.” A competitive advantage exists when the firm is able to deliver the same benefits as the competitors are but at a lower cost (cost advantage), or deliver benefits that exceed those of competing products (differentiation advantage). Thus, a competitive advantage enables a firm to create superior value for its customers and superior Continue reading

Advantages and Disadvantages of Starting Up a Business

Currently, the development of market relations implies a free and equal coexistence of various forms of entrepreneurship and sectors within each type of ownership. A special place in the international economy at this stage belongs to start-up businesses. These are small enterprises that do not require large initial investments and guarantee a high rate of turnover of resources that can quickly and economically solve the problems of economic restructuring. The formation and saturation of the consumer markets are the key elements in the current destabilization of the economy. It should be noted that for a highly monopolized economy, the small business acquires paramount importance since it makes a significant contribution to the development of a competitive environment. However, there are both rewarding advantages and serious disadvantages of starting a business, which need consideration. If a person plans to open a business, it is important to consider the upcoming possible gains Continue reading

Target Markets in a Global Environment

The starting point in selecting the most effective channel arrangement is a clear determination of the target market for the company’s marketing effort and a determination of the needs and preferences of the target market. Where are the potential customers located? What are their information requirements? What are their preferences for service? How sensitive are they to price? These are some of the questions that the channel manager should answer. Customer preference must be carefully determined because there is as much danger to the success of a marketing program in creating too much utility as there is in creating too little. Moreover, each market must be analysed to determine the cost of providing channel services. What is appropriate in one country may not be effective in another. Channel strategy in a global marketing program must fit the company’s competitive position and overall marketing objectives in each national market. If a Continue reading

SWOT Analysis of Tesla Motors

Tesla, Inc. is an American company that specializes in electric automobiles, energy storage, and solar panel manufacturing. Founded in 2003, Tesla has recently disrupted many industries, most notably the auto industry. Tesla’s focus on electric power vehicles, lithium-ion battery, and energy storage set itself apart from their competitors. Tesla has expanded its focus from simply building the best electric car to paving the way for autonomous vehicles, solar power, and so much more. The main message of Tesla, Inc.’s mission is “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible”. This demonstration of leadership and shared knowledge expresses their overall effort to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. While it isn’t common for a company to hope their competitors copy their products, this is exactly what CEO, Elon Musk, hopes for. While Tesla is a business, it is more Continue reading

Text Mining Concept in Data Mining

Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from data. Data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform the data into information. It is commonly used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection and scientific discovery. Data mining can be applied on a variety of data types. Data types include structured data (relational), multimedia data, free text, and hypertext. Nowadays, text is the most common and convenient way for information exchange. This due to the fact that much of the world’s data is contained in text documents (newspaper articles, emails, literature, web pages, etc.). The importance of this way has led many researchers to find out suitable methods to analyze natural language texts to extract the important and useful information. In comparison with data stored in structured format (databases), texts stored in documents is unstructured and to deal with such data, a Continue reading

5 Essential Skills Needed to Be an Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs need to have a wide variety of skills to run a successful business. Unlike personal characteristics and attitudes, which can often be hard or impossible to change, entrepreneurs can acquire skills if they are willing to learn them. Additionally, they can hire people to work for them who have the needed skills. The following skills are very important if the entrepreneur want to succeed in his business: Problem solving: Every customer have to deal with problems and every entrepreneur has find solutions to them. The successful entrepreneur sees opportunities in these problems where many of the rest of us only see difficulties. A lot of time, the best new ideas come from the need to solve a problem. The entrepreneur has to be good in identifying the problem, and then has to be able to identify solutions that can be good from the customer perspective. Communication: Entrepreneurs have to Continue reading