A case study on the internationalization process of a ‘born-global’ fashion retailer

This case study on Zara elucidates the expansion strategies used by both born-global and gradual global fast-fashion retailers based on theories of internationalization. Aspects related to knowledge sharing, resource-based theory, and psychic distance are overlaid with Zara's internationalization strategies to advance understanding of the role fashion plays in dynamic internationalization. Zara employs a high-risk, high-reward model of internationalization to defend its unique merchandise and retail position by remaining completely vertical. Zara's born-global expansion strategy engendered a psychic distance paradox in that it was very successful in distant markets early on. It is proposed that fashion retailers may take note of Zara's success through the proposed ‘dynamic strategic planning process’ for expansion in international markets. Researchers can test the proposed framework empirically to investigate the theoretical constructs for both gradual- and born-global firms.     

Craft Retailers' Criteria for Success and Associated Business Strategies

This research was designed to fill the void in understanding how art–related retailers define and achieve success. A two–phase data collection process was implemented. Preliminary personal interviews were conducted with 12 craft retailers followed by a mailed survey to 1000 craft retailers in nine southeastern U.S. states. Factor analysis was employed to reduce the number of items for defining success. Cluster analysis followed to develop empirical groupings of craft retail businesses based on the success factor scores, of which four different groups were identified. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to compare retail clusters related to business strategy variables of competitive strategies, product assortment, pricing, and distribution strategies, and networking activities. Significant differences were found in the craft retailers' business strategies used to achieve success. Craft retail entrepreneurs were found to define success with both traditional criteria such as profit and growth and also with intrinsic factors such as personal satisfaction and the opportunity to elevate the craft tradition. Successful small craft retail firms offered more focused product assortments of specialized craft products, implemented more differentiated strategies of stocking unique crafts in their assortments, as well as offering unique services to educate consumers about crafts, craft artisans, and a region's culture. Craft retailers who reported greater success did not engage in competitive pricing. Collaborative strategies included networking among family, friends, and business peers.     

Critical success factors in project management: implication from Vietnam

This study will assess successful project performance based on key project factors. The indicators of project success are cost, time, technical performance and customer satisfaction as used in previous studies. The sample consisted of 239 project members and managers currently involved in infrastructure projects in Vietnam. Regression analysis was used to test five hypotheses developed from theories on project success. Three groups of factors including manager competencies, member competencies and external stability have significant positive relationships to the success criteria. The completion and implementation stages in the project life cycle are also positively related to success. The implementation stage of a project moderates both the effects of external stability and organization support on success. The implication for project managers is that implementation is the key stage in determining the success of projects.     

International business-government relations: The risk management strategies of MNEs in emerging economies

In emerging economies where the institutional environment is weak, the level of risk faced by MNEs remains high. Extant literature recognizes the forms of risks faced by MNEs, but only a few studies have attempted to explain how firms identify and mitigate these risks. This study addressed the commercial risk management strategies of MNEs operating in Vietnam. We found that the government remained the key stakeholder and maintaining active relations with them aided MNEs’ operational success. The risk mitigation strategies employed by MNEs included managing alertness, portraying good behavior, navigating through the state of comfort, and active mediation.     

多元农产品购买渠道下城市居民的选择和感知效用因素分析

文章基于1251位城市居民在早市摊贩、农贸市场、超市和社区便利店这四种生鲜农产品购买渠道的选择行为基础上,以主观感知效用为理论框架,使用Multinomial Logistic模型,分析了影响选择的产品效用、购买效用和其它效用,结果发现：四种渠道的选择相互独立;在产品效用中,安全卫生和新鲜程度对超市和社区便利店的选择具有显著的影响,而新鲜程度显著影响了居民选择农贸市场和早市摊贩,价格因素与四种渠道都是显著相关的;在购买效用中,购买环境和农贸市场具有正相关关系,距离便利与农贸市场和社区便利店显著正相关,距离便利店和早市摊贩显著负相关;居民个人的性别、年龄、学历、家庭人口数和所在行业等因素也影响了渠道选择     

基于消费者接受理论的移动商务成功因素研究

近几年来中外移动商务呈现快速发展势态,以手机为终端的无线接入用户迅猛增加。B2C移动商务的成功主要取决于消费者的接受和使用。为此,从消费者接受问题的相关理论出发,结合B2C移动商务的消费者接受模型,研究B2C移动商务的成功影响因素,并从操作层面上提出相关成功因素的具体内涵。     

Driving health IT implementation success: Insights from The Christ Hospital

The application of information technology to healthcare promises significant benefits, particularly with regard to innovations in improving both clinical and administrative processes. However, to date, few studies have been devoted to understanding the process of implementing a hospital's clinical and business systems and the drivers of success. In this article, we describe a major HIT implementation undertaken by The Christ Hospital (TCH). Specifically, we report on TCH's efforts to separate from a well-established, multi-facility healthcare delivery network and move toward providing world-class patient care on its own. Here, we examine how different stakeholder perspectives, rather than causing conflict, were capitalized on via a collaboration-intensive process. These stakeholders included administrators, physicians, nurses, and other hospital staff, as well as external vendors and TCH's consulting partner. This project is unique due to the speed and spirit of collaboration with which it was accomplished. Our findings have a number of generalizable lessons for practice and implications for research.     

Strategies,Uncertainty and Performance of Small Business Startups

Personal strategies of owners/founders of small business startups are related to performance and to environmental uncertainty. This is done using a longitudinal data set. Personal strategies are operationalized by a behavioral measure of the manners in which small business founders deal with situations. The results suggest a dynamic process between strategy and performance. Business owners that perform poorly employ a Reactive Strategy, with poor performance leading to increased use of reactive behavior. High performing business owners start out focussing on the most crucial issues (Critical Point Strategy), with high performance leading to a more top-down (Complete Planning) approach. These relations are controlled for characteristics of the environment of the firm. Strategy use is dependent upon the type and level of environmental uncertainty. Complete Planning strategy is used less frequently in a fast changing environment and more often in a complex environment. Use of Opportunistic Strategy is negatively related to the complexity of the environment, while the Reactive Strategy is used more frequently in a non-munificent environment. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Congruence of Successful International Competitors:

This paper examines the marketing strategies and organization of a matched triad of American, British and Japanese companies competing in the UK market. The sample includes leading companies in industries identified as being under threat by the EC. The relative success of business was measured and strategies identified using multiple depth interviews with senior managers within the businesses. The strategies of successful companies were found to be similar and not dependent on their country of origin or industrial sector. The most successful companies had a balance of marketing, innovation, planning and entrepeneurial orientation. More of these successful firms were Japanese than American, and very few were British.     

Shopping and cross-shopping practices in Hanoi Vietnam: An emerging urban market context

The process of supermarketization in emerging countries does not imply convergence in shopping practices. Based on a qualitative study in Hanoi, Vietnam, this paper adopts a shopping-as-practice approach with a specific focus on factors influencing practices. Seventy-night interviews were conducted in six urban districts of Hanoi. The results allowed to identify five types of shopping practices of differing natures and degrees of cross-shopping, and different strategies used to accomplish these practices, dominated by constraints or based on trust. The analysis showed the relationships between the factors and (1) shopping and cross-shopping strategies and (2) the dimensions of shopping practices. These findings deepen the current understanding of shopping and cross-shopping practices in the context of emerging markets. This paper also provides recommendations regarding retail policy and development in Vietnam.     

The Strategies and Characteristics of Exporting SMEs:

The behaviour of exporting firms is the result of the complex interaction of many factors of the external and internal environment both at the national and international level. This paper presents the main findings from an exploratory study which assessed the characteristics and marketing strategies of small- to medium-sized exporting firms in a developing country, Peru. Statistical analysis using non-parametric methods to measure the behaviour of these firms used criteria taken from studies of firms in mostly developed countries. The observations from the analysis indicate that characteristics such as size and management perceptions and commitment, and strategies related to market concentration in developed countries taking into consideration export sales volume as a measure of performance (dependant variable) were positively associated to the success of these Peruvian firms and added to their competitiveness.     

Practice Makes Profit: Business Practices and Firm Success

Which business practices set successful firms apart from others? We address this question using data from an official survey of almost 3000 New Zealand firms. Questions cover: leadership, planning practices, customer and supplier focus, employee practices, quality and process monitoring, benchmarking, community and social responsibility, innovation, IT use, business structure and the competitive environment. Some of these are internal practices reflecting a firm’s resources and capabilities; some are characteristics of the external environment. We find that capital investment choices, R&;D practices, market research and a range of employee practices are positively associated with firm success; industry structure is also a key determinant of success. The association between specific business practices and firm success is mostly independent of firm size, age and industrial sector, other than for export marketing.     

Planning comprehensiveness and strategy in SME's

Although it is generally assumed that planning is of great value for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME's), little is known about the conditions that influence the organization of the planning process. In this paper it is hypothesized that planning comprehensiveness is, to a certain extent, related to the complexity and variability of the strategies pursued by SME's. This hypothesis is partially supported by an empirical study in which 154 SME's in the Dutch Machinery Industry are involved.     

Mitigating transaction risk for cross-border e-commerce firms: A multiagent-based simulation study

The industry of cross-border electronic commerce (CBEC) has experienced rapid development in recent years, however it has also faced severe challenges concerning the managerial risks taking place across national borders. The aims of the study are two folds: first examine the effects of applying different risk mitigation strategies on the market performance of international online vendors (IOVs) and utilities of consumers; second explore whether consumers’ choices among vendors from different nations based on psychic distance are affected by the risk mitigation strategies of platforms or by the actual frequency of vendors making default moves. A dynamic simulation has been conducted based on four combinations of platform strategies determined by two dimensions of ex ante intervention and ex post investigation. The results indicate that (i) once increasing the frequency of ex post investigation of risk events, customers will suffer less default losses, and both IOVs and customers will gain more utilities; (ii) the profits of ordinary vendors will increase marginally when reducing the frequency of ex ante intervention of high-risk orders, causing a lower degree of shopping concentration; (iii) when platforms adopt risk mitigation strategies of more frequent intervention or higher investigation intensity toward IOVs, the psychic distances of consumers towards IOVs from the same nation and from relatively closer nations become closer.     

Comparison of promotional management in exporting to the Soviet Union and OECD countries

This study compares the promotional management problems Finnish firms have experienced in exporting to the Soviet Union and OECD countries. Within the context of a representative sample of 76 industrial companies, the study focuses on the perceived importance and use of promotional activities as well as on the major planning and implementation problems related to these activities. The results indicate that companies exporting to the OECD area should modify considerably their strategies when trying to enter the Soviet market. Promotional planning should be based on comprehensive knowledge of the characteristics of Soviet government bodies and communication patterns.     

“走鬼”,我们该拒绝吗?

<正>"走鬼"一词流行于香港、广州等城市,是人们对流动小摊贩的一种叫法。在一座城市中,"走鬼"们往往是最为活跃的经济细胞。他们的生存现状和社会问题,也一直是引发热议的焦点。2009年5月20日,江苏省人大批准了一项颇具"爆炸性"的决     

Competition In Mediation Services: Modeling the Role of Expertise,Satisfaction, and Switching Costs

This article analyzes competition among mediation service providers that match clients and vendors in a horizontally differentiated market. This is an issue that is important for decision support of mediators in determining pricing and service strategies. We present a simulation model to simultaneously represent search as well as the behaviors of clients, vendors, and multiple competing mediators. Among our findings: intermediaries find it optimal to offer registration fee incentives and derive revenues from transaction fees from successful matches; as switching costs increase, incumbent utilities increase and entrant utilities decrease; expertise, modeled as the ability of mediators to assess vendor attributes accurately, is a powerful competitive weapon for entrants to erode the incumbent intermediary's first mover advantage. On the other hand, client satisfaction is an instrument for an incumbent intermediary to deter entrance by competitors.     

Investigating the factors influencing small online vendors’ intention to continue engaging in social commerce

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the variables that determine small online vendors’ intentions to continue engaging in social commerce. Based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and social exchange theory (SET), eight hypotheses were developed to (1) identify the antecedents that influence small online vendors’ attitudes toward social commerce, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control; and (2) examine the causal relationships among the variables with respect for continuous usage intention. A questionnaire survey was used to collect data on a sample of 166 small online vendor managers and employees. Partial least squares (PLS) was used to validate the proposed model. The findings show that social exchange factors (perceived benefits and commitment) significantly affect small vendors’ attitudes toward social commerce. The results further confirm the validity of TPB, i.e., attitude and perceived behavioral control have significant impacts on continuous usage intention in relation to social commerce. The findings of this study provide important insights into the antecedents of attitude for academics and practitioners, application of social computing in commerce for engaging in service innovation, and have the potential to contribute to the development of effective online marketing strategies.     

Child injury prevention in Vietnam: achievements and challenges

As with other South Asian countries, injury is becoming a leading cause of death and morbidity among children in Vietnam. In response to the increasing burden of child injury, government and non-government agencies in Vietnam have combined efforts during the last decade to develop and implement various child injury prevention strategies and programmes. This article provides, through a review of relevant documents and interviews with major stakeholders, an overview of these efforts and highlights major challenges to child injury prevention in the country. The findings point to notable achievements in terms of increasing awareness of injury facing children at all levels in the community and developing a sound injury prevention policy framework in a relatively short period of time. However, much needs to be done to implement necessary environmental and legislative changes, strengthen child injury surveillance and injury prevention research; and to improve access to health services. The insight into the experience of Vietnam could benefit other low- and middle-income countries with a high burden of child injury.     

Child injury prevention in Vietnam: achievements and challenges

As with other South Asian countries, injury is becoming a leading cause of death and morbidity among children in Vietnam. In response to the increasing burden of child injury, government and non-government agencies in Vietnam have combined efforts during the last decade to develop and implement various child injury prevention strategies and programmes. This article provides, through a review of relevant documents and interviews with major stakeholders, an overview of these efforts and highlights major challenges to child injury prevention in the country. The findings point to notable achievements in terms of increasing awareness of injury facing children at all levels in the community and developing a sound injury prevention policy framework in a relatively short period of time. However, much needs to be done to implement necessary environmental and legislative changes, strengthen child injury surveillance and injury prevention research; and to improve access to health services. The insight into the experience of Vietnam could benefit other low- and middle-income countries with a high burden of child injury.