A four-step approach to 1992

Here's a four-step process to help you analyze both the opportunities and potential hazards of 1992. Even if you've already made your plans, it's a way to make sure you've considered all the implications of a Single Europe.     

Online luxury goods with price discount or onsite luxury goods with luxury services: Role of situation-specific thinking styles and socio-demographics

Today, the luxury goods and service market is growing faster than ever. However, despite its growth, we do not know much about the ways in which consumers choose to shop online or in store when buying luxury goods. We also lack insight into the factors that can affect such luxury consumption decisions. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether consumers prefer to buy luxury goods online at a discounted price or would rather buy luxury goods in store with additional luxury services at a cover price. This study also examines the extent to which such decisions can be driven by their situation-specific thinking styles as well as other socio-demographic variables. The results show that participants adopted a rational thinking style when deciding to buy luxury goods online with price discounts. On the other hand, an experiential thinking style was evoked when participants chose to visit a store offering luxury brands and luxury services. In addition to momentary thinking orientations, gender as well as income were found to be relevant to a consumer's choice in a shopping platform when seeking luxury brands. More details about the study's findings and their implications are discussed below.     

DIAL-A-RIDE

One of the worst things about being disabled is the loneliness. Able-bodied people do not have to wait for busy friends to find time to visit them. They can get on to a bus or a tube or a train and go visiting, or to the shops or a cinema or club, as the mood takes them. If you are in a wheelchair, you can't. You will get taken to hospital or a day centre or to your doctor, if need be, but nowhere for fun. The idea has arisen in several countries that there should be a special service for people with disabilities, who cannot use public transport and cannot drive or use friends' cars. This would be the equivalent of what taxis provide for the able-bodied — the possibility of getting out and going where you want, when you want, when there is no public transport, or car, available to take you.     

询盘

你能报给我这些商品的价格吗？ 若质量好且价格适合我方市场的话，我们愿考虑与你方签署一项长期合同。 若我方向你们长期订货，请告知能给予多少折扣，不甚感激。     

The craft of business intelligence: An American view

Business is war. And in war, it is a matter of survival of the fittest. In order to survive in today's cutthroat business environment, we must be properly armed. And one of the most important arrows in the executive's quiver is accurate knowledge of competitors and their business environment. In other words, detailed knowledge of the enemy and the terrain of the battlefield. Every major country on earth recognizes the importance of intelligence and employs an intelligence agency to collect it for them. Over 2,500 years ago, the Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Frederick the Great also expressed his opinion on the importance of intelligence when he said: “It is pardonable to be defeated, but never surprised.” In today's highly competitive business world it is becoming more and more important to know your competition-know your enemy-and, particularly in the international arena, to know your battlefield. There are minefields out there, and it is imperative to be able to identify and avoid them. You can still lose, even when armed with superior forces, if the terrain is against you. 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

对上市公司财务分析的几点建议

上市公司对于投资者来说是一种很好的投资渠道,但如何选择投资的企业却不是一件易事,一旦选择失误,损失重大。在投资过程中,要想理性决策,必须要从两大方面来进行:一是全面了解,二是重点分析。在全面了解的基础上进行重点分析,从而找出对决策有用的信息     

Preparing for promotion pays off

You shouldn't assume that your organization will make any great effort to help you get promoted. It is your responsibility to discover and to meet the expectations of those who make the decisions about promotion.     

Relationship marketing management: Its importance in private label extension

Relationship marketing aims to generate long-term profitable relationships between partners. In the context of the convenience goods market, the present study considers private labels in traditional categories as a tool to develop effective relationships. The main contribution of the study is the use of the relationship approach to explain private label loyalty and the success of store brand extension strategies. Drawing upon a sample of 434 individual and using EQS software, this study shows that customer experience, satisfaction, trust, and commitment to private labels play an important role in customer loyalty toward private labels in convenience goods, increasing consumers' propensity to buy private labels in new categories such as durable goods. Generating trust and commitment, which ultimately result in loyalty, is therefore a strategic goal and a source of long-term profitability for retailers.     

The garage team—entrepreneurship lessons from DHL international

When you start a venture, you start with yourself: your own personal operating system, or POS. Then, you identify and define your compelling product or service, something you should already know a lot about. You also need to use your sales skills to convince key stakeholders to support you, and to design your venture by putting together a pattern that works. The next step is to put together a team to help you implement the pattern you have designed, the men and women who will make up your garage team. The garage team is made up of the core people in a start‐up, people who help graduate the entrepreneur to the role of leader, because a leader with no followers is a leader of none. This article explores the essential attributes of such a team and how they contribute to the success of entrepreneurial ventures. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

6 Steps to Help You Save Money

You have a nice salary, but you still feel short of money. At the end of each month, you often ask yourself, "Where has all my money gone"? To help you better manage your salary, here comes some money saving tips. Following them your daily expense will be cut off easily, but still keep the quality of your life.     

The effects of store brand loyalty on store loyalty: evidence from the Spanish market

This article studies the impact of retailers' store brands on store performance. Specifically, we analyze the extent to which store brands contribute to store loyalty. On the one hand, a positive relationship between customers' familiarity with and loyalty to the retailer's own brand and customers' loyalty to the retailer should result from the potential of the store brand to differentiate the retailer. On the other hand, an negative relationship between customers' familiarity with and loyalty to the retailer's own brand and customers' loyalty to the retailer may result from store brands' association with more price-sensitive customers, who have a higher propensity to buy at different stores that offer the best bargain. The empirical analysis, conducted with a sample of customers of leading retailers in the Spanish detergent market, shows no relationship between store brand loyalty and loyalty to the retailer. Although the purchase of store brands relates positively to higher loyalty to the retailer, this relationship deteriorates with the degree of exclusivity of store brands within the customer's shopping basket.     

An empirical analysis of buying behaviour in UK high street womenswear retailing using the Dirichlet model

Clothes shopping behaviour is thought to be characterized by a high degree of segmentation but there appears to be little previous research to validate these assumptions. In addition, the belief that clothes shoppers are fickle has led to scepticism regarding the ability of empirical models to analyse consumer behaviour in this sector. However, an empirical analysis of 'Fashiontrak' data compiled by Taylor Nelson Sofres plc using the Dirichlet model highlights regular and predictable patterns of consumer behaviour; there appears to be little difference between how shoppers frequent womenswear retailers and how they buy fast-moving consumer goods brands despite major structural differences between the two (such as purchase frequency, pricing levels, durability of the product). The implications that these observations have on customer loyalty, marketing planning, store patronage and store location and performance planning are discussed.     

Assessing chain-restaurant impact—: Using linear regression

No matter which side of the impact question you're on, here's a model to help sort things out.     

Breaking the rules for better service

It's possible your company's customer-service policies are inhibiting the potential of your managers and costing you business.     

Innovation, Ethics, and Entrepreneurship

This paper is a response to Ray's (2004) recent proposal that the intellectual property rights (IPR) attached to potentially life saving/life sustaining innovations should become public goods in cases where markets are either unable or unwilling to pay for the creation of the intellectual property. Using a free market approach to innovation based on Western moral philosophy, we suggest that treating intellectually protected life saving/life sustaining innovations as public goods will likely reduce social welfare over the long term.     

An investigation on the effectiveness of hedonic versus utilitarian message appeals in luxury product communication

This research studies the role of hedonic versus utilitarian message appeals in luxury goods communication, investigating how using one or the other type of message appeal affects product perceived luxuriousness and, in turn, product attitude, and consumers' willingness to buy. This research presents three experiments in which message appeal and brand prominence have been manipulated, while perception of luxuriousness, attitude toward luxury products, willingness to buy them and consumers' conspicuous consumption orientation have been measured. Hedonic, compared with utilitarian, message appeals increase perceived luxuriousness, thereby increasing product attitude and consumers' willingness to buy the product promoted. This effect is particularly likely to occur for consumers with lower levels of conspicuous consumption orientation and for products carrying lowly prominent logos. We extend the literature on luxury communication by studying the effect of hedonic versus utilitarian message appeals on consumers' responses, and the literature on hedonism versus utilitarianism by studying this dichotomy in the context of luxury goods communication. This research suggests that different message appeals used in luxury goods communication produce different effects on consumers' responses and that this differential effectiveness is particularly likely to manifest for certain types of consumers and certain types of luxury products.     

Marketing compatible, yet differentiated, products : In search of competitive equilibria when network externalities are at work

Many goods are characterized by the fact that their utility increases with the number of consumers who buy them. It is the case for computers or communication networks, for example. Such goods are said to be subject to network externalities. We study those externalities in the context of a product differentiation model where product characteristics (or the image of the firm) are taken into account.We consider a market where two firms sell differentiated products and we study an equilibrium where the firms are competing in quantities (Cournot model) as well as in quality (two-stage game). We show how the degree of differentiation between the firms (or their products) and the compatibility decision are affected by the externality effect.     

Happy Birthday,Milton Friedman: A buyer-seller salute

Milton Friedman—famed economist, statistician, Nobel Memorial Prize winner, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and proud champion of the free market—would have turned 100 years old this past July. In spite of his myriad contributions, business researchers and practitioners can easily overlook how his work impacted their own disciplines and areas of focus. A business-to-business buyer-seller perspective is offered herein, detailing how Dr. Friedman's work—specifically, his seminal book, Free to Choose—helped usher in the era we today call ‘relationship selling.’     

Polygamous Store Loyalties: An Empirical Investigation

Grocery store loyalty has been traditionally viewed as a trait of consumers toward a particular store for their overall shopping needs. In this study, we argue that store loyalty shall be regarded as category specific trait, that is, a consumer could be loyal to store A in category one while at the same time be loyal to store B in category two. We name this consumer behavior polygamous store loyalties.We use an in-home scanning panel dataset that tracks purchases of 1,321 households in 284 grocery categories across fourteen retail chains over a 53-week period in a large US market. First, we provide model free evidence of polygamous store loyalties in the data, even though the overall store loyalty based on the traditional view is low. Next, we propose a model to separate category specific effects from overall store level effects. Finally, we discuss how retailers can use the results to gain a new perspective on store attractiveness to improve overall store patronage.