List and define some of the important shifts that have taken place in business and marketing practices.
Student answers will vary. Some possible answers include:
• Reengineering is the appointment of teams to manage customer-value-building processes and break down walls between departments.
• Outsourcing involves buying more goods and services from outside domestic or foreign vendors.
• Benchmarking is the study of "best practice companies" to improve performance.
• Supplier partnering focuses on partnering with fewer but better value-adding suppliers.
• Customer partnering entails working more closely with customers to add value to their operations.
• Merging involves acquiring or merging with firms in the same or complementary industries to gain economies of scale and scope.
• Globalizing focuses on increasing the effort to "think global" and "act local."
• Flattening refers to reducing the number of organizational levels to get closer to the customer.
• Focusing involves determining the most profitable businesses and customers and focusing on them.
• Accelerating involves designing the organization and setting up processes to respond more quickly to changes in the environment.
• Empowering means encouraging and empowering personnel to produce more ideas and take more initiative.
• Justifying means becoming more accountable by measuring, analyzing, and documenting the effects of marketing actions.
• Broadening involves factoring the interests of customers, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders into the activities of the enterprise.
• Monitoring involves tracking what is said online and elsewhere and studying customers, competitors, and others to improve business practices.