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.
Learn More :
- What practices guide innovation at W. L. Gore?
- Shorter product life cycles are common in industries characterized by low level of competition.
- Identify the major reasons why new product failures occur. The following are some of the possible reasons for the failure of new products:
- Companies that fail to develop new products leave their existing offerings vulnerable to increased domestic and foreign competition.
- Most established companies focus on incremental innovation rather than radical innovation.
- High-tech firms that function in a market with high technological uncertainty, high market uncertainty, and high investment costs are not likely to seek radical innovation.
- Companies typically must create a strong R&D and marketing partnership to pull off a radical innovation.
- Organic growth refers to increasing the profitability of the organization by increasing employee productivity.
- After creating a product prototype, a company tests it within the firm to see how it performs in different applications. The company refines the prototype to correct the mistakes found in in-house testing. What should be the next step?
- Pager, a simple personal device for short messages, became famous in the 1990s. Troveron Communications launched a pager in the early twenty-first century. Due to the introduction of mobile phones and text messaging, the pager industry was on a decline. The company's innovations were not well received by the market and the product was a failure. Which of the following is the most likely reason for the product's failure in this case?
- Which of the following strategies for new-product development incorporates buyers' preferences in the final design of the product?
- It has been observed that most new products have shorter product life cycles. What is the reason for this?
- What is incremental innovation? Give an example of incremental innovation.
- I-ball, a cell phone manufacturer introduces a cell phone targeted at customers ages 70 and above. It has features such as loud volume, large keys, and so forth. How do you classify this product innovation? What could be a possible disadvantage of this product?
- What does the term organic growth mean?
- What are the types of new products that a firm can introduce? What are the problems associated with introducing a truly innovative product? What are the necessary conditions to create a radically innovative product?
- Jill, a Product Manager for Nike, is responsible for evaluating the viability of a radically new product. How should she estimate demand?
- Fewer than 10 percent of all new products are truly innovative and new to the world.
- Jordan's firm enters new markets by tweaking products for new customers, uses variations on a core product to stay one step ahead of the market, and creates interim solutions for industry-wide products. In other words, it uses ________.
- Most established companies focus on ________ innovation when they aim to enter new markets by tweaking existing products, or they want to stay one step ahead in the market by using variations on a core product.
- Which of the following is the best example of a new-to-the-world product?
- Most new-product activities are devoted to ________.
- Which of the following firms is most likely to seek radical innovation?
- New-to-the-world products are ________.
- Which of the following is most closely related with the organic growth of an organization?