...Exploratory research: The chief purpose of exploratory research is to reach a better understanding of the research problem. This includes helping to identify the variables which should be measured within the study. When there is little understanding of the topic it is impossible to formulate hypotheses without some exploratory studies. For example, crop residues such a straw are high in lignin (a wood-like substance) and low in nutrients. This makes them a poor animal feed since the lignin acts against digestibility and the low nutrient content means poor food value. However, if treated in a strong alkali, plus a little heat, the lignin breaks down and the nutrient content increases. A company was established to exploit this technology and did so successfully for 4 seasons. After this period sales began to slow down. Three other manufacturers had entered the market by this time. The company, Animal Feed Systems, did not know whether the whole industry had slowed down or if only their product was suffering. Nor did they know if the problem was temporary in that perhaps the market comprised of "early adopters" had been saturated but it was only a matter of time before other farmers began to buy their systems when they saw how well they worked. It was also possible that if a problem did exist it could lie in any one of a number of areas: animal populations might be declining, distributors may not be promoting the product aggressively, customers may be experiencing difficulties in...
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...Alyssa Cleo E. Cortes BAEM MKTG 108: Consumer Behavior Title: Consumer Research: The Best Way To Understand Consumer Behavior Subtitle: Packaging: A key element to understand consumer behavior Good things often come in small packages, but by no means this art is simple. In fact in many cases, package is the product. In nowadays competitive environment, the role of package has changed due to increasing self-service and changing consumers’ lifestyle. Firms’ interest in package as a tool of sales promotion is growing increasingly. Package becomes an ultimate selling proposition stimulating impulsive buying behavior, increasing market share and reducing promotional costs. (Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd., 2013) A package is the first direct interface of the product with the consumer. It informs the user about the contents; it contains and protects the contents. Above all, the package is the face of the product in the retail environment. Like all faces, the package tells a story, a story of where the product has come from, who manufactured it, what it is meant to do and by using or consuming the product what kind of experience a user is going to subject himself to and very importantly, what lifestyle statement is the consumer going to make. As promotional information is shifting more to the pre-buying experience online, consumer is looking to see a more engaging experience in the actual retail environment. (Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd., 2013) According to Rundh (2005)...
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...in technology and way of life. One of the most significant forces driving this development is the ability to record and deliver information across distances and at rates expanding exponentially. This is also referred to as the information age. Digital technology has changed the economy. The new terminology being used is e-marketing where the primary source of value creation for consumers has shifted from physical goods to services and information. This does not mean that everything we previously knew about business becomes irrelevant and obsolete, but it does mean that significant changes in business environment justify new approaches to thinking of the best marketing strategy and management. In summary E-commerce can be defined as an exchange of goods and services between parties, individuals and organizations as well as the electronically based intra and inter organizational activities that facilitate such exchanges.(Dave.C.,2007,p,4) There are four categories of E-commerce:- a) Business to business b) Business to consumer c) Consumer to business d) Consumer to consumer Most business still carries out the traditional ways of conducting business. This is by having a physical address where they have their products and services and translations are made there. Due to the new dot com community and ways of doing business many businesses have taken up the opportunity of conducting business online. This is because of the benefits brought about by...
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...1. Introduction Electronic commerce has become an attractive market to the world, and the emerging business opportunities are now becoming a major factor in world economics. Although, investment through e-commerce channels returns high profits, but like many IT systems, it could lead business organizations to a risky situation or failing to deliver expected returns. The main cause of this is the inconsistency between the system design and the desired requirements or for the misunderstanding between IT professionals and business experts. Therefore, to design e-commerce system, a communication pattern is needed either between system developers and business owner, or between customers and the online business system. Moreover, e-commerce system should be adapted with the whole business environment such as business norms and behavior, customer practice, business rules and government policy. However, Semiotic that is ‘the science of signs’ has brought many approaches to facilitate the process of understand signs’ meaning. The approach of organizational semiotic defied the organization as a group of social norms and emphasizes on the people and their role and responsibility in order to merge them when analyzing and designing information system (Stamper et al, 2004). For e-commerce systems, there is a necessity of clear meaning for each symbol, icon and image because almost all transactions done through the web system without human agent involvement. Therefore, semiotic...
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...perspective, e-commerce is the ability to deliver products, services, information, or payments via networks such as the Internet and the World Wide Web. 2. From an interface perspective, e-commerce involves various information and transaction exchanges: business-to-business, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer. 3. From a business perspective, e-commerce includes activities that directly support commerce electronically by means of networked connections. 4. From an online perspective, e-commerce is an electronic environment that makes it possible to buy and sell products, services, and information on the Internet. 5. From a structural perspective, e-commerce involves various media: data, text, web pages, Internet telephony, and internet desktop video. 6. As a market, e-commerce is a worldwide network. A local store can open a Web storefront and find the world at its doorstep-customers, suppliers, competitors, and payment services. E-business: Connecting critical business systems and constituencies directly via the Internet, Extranets, and Intranets. It goes beyond a web site on the Internet to affect all aspects of business, from strategy and process to trading partners and the ultimate consumer. It combines the resources of traditional information systems with the global reach of the Web. E-business enables organizations to accomplish the following goals: 1. Reach new markets. 2. Create new products and services. 3. Build customer...
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...Human Resource Roles and Responsibilities Human resource roles and responsibilities are changing because business trends are changing. Technology, e-business, ethics, and globalization are changing the way companies do business and therefore, the human resource management need to make changes to keep up with the new trends. Globalization and Technology During the past century companies have made changes to the way human resource department’s run. Many companies created jobs overseas, which slowed down the hiring in the United States (Noe, R., Hollenbeck, J., Gerhart, B. & Wright, P., 2004). Companies are finding to survive they must compete in international markets and fend off their competitors. Companies are also outsourcing and offshoring the workload in order to compete and pay employees lower pay. Technology is constantly advancing forward. In today’s business world technology is changing rapidly and human resource department find they need to move with it. These days few companies use paper for job applications now businesses rely on the internet which combines data from several sources into a single site. Shared service centers consolidate different human resource functions into a single location (Noe, et al, 2004). Diversity and E-Business Diversity in the U.S. labor force is growing in racial, ethnic, and gender terms. Many U.S. companies have already committed themselves to ensuring they recognize the diversity of their internal labor force and use it to gain...
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...H-E-B grocery store https://www.heb.com/ fits the category of a non – news organization that utilizes social media feeds alongside traditional media feeds. Mixed media is the best way to describe H-E-B online communication (i.e. identified as a mixture of owned media, paid media shared/social media and earned media). The organization has its own website (owned media pg. 175) that allows the company to have control over information disseminated out to both its internal and external publics (pg. 118). When it comes to paid media (pg. 176), H-E-B paid to have control over 60 seconds of air time during the 2018 super bowl. Its commercial in this case demonstrated corporate advertising (pg. 176) as it promoted its annual contest Quest for Texas...
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...Joshua Tollison Phase 4 Individual Project MGM310-1204B-01 Bari Courts 23 December 2012 If I were to start an e-business the main thing I would focus on would be functionality of the site and ease to make customers feel comfortable and confident about shopping with my storefront. By this I mean designing a site that gives customers several options for the products they are shopping for; along with that my customers would have access to multiple pictures of every product available, and a detailed description of the item they are interested in. My customers would also be able to compare similar items by their available options and provide a side by side analysis. The main thing for my e-business though would be the superior customer service that is provided to my clients by means of email, live chat, and a customer service hotline if you would prefer to talk to a representative. One of the final details that would make my site superior to others would be a hassle free return policy that even included return shipping for those who need to return their products for any reason. To be able to make this dream come true there are several other factors that I will be discussing throughout this paper as I present my business plan for establishing my storefront. I. E-Commerce Infrastructure Just as brick and mortar companies have an infrastructure to help them succeed in business, so do e-businesses. By having the correct infrastructure in place allows a company to run...
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...target customers, figure out what the consumers of your services and products think of your particular businesses’ brand, ideas and products. A general researcher in addition can help you as the business owner to gather some insights to assist you in focusing on the right market. In your business you it is important that you hire a general researcher as a part of your business strategy. The general researcher can be brought along at any stage of the business from pre launch onwards. A general researcher should be hired on a regular based interval due to the ever changing consumer behavior and motivation changes. A general researcher can help your business dependent on the brand and niche of business endeavor. It is especially important to hire a general researcher when you are launching a new product into the market. The General researcher will help you understand how the product will fair in the market and whether your particular product has an appeal to the target consumers. The researcher also helps you identify the size of the market, your businesses position in the market and the rest of the competition in the same market. The General researcher plays a vital role in aiding the testing of your perceptions, ideas and even packaging of the final products. As a business owner though it is possible to conduct your own background research, a general researcher is the more efficient in dealing with matters of consumer feedback and market research. A general researcher is experienced...
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...The two companies that I choose to discuss in this paper are Procter and Gamble, and Unilever both specialized in consumer goods and fierce foes for decades. Determine how each corporate culture differs from the other. As Ravasi and Schultz (2006) stated, organizational culture is a set of shared mental assumptions that guide interpretation and action in organizations by defining appropriate behavior for various situation. Procter and Gamble gives lots of importance to productivity and is constantly improving its productivity at all levels, to a point that it is part of the company culture. Their practices and values that have helped build that strong culture are: 1- Lead by example; the top executive team members personify the culture and consistently reinforce it through their actions. 2- Communicate regularly: Communication up, down and across the organization. 3- Transparency: Establish clear roles and responsibilities. 4- Promote for with in: human capital development to ensure consistency and well understood expectations. 5- Make data-drive decisions; Comprehensive financial, consumers and strategies rationales are all part of the decision making process. Meanwhile Unilever culture is more about what they believe in and how they act collectively. Unilever has an innovation culture. Some of the practices and values that helped Unilever achieve its goal as an innovative organization are: 1- Focus on company’s core competencies: listen to all employees’ ideas...
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...Running head: BUSINESS RESEARCH ETHICS 1 Business Research Ethics 2 The medical field is one that unethical research happens. The way it happens is when doctors or hospitals publish findings in some area but they do not research other results for the same test. In the article titled “The highly profitable but unethical business of publishing medical research”, it discusses how to make money in the medical field companies do not complete research and just publish information without the complete facts that accompany it. The reason publishing medical information without the complete research is unethical is because it can cause great damage to the consumer reading the report. It is also a problem because it means that the researchers in charge of looking up the right information are not doing their job. A better way to understand it is by know what unethical behavior is. According to smallbusiness.com, “Unethical behavior in business runs the gamut, from simple victimless crimes to huge travesties that can hurt large numbers of people. Whether it is stealing a pen, padding an expense report, lying to avoid a penalty or emitting toxic fumes into the air, unethical behavior cannot be condoned by a company. A strict ethics policy is the cornerstone for any business that wants to maintain a good reputation” (). In the article there are several issues presented. The first one is the lack of information, that is the primary...
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...Orientation on Frontline Employee Service Performance and Consumer Response Rong-Da Liang Department of Marketing and Logistics Management, National Penghu University No.300, Liuhe Rd., Magong City, Penghu County 88046, Taiwan, R.O.C Tel: 886-6-926-4115 Ext: 5522 E-mail: rdliang@npu.edu.tw Hsing-Chau Tseng Graduate School of Business and Operations Management, Chang Jung Christian University 396, Chang Jung Rd., Sec.1, Kway Jen, Tainan 71101, Taiwan, R.O.C Tel: 886-6-278-5123 Ext: 2020 E-mail: hsingchau@mail.cjcu.edu.tw Yun-Chen Lee (Corresponding author) Graduate School of Business and Operations Management, Chang Jung Christian University No. 396, Chang Jung Rd., Sec.1, Kway Jen, Tainan 71101, Taiwan, R.O.C Tel: 886-937-366-869 Abstract As product and price become less important, managers search for new ways to differentiate themselves in a buyer-seller relationship. Increasingly, businesses have to focus on service orientation to differentiate themselves from their competitors. As consumer loyalty depends primarily upon rendering quality service, the delivery process among business service orientation, frontline service employee performance and consumer response deserves more attention. This article explores some of the ways in which service orientation can be used as an appropriate alternative to the more traditional business methods. This study analyzes the dyadic data collected from 247 questionnaires distributed to consumers and employees across 17 branches of a financial...
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...problems, seize opportunity, and adapt throughout adversity. Our company faced an opportunity/problem. The opportunity was to receive a renovation and upgrade, the problem was the business was 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Research Questions The research questions we developed were; How long will the total process take? Doing most of the work at night will be smartest? Doing work at what time could affect profit? We must know how long the entire process is going to take to determine what work needs to be done. Then we can begin to plan what jobs and when they will be done at night preferably, etc. Hypothesis Some of the hypotheses were that Working at night will allow consumers to see new product in the morning and increase sale. If work is done during peak business hours it will cause us to lose consumers. Informing consumers about what is going on and what they can expect to see “new” will increase profit. Variables and ethical decisions Perhaps the most important variable in any business is the consumer. We can plan for everything except the consumer’s reactions. Researching data that we have collected, anticipating trends, and knowing your consumer will still not afford you sufficient data to predict the consumer. But we try. The consumer is an independent variable, they are dependent on someone to get the service from but there are many other options so we do our best to know our most independent variable. Sales are a dependent variable. This variable is dependent...
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...It is important that a business understand the factors to business growth and improving customer satisfaction is the key. Many organizations should always look into developing a research study to continue to improve its customer satisfaction. The research study uses feedback from the focus group and customer satisfaction surveys. The purpose of the survey is to close the gap between the organization and its consumers. An important question to ask is “How satisfied are the customers?” The business has to understand what is important to the consumer. The research study focuses on who, what, when, and where. Improving customer service sends a message to the customer of respect and appreciation of his or her business, and the business it focused on staying abreast to his or her needs. ABC auto manufacturer has been successful for the past 80 years. Unfortunately, as the years progressed the average age of its customers has been more than 50 since 1990, and logic dictates that the consumer base organically will shrink. ABC autos are high-end with an average cost in excess of $50,000. ABC auto Management has decided the target market for this automobile will be adults in the age range of 35 to 45 years if ABC will survive. The next step for ABC is to create a business research plan to accomplish its goals. Management needs to formulate a plan to attract customers in the age range of 35 to 50 to expand its customer basis and increase profits....
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...Social Medias Impact on Consumer Behavior With today’s technology the use of social media has taken the world by storm, with millions of people able to rate, review and share opinions on products at the palm of their hands. The high usage of social media sites is creating a new medium for companies to communicate with consumers on a personal level they were not able to years ago. With the usage of smartphones sky rocketing consumers are now able give their “two cents” about products or services the second they experience them. This is an essential element for companies and consumers because social media allows them to view reactions about new products, whether they are negative or positive. Where would you like to eat tonight? Be daring and try the new bistro that just opened down the street or play it safe and go to Applebee’s? This could be one of the most daunting decisions someone may have to make throughout their day. When it comes to where one would like to spend their hard earned dollar on a meal 45% of consumers turn to leading social media sites like Yelp for recommendations (Pann). 57% of consumers rely on the reviews from these sites on restaurants to determine where they will dine that night (Pann). But how reliable are these reviews that consumers are putting such high importance when it comes to their dining experiences? When it comes to the reviews on websites such as Yelp, a recent study by Gartner a tech research company has determined by 2014 that 10%...
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