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Reverse Decisively, Politician
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“[I]n defending continued U.S. involvement in Iraq, President George W.
Bush stated: ‘I'm not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have
died in...
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Six ways to make volatility your friend
This article from Accenture discuss how to increase the company agility in order to stay ahead of the competition. If you don´t have the time to read it, just browse through the twelve-point checklist and see how your company have prepared for rough times:
Does your organization have at least three scenarios for how your industry is most likely to evolve over the next 36 months? Does it have good options for responding?
What three big opportunities would your company be pursuing if it were more agile?
Imagine three possible sources of competition that you haven’t thought would be likely until now. How will you respond to them?
Put yourself in your top competitors’ shoes. What could they do to disrupt the market in the next year, and what are your plans for outsmarting them?
How is your company augmenting its ability to quickly sense new market anomalies? Are you taking full advantage of the new capabilities of today’s analytics tools?
What are the three biggest factors preventing your organization from being more agile? How do you plan to overcome them?
Did you make such big cuts during the recession (particularly in terms of talent) that your agility and ability to grow have been damaged? If so, how are you compensating now for those cuts?
In what areas should you be collaborating with your competitors to drive changes in the market?
Who among your organization’s new leaders will be most effective at taking advantage of volatility? What makes them different from your longtime leaders?
Which of your customers are the best leading indicators of future market opportunities?
Where would faster decision making be of most benefit to your company?
Have you been able to cut your company’s fixed costs in the past few years to improve its agility?"
o
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Bringing style home - how tastes are shaped online
Does the ideal ratio of couch to rug size keep you up at night? Are the exposed wires of your stereo causing you angst? Is that crocheted toilet paper cover kitschy enough to be cool? If you wonder, then you are not alone.
For Concordia University’s Zeynep Arsel, such questions have led to exciting new research into buyer behaviour. The assistant professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business teamed up with Jonathan Bean from Parsons The New School of Design in New York City to co-author a recent article in theJournal of Consumer Research. Together, they investigated how the notion of taste can be seen as an integral part of personal identity in addition to serving as a boundary that sets one apart from the crowd.
The researchers turned to a surprising source for their findings: Apartment Therapy, a popular website with a fresh take on present-day interior decorating that has had more hits than Martha Stewart’s online empire. Arsel and Bean painstakingly combed through hundreds of thousands of posts and comments on the website to uncover how its readers were forming their own notions of personal taste by following a prescriptive view of what constitutes cool when it comes to interior decorating.
“It turns out that reading Apartment Therapy or watching a do-it-yourself home decorating show is way more than just a passive leisure activity,” explains Arsel. “It’s really an element of practice that influences how people relate to objects and what they do with them.”
While our choices in interior decorating may begin as a simple imitation of what we see online or on TV, those decisions eventually become ingrained.
Arsel herself was not immune to this pattern of consumer behaviour. She first came to the Apartment Therapy website out of personal curiosity rather than academic interest. “I was just getting my first apartment as a new PhD,” she recalls. “It was a lower duplex that was totally typical of Montreal and I wanted some decorating ideas to help me liven up the dark space.”
Through personal experience and in-depth research, Arsel and Bean developed a new theory that sees taste-making as a tripartite process that involves problematization, instrumentalization and ritualization.
First, the consumer problematizes his or her own environment by comparing it to the prescriptions on the web site and acknowledging that things could be improved. Then, they rationalize a design choice or purchase through the process of instrumentalization or, in other words, linking this choice to goals and meanings. Finally, imitation becomes ingrained behaviour through repetition and ritualization.
“We start by looking at these decorating sites and emulating what we see. But through repeated exposure, we develop our own standards for what can in fact become personal taste,” says Arsel.
Consumers Perceive Risk When "Price" Means More than Money
When companies combine different pricing structures – such as asking for effort or information in combination with or instead of money – consumers perceive a greater risk in the decision to buy.
That’s according to University of Cincinnati research, by doctoral marketing student John Dinsmore. His paper is titled “Mental Accounting, General Evaluability Theory and the Framing Losses Posed by Partitioned Monetary and Nonmonetary Prices.”According to Dinsmore, shoppers routinely arrive at buying decisions by categorizing and evaluating prices, a process known as mental accounting that helps consumers judge a level of loss or sacrifice posed by pricing strategies.
“Companies have lots of options when pricing products. They can charge money, or they can require something else such as watching an advertisement,” explained Dinsmore of UC’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business.
And in the eyes of the consumer, greater sacrifice means more risk, he added.
This risk can be tied to cash outlay and an additional consumer sacrifice to obtain a good or service, such as time spent evaluating product information, partaking in services or registering personal information to be granted user access.
Dinsmore’s research, for which he won an honorable mention from the Fordham University Pricing Center, New York, as one of three finalists in the 2012 Behavioral Pricing Dissertation Competition, consisted of an online survey of about 300 people in which he presented them with identical product descriptions and randomly used three different pricing structures.
Surveyed “consumers” were asked to consider different expenses (money, time and information privacy) and assess anticipated risk.
“I found that products with multiple monetary prices did not appear any riskier than products with a single price,” he said. “Products with different price categories, for example charging money and requiring consumers to view an ad before buying a product, seemed riskier.”
In other words, these nonmonetary costs evoke different mental considerations, a field of study known as behavioral pricing research that observes buyer behavior as it relates to characteristics behind perceived value.
What does it mean for businesses? It’s all about striking a risk balance, Dinsmore explained.
“As businesses seek new ways to make money off their product or search for new revenue streams, there could be negative unintentional consequences for combining different categories of prices, “ he stated.
Dinsmore added that for each type of price a company attaches to a product, a different set of consumer concerns may arise: “The wider array of concerns (e.g. privacy), the riskier that product seems.”
Businesses will need to assess whether they can afford if their product is viewed as slightly more risky, he said.
“Companies may be better off charging a higher monetary price than opting for a seemingly cheaper (monetarily) but combined pricing strategy,” according to Dinsmore.o
That’s according to University of Cincinnati research, by doctoral marketing student John Dinsmore. His paper is titled “Mental Accounting, General Evaluability Theory and the Framing Losses Posed by Partitioned Monetary and Nonmonetary Prices.”According to Dinsmore, shoppers routinely arrive at buying decisions by categorizing and evaluating prices, a process known as mental accounting that helps consumers judge a level of loss or sacrifice posed by pricing strategies.
“Companies have lots of options when pricing products. They can charge money, or they can require something else such as watching an advertisement,” explained Dinsmore of UC’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business.
And in the eyes of the consumer, greater sacrifice means more risk, he added.
This risk can be tied to cash outlay and an additional consumer sacrifice to obtain a good or service, such as time spent evaluating product information, partaking in services or registering personal information to be granted user access.
Dinsmore’s research, for which he won an honorable mention from the Fordham University Pricing Center, New York, as one of three finalists in the 2012 Behavioral Pricing Dissertation Competition, consisted of an online survey of about 300 people in which he presented them with identical product descriptions and randomly used three different pricing structures.
Surveyed “consumers” were asked to consider different expenses (money, time and information privacy) and assess anticipated risk.
“I found that products with multiple monetary prices did not appear any riskier than products with a single price,” he said. “Products with different price categories, for example charging money and requiring consumers to view an ad before buying a product, seemed riskier.”
In other words, these nonmonetary costs evoke different mental considerations, a field of study known as behavioral pricing research that observes buyer behavior as it relates to characteristics behind perceived value.
What does it mean for businesses? It’s all about striking a risk balance, Dinsmore explained.
“As businesses seek new ways to make money off their product or search for new revenue streams, there could be negative unintentional consequences for combining different categories of prices, “ he stated.
Dinsmore added that for each type of price a company attaches to a product, a different set of consumer concerns may arise: “The wider array of concerns (e.g. privacy), the riskier that product seems.”
Businesses will need to assess whether they can afford if their product is viewed as slightly more risky, he said.
“Companies may be better off charging a higher monetary price than opting for a seemingly cheaper (monetarily) but combined pricing strategy,” according to Dinsmore.o
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