Life and Business Improvement

The development in technology has made the gathering and distribution of information very easy. The monitoring and surveillance of a person’s movement and behaviour has also become very easy with recent development in technology. As the technologies bring so many developments in conducting business, a lot of concern has risen as to the privacy invasion of individual customers. To gather useful information on consumer behaviours in order to present their offerings to various segment of the market, marketers has resulted in using various means in gathering information as to what each age group, income bracket, educational status etc buys, when they buy it, where they buy it, how much of it they buy and how often they buy it. All these have become easy for marketers to obtain with minimal cost without stretching across dangerous boundaries. Such invasions of privacy have become common as it happens on daily basis. Consumers are becoming increasingly aware on how informati...

The product life cycle (PLC) is tied closely to the concept of Diffusion of Innovation, which explains how information and acceptance of new products spread through a market. Innovation is anything new that solves needs by offering a significant advantage over existing methods customers use. Innovation can encompass both highly advanced technology products, such as new computer chips, and non-technological products, such as a new soft drink. For marketers, a key concept to emerge from research on new product diffusion is the identification of adopter categories into which members of a market are likely to fall. These categories include: Innovators – Represent a small percentage of the market that is at the forefront of adopting new products. These people are often viewed as enthusiasts and are eager to try new things, often without regard to price. While a good test ground for new products, marketers find that Innovators often do not remain loyal as they continually seek new prod...

There is an adage that ‘he who fails to plan, plan to fail’. This statement is as true as tomorrow, because whether you like it or not, tomorrow must surely come – unless you are dead! Planning is the integral part of our daily activities. If you don’t plan your day before going out, no wonder you failed everyday! For marketers planning is an essential task that must be continually undertaken. As we will see, shifting market conditions, including changing customer needs, advance in technology and competitive threats, almost always insure that what worked in the past will not work in the future, thus requiring a new strategy on how a product is marketed. Marketing planning is also important since it is often a prerequisite for obtaining funding whether one is a marketer in a large corporation seeking additional money for his or her department or is part of a small start-up company looking for initial funding. The 21 st century business environment is driven by advances in techn...

Consistent with a Red Queen effect, firms whose patents cited competitors' older ones have slower rates of new product introduction. Thus, the speed of learning matters: organizations that learn slowly from competitors may find their innovation performance rapidly deteriorating. Firms citing older extra-industry patents introduce new products at a higher rate, however. Intra-firm knowledge has a nonlinear effect, first promoting, then hampering innovation as age increases. Temporal diversity in intra-firm and extra-industry knowledge reduces the number of new product introductions but may still positively impact their innovativeness. By considering the location of knowledge in both time and space (that is, its relatedness to a firm's existing knowledge base), newer knowledge is always better for innovation an issue that is made all the more relevant as digitization hastens technology and industry dynamics. Different organizational processes require different paces, and the ...