Search

Understanding how organizations respond to failure is important to management research, yet prior studies have offered contrasting findings for whether, in a multiunit hierarchical organization, a corporate office improves business unit search following product failure. To better understand how a corporate office affects business unit search, we focus on the role of corporate proximity (hierarchical, geographic, and cognitive) between the corporate office and constituent units. We argue that corporate proximity improves a business unit's local search process through two mechanisms—vertical linkages and corporate attention—that positively condition the likelihood of persisting; that is, reentering a product market after having experienced a prior product failure in that market. We find support for our theory using data on reentry in the U.S. medical device industry following exit from the market due to product failure. We also explore how age of the product market and characteristics of the failure—cause and severity—further moderate corporate proximity's role in business unit reentry. Overall, our study offers a better understanding of how complex organizations respond to failure, thereby contributing to literatures on search, corporate headquarters, and product entry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market producers often seek to position themselves in different categories over time. Successful repositioning is difficult, however, as audiences often devalue offerings that depart from a producer's past creations. Prior research suggests that this penalty arises as evaluators withhold opportunities for producers to reposition because of presumptions of a lack of competence in different categories. In this paper, we develop understanding of a novel evaluator-driven challenge to producers' repositioning efforts: evaluators are prone to "categorical stickiness," by which the categories they have come to associate with a producer through its prior offerings shape their perceptions of the producer's subsequent offerings. The result is a systematic mismatch between what producers claim and what evaluators perceive when a producer repositions. We further propose that audience members who have the greatest prior experience with a producer are the least likely to recognize its repositioning efforts. We examine evidence for our theory using data from Goodreads.com on authors within the book publishing industry, 2007–2017. We first build a novel deep-learning framework to predict categorization of a given book based solely on an author's description of its content. We then use data on how Goodreads users categorize and evaluate books as well as their past reading behavior to test for evidence of our proposed mechanism. Overall, our results extend understanding of the evaluative processes that generate categorical constraints and how these may differ among various types of audience members. This paper was accepted by Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, organizations. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02070. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: Cost advantage helps a firm at the expense of its rivals, but may hurt some rivals worse than others. Conventional wisdom suggests that an advantaged firm will do more harm to closer competitors, but the opposite may occur if competitors can reposition themselves. Closer competitors have stronger incentives to reposition away from the advantaged firm, thereby potentially encroaching on rivals more distant from the advantaged firm and propagating the harm to them like the cue ball in billiards transfers energy from cue stick to target ball. Our formal model compares an advantaged firm's closer and farther competitors, when repositioning is allowed or prohibited, and demonstrates when its advantage hurts farther competitors worse than closer ones. We provide an illustrative case study from grocery retailing. Managerial Summary: When Walmart brought its advantage in distribution efficiency to the low end of the grocery retailing industry, it displaced the inefficient downscale incumbent Winn‐Dixie in many geographic areas. One might have expected such increased efficiency at the low end of the market to hurt midscale supermarkets like Kroger more than premium grocers like Whole Foods, yet the opposite occurred. Why? In a word, repositioning. Midscale competitors retreated away from Walmart by repositioning upscale via renovations, which thereby transferred the impact to premium rivals who could not escape any further upscale. Our economic model of this "cue‐ball effect" predicts that the impact propagated onto upper‐end competitors is greater in markets with less income inequality, and our empirical results are consistent with this prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Foco (Interdisciplinary Studies Journal) is the property of Revista Foco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The COVID‐19 pandemic has changed many aspects of the economy. The situation has notably been more challenging for small businesses in developing countries which tend to operate with limited funding and a lack of social and human capital. In these contexts, technology has been argued to be an important resource to allow businesses to adapt and recover from the crisis. In line with this narrative, the pandemic has been linked to growing technology adoption within small firms in developing countries. However, little is known about how small businesses are using such technology as part of strategies: to survive, reposition themselves in the market and potentially "spring back" from the pandemic to thrive in a fundamentally changed environment. In this study, to fill this gap we look to the concept of resilience to examine how technology was adopted to help build resilience. The study focused on small businesses in Kenya and uses in‐depth qualitative analysis to unpack the processes of adoption and use. The study findings suggest that the pandemic created an incentive for many small businesses to engage with digital technology, enabling them to stay operational. The study evidenced specific coping strategies that incorporated technology to support resilience, including exploiting demand, acquiring new capabilities, expanding existing capacities, making data‐driven decisions, fostering social networks and freezing operations. Consequently, we argue for the need to unpack the processes of technology adoption and the links between technology and economic growth in such settings. During the pandemic, small businesses have typically adopted technology to build resilience appropriate to their context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on the impacts of COVID 19 reveals thathow the effects of the pandemic may be experienced at destinations in different stages of their development has not been studied. This paper discusses the impact of a break in tourism visitation to destinations caused by COVID 19 and uses the Tourism Area Life Cycle model as a framework from which to argue that the scale and importance of the impacts on destinations will vary depending on the stage of the development cycle reached by any specific destination. Such impacts may range from a short term and temporary loss of tourists to a permanent departure of the destination from tourism. It is argued that the nature and degree of recovery of the tourism market at any specific destination will vary in speed and level of recovery, the degree of permanence of impacts, and the likelihood of destinations retaining their overall appeal after the pandemic has ended, depending on their stage of development. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possibility of destinations using the pandemic to reposition themselves in terms of their markets, and attempting to modify the tourism industry itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates the effect of stock market volatility on economic growth in Nigeria, accounting for the moderating role globalization (economic, social and political globalization) from 1981 to 2018. Applying the recently developed unit root with structural breaks by Lee and Strazicich test, the Bayer–Hancks and Johansen cointegration tests, the results show that all the variables (real gross domestic product, stock market returns and globalization index) are integrated of order one, and are also cointegrated, suggesting evidence of long‐run relationship. Further, the results of the GARCH(1,1) model indicate that the effect of shocks to SMR volatility are very likely to be permanent than temporary. Regarding the nexus between stock market return and economic growth, the study reveals a positive, inelastic but statistically insignificant effect of stock market returns on economic growth in Nigeria. Also, globalization has a positive, elastic and statistically significant effect on economic growth in Nigeria. The study therefore, recommends collaborations on policy measures that would stabilize and reposition the stock market to continue playing its critical role of galvanizing funds for investment and stimulating economic growth and as well strengthens globalization related policies to achieve economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) on the job market are matters of great social concern. Economists and technology experts are debating at what rate, and to what extent, technology could be used to replace humans in occupations, and what actions could mitigate the unemployment that would result. To this end, it is important to predict which jobs could be automated in the future and what workers could do to move to occupations at lower risk of automation. Here, we calculate the automation risk of almost 1000 existing occupations by quantitatively assessing to what extent robotics and AI abilities can replace human abilities required for those jobs. Furthermore, we introduce a method to find, for any occupation, alternatives that maximize the reduction in automation risk while minimizing the retraining effort. We apply the method to the U.S. workforce composition and show that it could substantially reduce the workers' automation risk, while the associated retraining effort would be moderate. Governments could use the proposed method to evaluate the unemployment risk of their populations and to adjust educational policies. Robotics companies could use it as a tool to better understand market needs, and members of the public could use it to identify the easiest route to reposition themselves on the job market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how repositioning or recapitalization of public housing, mixed-financed housing and Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly Program of the National Affordable Housing Act can keep affordable housing. It discusses portfolio issues and options for public housing including rental assistance demonstration, mixed finance development, capital fund and operating fund financing and streamlined voluntary conversion. It shows options for Project Rental Assistance Contracts.

Copyright of Brazilian Business Law Journal / Administração de Empresas em Revista is the property of Administracao de Empresas em Revista and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Knowledge: International Journal is the property of Institute for Knowledge Management and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We estimate a model of route‐level competition between airlines who choose whether to offer nonstop or connecting service before setting prices. Airlines have full information about all quality, marginal cost, and fixed cost unobservables throughout the game, so that service choices will be selected on these residuals. We conduct merger simulations that allow for repositioning and account for the selection implied by the model and the data. Accounting for selection materially affects the predicted likelihood of repositioning and the predicted magnitude of post‐merger price changes, and it allows us to match what has been observed after consummated mergers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competing and coexisting policies (CACPs) may arise from the incompatibility of incentives, standards, and regulatory models between a local state and a federal government, or between two government jurisdictions across which supply networks operate. Traditional studies of supply chain dynamics typically explore the impact of policy regimens as standalone instruments. This study explores how the interplay between CACP regimens can affect the supply dynamics between producers, customers, and their intermediaries. We use a supply network configuration lens to assess implications for supply chain actors and system‐level outcomes. Our work is motivated by the federal‐state dissonance in the current dispute between India's farmers and the federal government regarding new laws that impact agricultural supply chains in India. In this case, alternative and coexisting policy interventions, ostensibly aimed at modernizing and transforming production and distribution, can lead to significant supply chain netting and inventory pooling reconfigurations in terms of material, information, and financial flows among Indian agricultural stakeholders, along with inventory repositioning and market creation options. In addition, of significance is the consequent shift in the balance between state/nation and federal/supranational equity and bargaining power, an increasingly relevant context where supply chains operate across a common but multi‐jurisdictional territory, and implications for system‐level outcomes, in this particular case equity, welfare economics, and food security. We conclude by pointing to the implications of CACP regimens, and their interplay, for the broader field of operations management and supply chain research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research summary: This article exploits a natural experiment involving self‐regulation in the ready‐to‐eat (RTE) breakfast cereal industry to evaluate the performance impact of product repositioning. It then examines how a product's brand equity value declines with repositioning distance and explores various nonprice responses of firms to increased own and rival competition. Self‐regulation led to a crowding of the product space by forcing differentiated products to become more similar. We find that products constrained by regulation performed relatively worse than unconstrained products. Furthermore, brand equity specific to a product was tightly linked to existing product positions. Increased competition also led to increased brand equity investments and some products with strong brand equity repositioned more aggressively than those with weak brand equity. Managerial summary: This article illustrates how firms respond to newly‐imposed regulatory constraints and how product brand equity is tightly linked to underlying product positions. The analysis is an empirical examination of a self‐regulatory initiative that placed advertising restrictions on high sugar RTE breakfast cereal products targeted toward children. We explore the impact of the regulation on performance and then use the setting to examine the connection between brand equity and changes in product positions. Finally, we examine firm responses to rival entry that include exiting, repositioning, and increasing investments in differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines the factors impacting the willingness of non-users to use ride-sharing applications from the lens of perceived value and perceived risk. Both perceived value and risk have been proposed and conceptualized as second-order constructs containing their first-order value and risk dimensions. An online questionnaire survey was used to collect the data from 388 respondents in Bangladesh using the convenience sampling method. PLS-SEM was performed, and results revealed that perceived value positively affected non-users' intention to engage in ride-sharing. Contrarily, consumers' risk perception was negatively associated with their willingness to adopt ride-sharing applications. Additionally, the impact of consumers' value perception on consumers' intention to adopt ride-sharing services was positively moderated by perceived risk. This study leads to a comprehensive understanding of the factors related to perceived value and perceived risk dimensions and provides novel insights to entrepreneurial firms, market specialists and policymakers to reposition the service in the market and foster innovation to make the platforms more readily accessible and reliable through policy reformations. The study adds to the body of literature and enhances theoretical depth by highlighting the multi-dimensional nature of perceived value and risk from the human-centered design thinking approach, which aims to assist two-sided platforms like ride-sharing to understand the factors that influence non-users willingness to engage in ride-sharing services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2010 British election particularly focused on the party leaders’ images – a departure in fifty years of British elections. The principal contribution of the article is to illustrate how a combined approach to assessing leadership positioning using both the traditional survey and semiotic analysis can provide insights into what image attribute dimensions end up in the minds of members of the public (actual positioning) and on what image attribute dimensions party marketers are trying to position themselves (intended positioning). Using data from the 2010 British general elections, our findings indicate that the combined methodological approach would be particularly useful for brands that need repositioning, those whose image attribute positions change dramatically over time, and those who wish to target previously unresponsive target audience segments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This case is developed to discuss options related to strategy in general and marketing strategy in particular that were implemented by an iconic brand—Old Monk—in the compelling attempt to revive the its brand value and relevance. The protagonist in the case is Mr Hemanth Mohan, the Director of this brand who is faced with serious challenges in resurrecting the brand in a hypercompetitive, ever-changing lifestyle alcoholic beverages market in India. The most significant of the challenges faced by Mr Mohan are changing tastes and preferences of the consumer, new foreign brands entering into the market, strong regulation, close monitoring from the government, and the monopoly of state-managed liquor retail chains. This case addresses and provides for the evaluation of various strategic options available for the brand in terms of repositioning itself in the relevant markets. The case presents questions related to how effectively a traditional brand can carry forward the legacy to redeem its brand value in the light of changing tastes and customer preferences. The case proposes to bring to light the importance of strategic decisions to be made around managing brand extensions in addressing the dilemma of brand value being spread too thin versus capitalizing on the past glory of the brand in finding life for the newly launched products under the known umbrella. This case is developed with an intent to be discussed among students pursuing undergraduate and/or graduate education in management discipline. The case is well aligned to be relevant for discussing concepts related to brand management, marketing strategy, strategic management, and consumer behavior. The content of this case is designed to be discussed and delivered in a typical 90-min class session, allowing students 120 min of pre-reading time and 120 min of post-discussion report preparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"This article advances a linguistic anthropological understanding of economic performativity by investigating how people uphold face when it is tied up in business performance. Analyzing interviews with the owners of Indian real estate firms, I demonstrate that under troubled market conditions, market indicators become indexical signs that can threaten a real‐estate professional's face, necessitating interactional repositioning vis‐à‐vis market descriptions, or varied ''market stances'. As they regiment market dynamics as objects of stance‐taking in interactions, industry members create emergent models of market activity shaped by multiple value projects. Such market stances are resources in performances aimed at shaping people's economic expectations and garnering capital." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the implications of a real and common alternative to attempting the transformation required to embrace a new, dominant, technology—the choice to maintain focus on the old technology. In considering this choice, we distinguish between “racing” strategies, which attempt to fight off the rise of the new technology by extending the performance of the old technology, and “retreat” strategies, which attempt to accommodate the rise of the new technology by repositioning the old technology in the demand environment. Underlying our arguments is the observation that the emergence of a new technology does more than just create a substitute threat—it can also reveal significant underlying heterogeneity in the old technology’s broader demand environment. This heterogeneity is a source of opportunities that can support a new position for the old technology, in either the current market or a new one. Using this lens, we explore the decision to stay with the old technology as a rational, proactive choice rather than as a mark of managerial and organizational failure. We then consider the distinctive challenges and organizational dynamics that arise in technology retreats, and their implications for the ways in which managers and scholars should approach questions regarding the management of capabilities, lifecycles, and ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study explores the independent and interactive effects of procedural justice and informational justice on post-deal value creation in large, related acquisitions. Our results show that informational justice and procedural justice affect different components of value creation. Procedural justice is critical in realizing market position improvements following the integration process, while informational justice is essential in achieving market position gains during integration and financial return gains both during and post-integration. Indicating that the interrelationships between different justice dimensions may be more complex than previously thought, we find that procedural justice reduces the positive effects of informational justice on financial return during the integration process, while it magnifies the effects of informational justice on the combined firms' market position during integration efforts. We explore the implications of these results for future research on the acquisition integration process and for practicing managers engaging in large, related acquisitions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of private labels over the past decades has been attributed to various factors. This article formally addresses the link between private-label success and economic expansions and contractions using recently developed time-series/econometric techniques. The findings confirm conventional wisdom that a country's private-label share increases when the economy is suffering and shrinks when the economy is flourishing. However, asymmetries are found in the extent to and speed with which private-label share changes in cyclical up- versus downturns. Consumers switch more extensively to store brands during bad economic times than they switch back to national brands in a subsequent recovery. In addition, the switch to private-label brands is faster than the opposite movement to national brands after the recession ends. Finally, not only are consumers more prone to buy private labels during economic downturns, but some keep buying them when bad economic times are long over as well, leaving permanent "scars" on national brands' performance level. The authors argue that national-brand manufacturers can mitigate the effect of an economic downturn on their shares by intensifying their marketing-support activities in recessions. Such a proactive strategy is not often observed. On the contrary, available evidence suggests that many manufacturers exacerbate their predicament by cutting back on their marketing expenses when the economy turns sour. Most retailers invest more strongly in their private-label program when the economy deteriorates, making it even more difficult for national brands to catch up with the share lost during contractions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-cultural aversions encompass a multitude of avoidant behaviours expressed in different forms and intensities. While there has been an increase in research on aversions that are somewhat underpinned by racism and discrimination, little research to date explores the existence of these aversions within an Indigenous tourism context. This study utilises projective techniques to explore the extent to which socio-cultural aversions may exist and how they manifest towards Indigenous tourism in Australia. Three major themes identified suggest that implicit and explicit socio-cultural aversions exist: 1) racial and stereotypical projections, 2) implicit cultural distancing and avoidance, and 3) ambivalence and indifference. Although less prevalent, non-aversive sentiments were also identified. The study makes a theoretical contribution to Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), specifically to the "consumer identity", "socio-historic patterning", and "marketplace culture" streams of research. Practically, product repositioning and marketing strategies are provided for destination managers and tourism stakeholders responsible for Indigenous tourism experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brand equity is a valuable yet fragile asset. The mounting frequency of product-harm crises and ill-prepared corporate responses to such crises can have profound consequences for brand equity. Yet there is little research on the marketing impact of crises. The authors employ the expectations-evidence framework to understand the impact of firms' responses to crises on customer-based brand equity. The results of a field survey and two laboratory experiments indicate that consumers interpret firm response on the basis of their prior expectations about the firm. The interaction of expectations and firm response is shown to affect post-crisis brand equity. The authors draw implications for the expectations--evidence framework and for the outcomes of different types of firm response (i.e., unambiguous support, ambiguous response, and unambiguous stonewalling) on brand equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The explosion of knowledge production within business and other organizations poses a critical challenge to current modes of teaching and research within our business schools. We need to consider new strategic positions closer to the knowledge production being carried on within the organizations we study, without assuming that immediate relevance is our primary objective. The academic advantage, in the authors opinion, still lies in generalization and abstraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two unresolved issues regarding the nexus between financial system development and environmental quality. (i) Does the structure of the financial system matter? (ii) Is there a nonlinear relationship? We employ the newly developed dynamic common correlated effect (CCE) and the dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators in order to address potential endogeneity, heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence in a panel of 58 countries. The panel data analysis reveals that the structure of the financial system matters in safeguarding environmental quality. More precisely, bank-based financial development enhances environmental quality, whereas the impact of market-based financial development is tenuous. We find some evidences of a nonlinear relationship between financial system development and environmental quality. The disaggregated data reveals the countries where financial structure matters for environmental quality, and countries where a nonlinear relationship exists between the variables. Therefore, countries that want to maintain environmental quality should strengthen the development of bank-based financial system. Moreover, effort to develop and reposition the stock markets should be prioritized in countries' environmental policies with a view to sustaining environmental quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the perspective of the global economic market with all the players from different industries, we see one important aspect that is present all the time, and that aspect is constant change. Looking back, you may say that this is nothing new, change has always been a constant factor in all life aspects, that's why humanity has evolved; and that is true, but change is different now. Today we experience change so fast that from the economic point of view, a company could go, from top to bottom in a matter of months. So, in order to survive in such an environment, companies us restructuring to secure business as a preventive and eventual business re-launch and not only when insolvency occurs, including a company reorganization procedure and bankruptcy procedure. As reported by a study that had been conducted by Cambridge University, the term "Corporate Restructuring" has been known in the world since the 1970s, when it was successfully applied to mergers and acquisitions, divisions sales, split-ups, financial recapitalization and private transactions in order to save renowned companies. The corporate restructuring process is a notion of corporate management for the legal reorganization, ownership, operational or other business structure of a company that has proved to be a difficult topic for managers of all around the world, companies undergoing the countless weather events that we live. Restructuring involves redesigning one or more aspects of a company, such as repositioning on the market to be more competitive, surviving in an unfavorable economic climate, or balancing the corporation to move in a new direction, it's a multidimensional process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process model of strategic business exit (SBE) maps the activities of different levels of management onto the business and corporate levels of strategy making involved in Intel Corporation's exit from its core dynamic random access memory (DRAM) business. The SBE process model contributes to the development of an evolutionary process theory of strategy making by conceptualizing the pattern of managerial activities through which resources and corporate competencies are internally redirected toward more viable business opportunities, and the strategic context of a core business dissolves. The SBE process model corroborates the usefulness of the Bower-Burgelman process model for conceptualizing strategy making in complex organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market pioneers outsell later entrants in both consumer and industrial markets. Entry barriers arising from preemptive positioning and switching costs have been advanced to explain this market share difference, termed "pioneering advantage." However, empirical studies show that pioneering advantages are present even in mature markets in which brands reposition and switching costs are minimal. In these cases, the authors argue that pioneering advantage can arise from the process by which consumers learn about brands and form their preferences. This process can produce a preference structure that favors the pioneer, making it difficult for later entrants to "compete away" the pioneer's large market share, even if brands can reposition and switching costs are minimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product positioning studies for both new and established products generally involve consumers' perception of the current product space in terms of the salient product attributes. Perceptions per brand attribute are hypothesized to be a function of direct measurement and brand "image." The influences of direct measurement and image are separated. The first step in penetrating a product market is to look for segments of rival brand customers for which there is o significant gap between image and direct measurement perceptions. A second consideration is the strength of the "image" in terms of actually changing the direct measurements. The author empirically illustrates how to identify penetrable market segments in terms of image-direct measurement influences and discusses the implications of this type of information in forming a realistic product positioning strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how existing organizations in an industry come to adopt a new market position in a differentiated market. I argue that the great uncertainty about the consequences of adopting a different market position does not lead to unchanging positions, as often assumed, but instead leads to mimetic adoption among organizations, as some organizations observe others adopting the new position. I test hypotheses developed from this argument in an event history analysis of the diffusion of a new music radio format. Results show that low organizational inertia, caused by events such as a recent ownership or format change, strongly increases the likelihood of adoption, while social proximity to prior adopters has a weaker effect. The results imply that organizational populations can become more diverse through this type of organizational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of compositional perceptual maps is an important aspect of the management of brands. The use of correspondence analysis to construct such maps is not new, nor is the subsequent use of conventional hierarchical and non-hierarchical cluster analysis to segment the brands. However, the application of chi-squared trees analysis can be used to cluster both brands and attributes using the same principle of decomposing the Χ² statistic of the matrix of frequency of responses as in correspondence analysis. Used in conjunction, these two techniques allow the construction of an enriched compositional perceptual map. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of an affective competitive position is a key stage in any marketing strategy. Typically, positioning is examined in relation to products and their features, but, in financial services, the nature of the products are such that organizational positioning is of much greater importance than product positioning. Current positioning strategies in the retailing of financial services are examined from the customer perspective and the results suggest that despite the disappearance of the traditional distinctions between banks and building societies, consumers still tend to see the two institutional types as occupying distinct competitive positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that firms which emphasize unrelated diversification through mergers and acquisitions are often located in unfavorable market positions, in terms of the attractiveness of their industries and their competitive positions within these industries. However, these previous research efforts have not established whether such positions will also be linked to firms using non-conglomerate acquisition strategies. This study utilizes three acquisition strategies--conglomerate, technology-related, and marketing-related--to hypothesize differences in the market position of acquisitive firms. Results show that, while acquisitive growth is generally associated with a decline in market position, one particular acquisition strategy, the marketing-related strategy, is associated with a distinctly superior position. Firms utilizing this strategy were found to be in more profitable industries and to have higher market shares in these industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents step-by-step directions on how to create a business plan that gives companies a strategic edge in their businesses. The author feels there are four steps in creating a "master strategy." Some of the key elements considered include: the supply strength of company, both tangible and intangible company resources, matching company strengths with key success factors, customer service, making the most of existing resources, expansion to obtain a resource, and expansion to enhance market position.