Market analysis

The marketing analysis process can be broken down into these parts:

• Market position;
• Market objectives;
• Market segments;
• Which segment?
• Market structure.

Market position

-A niche market is a focused, targetable portion (subset) of a market sector.
By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.
A distinct niche market usually evolves out of a market niche, where potential demand is not met by any supply.

-Market dominance is a measure of the strength of a brand, product, service, or firm, relative to competitive offerings. There is often a geographic element to the competitive landscape. In defining market dominance, you must see to what extent a product, brand, or firm controls a product category in a given geographic area.

-Market Follower is Follow the lead of the market leader – pricing, product development, etc.

Market objectives

Market object is any business element that enables or helps to enable an overall business objective. An example of a market object is an e-commerce web site. A market object can also be a smaller object within the larger parent - for instance, your shipping rules can be a market object within the larger market object, e-commerce web site.
Market objects are usually referred to by companies that are experts in both marketing and technology. This is a new breed of consultancy which attempts to take full advantage of the newer marketing technologies and deploy them for their clients.

There are a lot of parts of market objectives like: national growth, international growth, etical objectives, market share, consumer focus, product focus, igame, shareholder value, etc.

Market segments

Market segmentation is the process in marketing of dividing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in the same way or have similar needs. Because each segment is fairly homogeneous in their needs and attitudes, they are likely to respond similarly to a given marketing strategy. That is, they are likely to have similar feelings and ideas about a marketing mix comprised of a given product or service, sold at a given price, distributed in a certain way, and promoted in a certain way.
Broadly, markets can be divided according to a number of general criteria, such as by industry or public versus private sector. Small segments are often termed niche markets or specialty markets. However, all segments fall into either consumer or industrial markets. Although it has similar objectives and it overlaps with consumer markets in many ways, the process of Industrial market segmentation is quite different.

Which segment?

-Mass Markets – high volume, low margin goods – confectionary, cars, clothing, food stuffs.
-Multiple Segments – appealing to wider range of groups – e.g. 4x4 vehicles – town, country, gender, lifestyle, social class?
-Single Segment – often a specialised product, e.g. machinery, exclusive goods.

Market structure

In economics, market structure (also known as market form) describes the state of a market with respect to competition.
The major market forms are:

• Perfect competition, in which the market consists of a very large number of firms producing a homogeneous product.
• Monopolistic competition, also called competitive market, where there are a large number of independent firms which have a very small proportion of the market share.
• Oligopoly, in which a market is dominated by a small number of firms which own more than 40% of the market share.
• Oligopsony, a market dominated by many sellers and a few buyers.
• Monopoly, where there is only one provider of a product or service.
• Natural monopoly, a monopoly in which economies of scale cause efficiency to increase continuously with the size of the firm.
• Monopsony, when there is only one buyer in a market.

The imperfectly competitive structure is quite identical to the realistic market conditions where some monopolistic competitors, monopolists, oligopolists, and duopolists exist and dominate the market conditions.

Quantitative and qualitative factors in decision making

Quantitative Factors

Considerations relevant to a decision that can be measured in terms of money or quantitative units. Examples are incremental revenue, added cost, and initial outlay.

Qualitative Factors

Considerations in decision making, in addition to the quantitative or financial factors highlighted byInteremental Analysis. They are the factors relevant to a decision that are difficult to measure in terms of money. Qualitative factors may include: (1) effect on employee morale, schedules and other internal elements; (2) relationships with and commitments to suppliers; (3) effect on present and future customers; and (4) long-term future effect on profitability. In some decision-making situations, qualitative aspects are more important than immediate financial benefit from a decision.

SWOT

Analysis is a strategic planning tool used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture or in any other situation of an organization or individual requiring a decision in pursuit of an objective. It involves monitoring the marketing environment internal and external to the organization or individual. The technique is credited to Albert Humphrey, who led a research project at Stanford University in the 1960s and 1970s using data from the Fortune 500 companies.

The aim of any SWOT analysis is to identify the key internal and external factors that are important to achieving the objective. SWOT analysis groups key pieces of information into two main categories:
Internal factors - The strengths and weaknesses internal to the organization.
External factors - The opportunities and threats presented by the external environment.
The internal factors may be viewed as strengths or weaknesses depending upon their impact on the organization's objectives. What may represent strengths with respect to one objective may be weaknesses for another objective. The factors may include all of the 4P's; as well as personnel, finance, manufacturing capabilities, and so on. The external factors may include macroeconomic matters, technological change, legislation, and socio-cultural changes, as well as changes in the marketplace or competitive position. The results are often presented in the form of a matrix.
SWOT analysis is just one method of categorization and has its own weaknesses. For example, it may tend to persuade companies to compile lists rather than think about what is really important in achieving objectives. It also presents the resulting lists uncritically and without clear prioritization so that, for example, weak opportunities may appear to balance strong threats.
It is prudent not to eliminate too quickly any candidate SWOT entry. The importance of individual SWOTs will be revealed by the value of the strategies it generates. A SWOT item that produces valuable strategies is important. A SWOT item that generates no strategies is not important.

Examples of SWOTs

Strengths and Weaknesses

• Resources: financial, intellectual, location
• Customer service
• Efficiency
• Infrastructure
• Quality
• Staff
• Management
• Price
• Delivery time
• Cost Capacity
• Relationships with customers
• Brand strength
• Local language knowledge
• Ethics
• Principles

Opportunities and Threats

• Political/Legal
• Market Trends
• Economic condition
• Expectations of stakeholders
• Technology
• Public expectations
• Competitors and competitive actions
  

PEST

It analysis stands for "Political, Economic, Social, and Technological analysis" and describes a framework of macroenvironmental factors used in environmental scanning. It is also referred to as the STEP, STEEP, PESTEL, PESTLE or LEPEST or Political, Economic, Socio-cultural, Technological, Legal, Environmental). Recently it was even further extended to STEEPLED, including ethics and demographics.
PEST/PESTLE alongside SWOT can be used as a basis for the analysis of business and environmental factors. PEST analysis is a useful strategic tool for understanding market growth or decline, business position, potential and direction for operations.
It is a part of the external analysis when doing market research and gives a certain overview of the different macroenvironmental factors that the company has to take into consideration. Political factors include areas such as tax policy, employment laws, environmental regulations, trade restrictions and tariffs and political stability. The economic factors are the economic growth, interest rates, exchange rates and inflation rate. Social factors often look at the cultural aspects and include health consciousness, population growth rate, age distribution, career attitudes and emphasis on safety. The technological factors also include ecological and environmental aspects and can determine the barriers to entry, minimum efficient production level and influence outsourcing decisions. It looks at elements such as R&D activity, automation, technology incentives and the rate of technological change.Technological can also affect hoovers in the business
The PEST factors combined with external microenvironmental factors can be classified as opportunities and threats in a SWOT analysis.

Human Resource Management (HRM)

It is the strategic and coherent approach to the management of an organisation's most valued assets - the people working there who individually and collectively contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the business.
The terms 'human resource management' (HRM) and 'human resources' (HR) have largely replaced the term 'Personnel Management' as a description of the processes involved in managing people in organisations.
Human resource management (HRM) is both an academic theory and a business practice that addresses the theoretical and practical techniques of managing a workforce. Synonyms include personnel administration, personnel management, manpower management, and industrial management, but these traditional expressions are becoming less common for the theoretical discipline. Sometimes even industrial relations and employee relations are confusingly listed as synonyms (e.g. Encyclopædia Britannica) although these normally refer to the relationship between management and workers and the behavior of workers in companies.
The theoretical discipline is based primarily on the assumption that employees are individuals with varying goals and needs, and as such should not be thought of as basic business resources, such as trucks and filing cabinets. The field takes a positive view of workers, assuming that virtually all wish to contribute to the enterprise productively, and that the main obstacles to their endeavors are lack of knowledge, insufficient training, and failures of process.
HRM is seen by practitioners in the field as a more innovative view of workplace management than the traditional approach. Its techniques force the managers of an enterprise to express their goals with specificity so that they can be understood and undertaken by the workforce, and to provide the resources needed for them to successfully accomplish their assignments. As such, HRM techniques, when properly practiced, are expressive of the goals and operating practices of the enterprise overall.
Nowadays, the more traditional synonyms such as personnel management are often used in a more restricted sense to describe those activities that are necessary in the recruiting of a workforce, providing its members with payroll and benefits, and administrating their work-life needs. These activities can require regulatory knowledge and effort, and enterprises can benefit from the recruitment and development of personnel with these specific skills.

Decision making

It is the cognitive process leading to the selection of a course of action among alternatives. Every decision making process produces a final choice. It can be an action or an opinion. It begins when we need to do something but we do not know what. Therefore, decision making is a reasoning process which can be rational or irrational, and can be based on explicit assumptions or tacit assumptions.
Common examples include shopping, deciding what to eat, when to sleep, and deciding whom or what to vote for in an election or referendum.
Decision making is said to be a psychological construct. This means that although we can never "see" a decision, we can infer from observable behaviour that a decision has been made. Therefore, we conclude that a psychological event that we call "decision making" has occurred. It is a construction that imputes commitment to action. That is, based on observable actions, we assume that people have made a commitment to affect the action.
Structured rational decision making is an important part of all science-based professions, where specialists apply their knowledge in a given area to making informed decisions. For example, medical decision making often involves making a diagnosis and selecting an appropriate treatment. Some research using naturalistic methods shows, however, that in situations with higher time pressure, higher stakes, or increased ambiguities, experts use intuitive decision making rather than structured approaches, following a recognition primed decision approach to fit a set of indicators into the expert's experience and immediately arrive at a satisfactory course of action without weighing alternatives.
Due to the large number of considerations involved in many decisions, computer-based decision support systems have been developed to assist decision makers in considering the implications of various courses of thinking. They can help reduce the risk of human errors.

Efective presentation

How to do a good presentation?

There are some things which you have to follow. They are:

• appearance;
• good behaviour;
• good talk about the topic;
• planing a presentation;
• trust yourself;
• comunication with audience (eye-contact, questions);
• good mood (with smile);
• to use visual aids;
• others.

Now some sentences about making a good presentation.

Appearance
Dress neatly and tidily - first impressions are important.
Carry yourself in a confident and professional manner.

Eye Contact
Keep eye contact with the class. This will:

• keep them alert.
• make them feel that they are being directly spoken to.
• make them feel part of the class.
• give them confidence in you as the instructor/presenter.

Monitor the class' reactions to what you are saying so that you can adjust your talk accordingly.

Do not:

• stare (intimidate).
• move your eyes from side to side (distraction).
• look out the window or at the clock (indicates boredom).
• look only at the training aids or chalk board (this can be perceived as impolite).
• look at your feet or at the ceiling (indication of nervousness or timidity).
  

Body Movements
Be natural - don't move around too much or too little.

Do not:

• stand rigid.
• march.
• slouch.

Do:

• move forward for emphasis (e.g. when standing at a podium).
• relax when talking from behind a desk -this creates some intimacy with a group.
• slowly and on occasion move from side to side to engage all parts of the class.

Gestures
Do: use meaningful and appropriate gestures to make a point.
Do not, or at least avoid:

• play with keys or coins in your pocket.
• use your hands too much, touching your nose or ears and excessive coughing.
• use gestures that indicate you are washing your hand of a situation or wringing your hands because of frustration.
• use a praying gesture as some may find this offensive or foot tap as this may be perceived as patronizing.
• use a pointer, pen, pencil or chalk to point at an individual may be perceived as offensive.
  

Voice

Volume - Speak loudly enough to be heard.
Pitch - Use effectively to convey meaning.
Rate - Speak more quickly to convey enthusiasm.
- Speak more slowly to emphasize key points or issues.

Do not:

• speak so quickly that no one can understand.
• speak so quickly that materials are glossed over rather than well explained so that they are understood.
• speak so slowly that people become bored or drowsy.

Articulation
Speak clearly, pronouncing words carefully -don't mumble. Control your lips, teeth and tongue to assist you.

Language
Avoid "pet" expressions (e.g."O.K.","Like", "You know").
Do not use profanity.

Humor

Use humour but only appropriately.

The structure of the presentation is:

1. Introduction;
2. Body;
3. Conclusion.
   

In the introduction, you "tell them what you are going to tell them".
In the main body, you "tell them".
In the conclusion, you "tell them what you told them" .

The introduction should clearly tell the audience what the presentation will cover so that the audience is prepared for what is to come.

The body should develop each point previewed in the introduction.

The conclusion should reiterate the ideas presented and reinforce the purpose of the presentation. It usually answers the question: "so what?"

The conclusion should reiterate the ideas presented and reinforce the purpose of the presentation. It usually answers the question: "so what?"

Visual aids

• They help your audience understand your ideas.
• They help the audience follow your argument, your "train" of thought.
• They make your presentation more memorable and thus increase the chances that what you said will be remembered.

This is the place were you can learn more about how to make a good presentacion: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~riceowl/oral_presentations.htm

Business Organisation

Business functions:

• human resources;
• sales and marketing;
  
• research and development;
• productions/operations;
• customer service;
• finance and accounts;
• administration and IT.
  

If you want to make a good business, you have to look to main areas of it. One of them is human resourses. It contains of:

1. recruitment and retention (job description, person specifications);
   
2. dismissal;
3. redundancy;
4. motivation;
5. professional development and training;
6. health and safety and conditions at work;
   
7. liaison with trade unions.
   

For egzample:

(The law imposes a responsibility on the employer to ensure safety at work for all their employees.

Employers have to take reasonable steps to ensure the health, safety and welfare of their employees at work.

Failure to do so could result in a criminal prosecution in the Magistrates Court or a Crown Court. Failure to ensure safe working practices could also lead to an employee suing for personal injury or in some cases the employer being prosecuted for corporate manslaughter.
As well as this legal responsibility, the employer also has an implied responsibility to take reasonable steps as far as they are able to ensure the health and safety of their employees is not put at risk. So an employer might be found liable for his actions or failure to act even if these are not written in law.
An employer should assess the level of risk as against the cost of eliminating that risk in deciding whether they have taken reasonable steps as far as they are able. )


The other thing, which is also very important is sales and marketing. It contains of:

• market research;


• promotion strategies;


• pricing strategies;


• sales strategies;


• the sales team;


• product.
  

For egzample:
(Market research is the process of systematic gathering, recording and analyzing of data about customers, competitors and the market. Market research can help create a business plan, launch a new product or service, fine tune existing products and services, expand into new markets etc. It can be used to determine which portion of the population will purchase the product/service, based on variables like age, gender, location and income level. It can be found out what market characteristics your target market has. With market research, companies can learn more about current and potential customers.
The purpose of market research is to help companies make better business decisions about the development and marketing of new products. Market research represents the voice of the consumer in a company.
Product research - This looks at what products can be produced with available technology, and what new product innovations near-future technology can develop.

In marketing, a product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need. A product is similar to goods. In accounting, goods are physical objects that are available in the marketplace. This differentiates them from a service, which is a non-material product. The term goods is used primarily by those that wish to abstract from the details of a given product. As such it is useful in accounting and economic models. The term product is used primarily by those that wish to examine the details and richness of a specific market offering. As such it is useful to marketers, managers, and quality control specialists.)

Research and development

The phrase research and development (also R and D or R&D) has a special commercial significance apart from its conventional coupling of scientific research and technological development. For 2006, the world's three largest spenders of R&D are the United States (US$330 billion), China (US$136 billion) and Japan (US$130 billion).
In general, R&D activities are conducted by specialized units or centers belonging to companies, universities and state agencies. In the context of commerce, "research and development" normally refers to future-oriented, longer-term activities in science or technology, using similar techniques to scientific research without predetermined outcomes and with broad forecasts of commercial yield.
Statistics on organizations devoted to "R&D" may express the state of an industry, the degree of competition or the lure of progress. Some common measures include: budgets, numbers of patents or on rates of peer-reviewed publications.
Bank ratios are one of the best measures, because they are continuously maintained, public and reflect risk.

Productions/operations

• acquiring resources;
  
• planing output;
• monitoring costs;
• projections on future output;
• production methods;
• efficiency.

For egzample:
(Economic efficiency is a general term for the value assigned to a situation by some measure designed to capture the amount of waste or "friction" or other undesirable economic features present. The term microeconomic reform refers to any policy designed to increase economic efficiency.)

Customer service

Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during an after a purchase.
Its importance varies by product, industry and customer. As an example, an expert customer might require less pre-purchase service (i.e., advice) than a novice. In many cases, customer service is more important if the purchase relates to a “service” as opposed to a “product".
Customer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means called self-service. Examples of self service are Internet sites.
Customer service is normally an integral part of a company’s customer value proposition.

Finance and accounts

Accountancy (profession) or accounting (methodology) is the measurement, disclosure or provision of assurance about financial information primarily used by managers, investors, tax authorities and other decision makers to make resource allocation decisions within companies, organizations, and public agencies. The terms derive from the use of financial accounts. Accounting is also widely referred to as the "language of business.
Financial accountingis one branch of accounting and historically has involved processes by which financial information about a business is recorded, classified, summarized, interpreted, and communicated; for public companies, this information is generally publicly-accessible. By contrast management accounting information is used within an organization and is usually confidential and accessible only to a small group, mostly decision-makers.

Administration and IT

In business, administration consists of the performance or management of business operations and thus the making or implementing of major decisions. Administration can be defined as the universal process of organizing people and resources efficiently so as to direct activities toward common goals and objectives.
Administrator can serve as the title of the General Manager or Company Secretary who reports to a corporate board directors. This title is archaic but in many enterprises this function, and its associated Finance, Personnel and MIS services, is what is intended when the term "the Administration" is used.
In some organizational analyzes, Management is viewed as a subset of administration, specifically associated with the technical and mundane elements within an organization's operation. It stands distinct from executive or strategic work.
In other organizational analyzes, administration can refer to the bureaucratic or operational performance of mundane office tasks, usually internally oriented and usually reactive rather than proactive.

Organization Charts:
An organizational chart is a chart which represents the structure of an organization in terms of rank. The chart usually shows the managers and sub-workers who make up an organization. The chart also shows relationships between staff in the organization which can be:

Line - direct relationship between superior and subordinate.
Lateral - relationship between different departments on the same hierarchical level.
Staff - relationship between a managerial assistant and other areas. The assistant will be able to offer advice to a line manager. However, they have no authority over the line manager actions.
Functional - relationships between specialist positions and other areas. The specialist will normally have authority to insist that a line manager implements any of their instructions.

In many large companies the organization chart can be large and incredibly complicated and is therefore sometimes dissected into smaller charts for each individual department within the organization.

There are three different types of organization charts:
Hierarchical
Matrix
Flat

The following is an example of a simple hierarchical organizational chart: