Communications in B2B Marketing - Essay Example

In general it could be d that formal communication within the strata of the business are almost always well planned and structurally sound. On the other hand, informal communications are, revealed in studies, brief, unplanned, and frequent. Informal communication supports a number of different functions: the execution of work-related tasks; co-ordination of group activity; transmission of office culture and social functions such as team building. In many parts of the world resources are inadequate or stretched to produce mediocre good which do not find worldwide markets. Even those firms which aspire to international reach for their products are hampered by poor infrastructure and really unnecessary problems on the way. Additionally there are government regulations which have not reacted to changing technological environments as rapidly as they should. Partly this may be due to political compulsions especially in developing countries which impede quick decisions and action. There are developing countries which could be serious players in the B2B scenario but are not cost competitive enough. It can be stated that the world is in the midst of an all-purpose technological revolution based on electronic business technology, defined here as e commerce, software related trading techniques, and software related supply chain equipment. The macroeconomic benefits of the electronic business technology revolution are already apparent in some economies, especially the United States and United Kingdom. Historical experience has shown that such revolutions have often been accompanied by financial booms and busts, and the electronic business technology revolution has been no exception. But, while spending on electronic business technology goods is likely to remain stable in the immediate future, as past overinvestment unwinds, the longer-term benefits for the global economy are likely to continue, or even accelerate, in the years to come. While technological change is an ongoing process, there are periods during which technological progress is especially rapid, resulting in new products and falling prices of existing products that have widespread uses in the rest of the economy. Such periods are generally identified with electronic business technology revolutions. Earlier examples include textiles production and steam power in the industrial revolution, railroads in the nineteenth century, and electricity in the early twentieth century (the automobile could also be included, but its development was relatively gradual). The effects of such revolutions have generally occurred in three (often overlapping) main stages. First, technological change raises productivity growth in the innovating sector; second, falling prices encourage capital deepening; and, finally, there can be significant reorganization of production around the capital goods that embody the new technology. The growth of the electronic business technology sector in the 1990s was an important development for the economy, but it spurred relatively little policy or media interest. True, electronic business technology was recognized as a driver of comparative advantage for the US and the UK and there were a few initiatives involving industrial policy and military preparedness, electronic business technology was of interest primarily to specialists. A unique confluence of forces certainly came together in the late 1990s: rapid technological advances in the technology sector; widespread recognition that electronic business could be used to comparative advantage as well as process it; the rapid spread of a simple, inexpensive, and powerful wide-area security network based on non-proprietary standards; and financial institutions ready to fund investment in advanced technology. These forces led to very rapid growth of the electronic business technology. As parts of the firms and consumers in the economy flocked to the new security system in large numbers, it became evident that electronic business technology and development of market segment of the subject required serious attention as there were high potential of the development in this sector. In this context it would be relevant to mention that in contemporary extremely competitive and cost induced market economy, maintaining a ready for action benefit by becoming a low cost or a differentiator puts a heavy effort on having highly dedicated marketing plans. Competitive advantage is not merely making distinctions between a product and service or in becoming the low cost but in also being proficient enough to tap the company’s exceptional skills or core competencies and speedily respond to customer’s requirements and competitor’s processes. Competitive advantage lies in management’s aptitude to merge corporate-wide technologies and production expertise into competencies that give power to individual businesses to become accustomed with rapidly changing opportunities in the context of supply chain. Thus it becomes necessary for the organization to understand that any advantage related to protection or defense mechanism becomes the competitive advantage of the organization and Market development plan for companies become a very important aspect of that electronic business strategy depending on the supply chain measures. Supply Chain Management can be defined as the art of creating industrial relations of any kind, between people engaged in the industry, such as relation between employers and employees, relation between individuals entering into commercial contracts, relation between investors and debtors etc, in order to maintain true cooperation of all concerned. Efficiency of management lies in not only making the employees to work, but to make them work willingly, sincerely and consciously, by employing new knowledge, new methods, new designs, new machines and novel techniques of production and by allaying mistrust and antagonism. The emphasis should be on good relationships and sound terms and conditions of employment between employees and the organization with consent of both the parties in the context of supply chain and e commerce. Determining the work-pay relationship with the method of Collective bargaining is too back dated and should be removed from the organizations. It is required by the organisation to reveal its gratitude and recognition of their efforts of its employees. Individuals and groups of employees should be rewarded properly for their particular contributions in the organization. The package rewards may include both tangible and intangible rewards. Working in a renowned and progressive company, which can be pride of an employee can be a significant reward element. The participation of the whole staff in the process decisions making in the workplace can boost up the interests of the employees. This authorize the employees in their duties and give emphasis to team work, creativity, innovation, and discretion in solving problems, improvement in quality of production etc. As the purpose of any organization is to thrive and be persistent in its endeavours, every employee of the organization must appreciate it, realize the competitive nature of the business, try to solve problem and take possession of their contribution to presentation and quality, which is totally focused on customer service. Managers must be efficient and intelligent. Let us take the example of Peters and Waterman, who in "In Search of Excellence" thought of "being visible" and "management by walkabout". The dexterity and expertise of managers should support the endeavours of the Staffs. Staffs should feel that they are guided by the managers in perusing their duties. By sound management techniques the ambitions of participative leadership and the human relations school can be achieved. (Cunningham, 24-5) According to the assumptions of the modern approach in management, organizations should have the capacity to influence their members as well as bind them together in a composite unit, as a family or a community. Few guidelines prescribed by the unitary approach are: Management should have recognition towards the efforts of the workers, and have co-operative attitudes towards them. The emphasis should be on working together as a team to achieve the ultimate purpose. TO pursue this goal management should compromise and understand the purposes and values of the employees. Disagreement and unconcealed divergences between management and employees, disruptive behaviour and even strike action of the employees and such problems in an organization can be alleviated using the "unitary" frame of reference. This approach is helpful in curing unnecessary, deviant damage of the organisation. The staff of a suffering organization should be made to realize that stoppages and obstructions are meaningless. The benefits of lingering useless momentary disagreements and conflicts disturb the environment of the organization. (Dollard, 116-7) Misinterpretation and Passions that procreate conflict are indeed enhanced by detrimental, marginal splinter groups and provocateurs. The unitary frame of reference portrays management as a perfect guardian of the employees, having the paramount interests in well being of the staff, at heart. Decisions are taken with consent of the employees Of course misunderstandings and incongruity may arise from time to time but these are not helped by marginal splinter groups and provocateurs who distort the efforts of management. Effectiveness of the management can be judged by its capacity to bind the workers and at a time keep them satisfied, to fulfil a greater cause of success of the business. Efficient and participative managements can keep the employees satisfied and interested in progress of the company. With good will, rationality and sensitive communication the organizations can keep trade unions away and survive securely. Because of poor and irrational practices of the managements and lack of communication between the employees and the management, workers unite against the managements to form trade union, which can fight for their causes and interests. (Dos, 47-48) Similarly, an e commerce company has the capacity to influence its members as well as bind them together in a composite unit, as a family or a community. Few guidelines followed by the company are, as such, Management of this company has recognition towards the efforts of the workers, and have co-operative attitudes towards them. The emphasis is working together as a team to achieve the ultimate purpose. TO pursue this goal management should compromise and understand the purposes and values of the employees. Disagreement and unconcealed divergences between management and employees, disruptive behaviour and even strike action of the employees and such problems in an organization can be alleviated using the "unitary" frame of reference. This approach is helpful in curing unnecessary, deviant damage of the organisation. The staff of a suffering organization in this company is made to realize that stoppages and obstructions are meaningless. The benefits of lingering useless momentary disagreements and conflicts disturb the environment of the organization. Misinterpretation and Passions that procreate conflict are indeed enhanced by detrimental, marginal splinter groups and provocateurs. The unitary frame of reference portrays management as a perfect guardian of the employees, having the paramount interests in well being of the staff, at heart. Decisions are taken with consent of the employees Of course misunderstandings and incongruity may arise from time to time but these are not helped by marginal splinter groups and provocateurs who distort the efforts of management. Effectiveness of the management of this company can be judged by its capacity to bind the workers and at a time keep them satisfied, to fulfil a greater cause of success of the business. Efficient and participative managements can keep the employees satisfied and interested in progress of the company. With good will, rationality and sensitive communication the organizations can keep trade unions away and survive securely. Because of poor and irrational practices of the managements and lack of communication between the employees and the management, workers unite against the managements to form trade union, which can fight for their causes and interests. The goals of this company are simple, such as speed, equality and competitive price. Commodities have become international for this company and the impact of engineering is significant. In this company, the learning curve in engineering has become an unaffordable luxury. Competitive market pressures mandate finding ways to reduce the total time required to introduce new products in the market. Competition along with more complex production and distribution environments requires identifying and reducing necessary costs, such as costs associated with development, manufacturing, distribution and service. This company’s culture is partially the outward demonstration of the values currently existing in its workplace. In this company efforts are given to identify the values that at present exist in the workplace, settle on if these are the accurate values for your workplace, and modify the actions and behaviours by which the values are established, if essential. The following Steps in a Values Identification Process is followed in this company to recognize organization values and bring together its executive group and management to learn about and talk about the power of shared values, obtain consensus that these leaders are dedicated to creating a value-based workplace, define the responsibility of the executives in leading this process; and provide written material the executives can share with their reporting staff, Share any written materials as well as the spirit and context of the executives’ values discussion with every individual in your reporting group, endorse the underlying principle for, necessitate for, and preferred organizational impact of the process, Make certain your reporting staff members understand the importance of their participation in the process, Assure that every member of your reporting group is signed up for and attends a session, Answer questions and provide feedback about any staff concerns to the rest of the managerial or cross-functional group leading the process. Working conditions in some sections of this industry are very hazardous. The precipitation areas in this company have caustic vapours these cause skin problems. In some sections of this industry people work in fluoride environment .Continuous exposure to fluoride leads to a disease Fluoric in which bones and teeth are effected. In all these less attention is paid towards the interests of their workers, hence the relation between the management and the workers get seriously damage. In this context of e commerce it would be interesting to incorporate a real time case study. On Boxing Day, shoppers queued up early hours for some of the biggest discounts offered by stores – reductions up to 80% reduction on purchases. Reason: After sluggish December sales, well known outlets were compelled to keep pace with Internet retailers who had begun to reduce prices much before the traditional Boxing Day rush. Over 3 million people looked online on Christmas day aiding online stores to clock in approximately 50 million pounds of business. The bricks and mortar retailers like Argos, Currys, PC World or Marks and Spencer would appear to have convinced shoppers to return to their stores through aggressive discounting but the competition posed by online business is here to stay. It is reported that for every 6 pounds, one is spent on shopping online. The amount spent on internet shopping in 2007 exceeded the previous year’s sales by 50%. More than 15 billion pounds was spent in a three month period starting October and making a rout of the markets by December. (Chan, 2008) On the managerial aspects B2B streamline operations because the need for paper data is done away with and reduces the need for clerical inputs. This facilitates system integration. Therefore, the unit is closely connected with vendors and customers through an appropriate information base which can be changed to the situation. The business alignment reaps huge savings for the manufacturer owing to costs saved by timely information. E Commerce also has an impact on tightening of order time lags between a manufacturer and supplier. The B2B electronic platform also enables the movement of goods directly between producers and suppliers and customers. This removes an additional layer of middlemen in the cost chain and truly realizes value along the chain. It will be interesting to watch if E commerce can be adopted by larger units and corporations to realize even bigger gains. Furthermore, it should be added that benchmarking an important activity in the analysis of e-commerce Web sites because it is essential to scale a website and while doing this evaluation it becomes necessary to install a standardization on which the entire process would depend. However, it is important to note that his strategy of Benchmarking is not a rigid feature of evaluation and analysis. This is because the Benchmarking for a site changes with the variables such as economy, culture, language, social structure or simply content and market. Legal and technological factors are also very important in this respect. However, it should also be noted that Benchmarking is a very important tool for understanding the weakness of a business alongside it is also helpful in determining the position of the competitors in the same business. This method of Benchmarking also ensures that duplication is avoided in general senses. There several sites and e-commerce that needs the process of benchmarking to excel in business. In general sense it could be stated that e-commerce that are involved in fields of supplier management purchasing, quality management, customer processes and information systems are the most benefactors of this method benchmarking. It can always be mentioned that to survive in the competitive environment of e-commerce one needs to be always a step ahead of the nearest competitors with eyes towards the superior business organizations. Thus to be successful one needs a tool of success and benchmarking, rather the wise use of benchmarking, provides that opportunity. The concept of e-commerce is relatively a new one and it is constantly going through different experiments to yield the best result. The reason behind keeping abreast of ecommerce trends when running an e-commerce that in this business the trends are changing at a regular basis. Thus it is important to be updated at all time. In general, it could be said that the business of an e-Business depends on the factors of several variables. One of the most important factors of the business is the design of the website. It is true that the innovations in this field are tremendous and pioneering. So there is always the risk of lagging behind. As a result maintaining a thorough watch on the trends and keeping the website updated is one of the most important aspects of the e-commerce. Moreover, the use of content is very important and specified tools like Search Engines Optimizers and the Search Engine Marketing are the two most imperative instruments in the hands of an e-Businessman to obtain the maximum links. For this purpose keeping up with the trends is as important as the design because competitors are always instrumental in developing newer techniques in the field to get the maximum out of the market. Additionally, it is always helpful to search for market variations as the markets are changing in accordance to the trends and further innovations implemented. Thus keeping up with the market would ensure the trends are being kept in watch and thus updated. Read More