Saturday, February 15, 2020

Business Strategy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Business Strategy - Essay Example The organization we have selected to compare with Kellogg is General Mills, a manufacturer and marketer of branded consumer foods. General Mills’ mission is nourishing lives. General Mills seeks to attain this mission through making lives healthier, easier and richer (General Mills, 2010). The organization makes lives healthier by continuously improving the health profile of its products. It makes lives easier with foods that are simple to prepare and it makes lives richer by making foods for special moments such as birthdays. Goals and objectives help an organization in controlling its plans and providing its staff with the direction to take for the organization to realize its mission and vision. General Mills has not clearly delineated its vision through a vision statement. However, this can be inferred from the organization’s mission and values statement. Likewise, we can use the values statement to point out General Mills’ goals. From the values statement G eneral Mills aims to assert its values everyday through its people, its brands, its innovation and its performance. These goals are: to ensure that its brands continue to win consumers trust around the world; to nurture diverse, talented, committed people who contribute to their communities; to continue developing and implementing innovative ideas that further build the company’s brands and business; and to continue delivering outstanding performance for its investors. According to Kotelnikov (2011) core competencies are the things that a company does better than its competitors in the critical, central areas of the organization where the most value is added to its products and/or services. For General Mills, its core competencies are in its intimate consumer knowledge and its innovation. These two competencies manifest themselves in in the mix of new products and improvements to existing products that General Mills is renowned. The company extends its legacy of learning ab out products, processes and unique disciplines; improving production efficiencies, elevate quality and reducing costs; and preserving precious institutional memory through its multiple schools such as Cereal School, Yogurt School and Packing School. 1.2 Explain the significance of stakeholder analysis, (especially for the selected organization) (P2) The topic of stakeholders is very popular and contested among theorists. There is quite an amount of contesting literature around which theorists try to update and replace. Freeman, the â€Å"father† of stakeholder theory has also given different definitions of whom or what constitutes a stakeholder. In 1984 Freeman defined stakeholders as â€Å"any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization objectives† while in 2004, Freeman defined stakeholders as â€Å"those groups who are vital to the survival and success of the corporation† (Fontaine, Haarman, & Schmid, 2006). The former definition (Freeman 1984) is preferred in academic circles because it is entirely organization orientated. This is the one we shall use in this discussion. General Mills’ mission is to nourish lives. Nourishing lives refers to nutrition, which as the cliche goes, â€Å"you are what you eat†, is the crux of human health. Furthermore, General Mills is also a Fortune 500 company, among the largest food companies in the world, with a presence in more than 100 countries on six continents. This inter-continental presence implies that General Mil

Sunday, February 2, 2020

CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR (EXAM PREPARATION) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 2

CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR (EXAM PREPARATION) - Essay Example Schouten and McAlexander (1995), in the work, try to explain that the responses of individual consumers can be explained by using what the term as the subcultures of consumption. The subcultures arise from the fact that people will tend to organize their lives along particular lines. The organizing process results in one making choices in their lives. The sub-groups can be defined as the authentic sub-units that can offer a self-reflection as to the relations of consumption. That is on the basis of the commitment that the people share in terms of the product, the brand or the activities being undertaken in the use circles. Other characteristics that may exist include unique jargons, rituals as well as the shared beliefs. The authors try to understand the consumers as well as the manner in which these consumers organize their various identities, as well as their lives. The most powerful organizing forces are the activities as well as the associated relationships. These interpersonal relationships are taken into consideration by people, and they make up a bigger percentage of the contributory factors towards consumer mannerisms. In trying to understand the fundamental alignments within the subcultures one would need to understand the ethnographic analyzes behind these groupings. Take for members club whereby on requires some subscription. Here there is a gathering of people with similar interests that have led to being together since they share the same mannerisms. For one to study the consumer behavior within this grouping, one would need to understand the overall structure of the subculture, as well as its ethos. The ethos represents the moral standing of the group as well as its values (Schouten and McAlexander, 1995). The grouping has some impact on the lives of the members since they are prescribed by an absolute code of conduct that distinguishes them from the rest, and that also aligns their consumption behaviors