Think Local-Act Local: Is It Time to Slow Down the Accelerated Move to Global Marketing?

In view of the accelerated move of great corporations towards global marketing, the strategic changes of such companies raise interesting questions. Is marketing globalization reaching its limits after years of implementation? Is it time for companies to rethink their strategies and move back, like Coca-Cola, to a multi-domestic marketing approach?Global Marketing, Multi-Domestic Marketing Approach, Brand Equity, Drawbacks of Marketing Globalization, Coca-Cola

DESIGN AND DELIVERY OF ELECTRONIC SERVICES: IMPLICATIONS FOR CUSTOMER VALUE IN ELECTRONIC FOOD RETAILING

Electronic food retailers can satisfy their customers more effectively if they understand how this particular market works. As in other service segments, the emergence of electronic business-to-customer services in the retail food industry poses questions for managers about the design of new food retailing services and the redesign of existing services for delivery through electronic channels. Important topics include characteristics of electronic service offerings, the typical operational configurations used to deliver electronic services, and the ways in which they relate to the effectiveness of electronic service delivery. We address this issue by developing a product-process matrix for understanding and analyzing electronic retailing services in general. We tailor the matrix to food retailing in particular. The product-process matrix allows electronic food retailers to determine in advance what features they need in a web site to serve their chosen market effectively.Consumer/Household Economics, Marketing, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Innovation in Marketing Channels

In more recent years, the context of globalization in which market channel structures and strategies are developing is bringing to a more complex concept of marketing channels, with disintermediation or reintermediation, multichanneling and new roles/specializations that are emerging as new issues.In this context, innovation in marketing channels becomes a complex, multiorganizational, multidisciplinary activity that requires collaboration and interactions across various entities within the supply chain network. In recent years, the innovation processes in marketing channels have occurred with high intensity and speed, especially following the changes spurred by technology that allowed the adoption of more efficient organizational solutions.Retail; Channel Structure; Innovation in Marketing Channels; Retail Technological Innovation; Global Markets

Stronger Partnerships for Safer Food: An Agenda for Strengthening State and Local Roles in the Nation's Food Safety System

Examines federal, state, and local agencies' responsibilities, strengths, and weaknesses in ensuring food safety. Recommends systemwide reforms to enhance state and local roles and improve surveillance, outbreak response, and regulation and inspection

Collaborative Commerce

Following the evolution of electronic business, collaborative commerce uses information technology to achieve a closer integration and a better management of business relationships among parties including internal personnel, business partners and customers. Recently, market and globalisation competition, customer oriented service strategy and product complexity have pushed enterprises a step further on in collaborative commerce. In brief, collaborative commerce is (1) a collaborative technology – similar to workflow collaboration, (2) a customer-driven technology – similar to a pull-type supply chain, (3) a functionally-integrated technology – similar to concurrent engineering and (4) a businessdriven technology – similar to enterprise resource planning, for cross-organisational integration. The paper will illustrate the technologies and the critical success factors of collaborative commerce adoption

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Enabling pervasive computing with smart phones

The authors discuss their experience with a number of mobile telephony projects carried out in the context of the European Union Information Society Technologies research program, which aims to develop mobile information services. They identify areas where use of smart phones can enable pervasive computing and offer practical advice in terms of lessons learned. To this end, they first look at the mobile telephone as * the end point of a mobile information service,* the control device for ubiquitous systems management and configuration,* the networking hub for personal and body area networks, and* identification tokens.They conclude with a discussion of business and practical issues that play a significant role in deploying research systems in realistic situations

Global electronic commerce through ebXML and service oriented architectures

Global electronic commerce has flourished following the commercialisation of the Internet. ebXML is a global business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce standard which addresses not only the formats and vocabularies of electronic business documents exchanged between business partners, but also the choreography of business transactions during a collaborative process. On the other hand, the service-oriented architectures (SOA) together with web services promise a new era for B2B collaboration with dynamically created business partnerships transacting based on published choreographies, for which the ebXML BPSS (Business Process Specification Scheme) is a major specification language. This paper illustrates the approach with a contract negotiation process and identifies some implementation issues

Consumer self-service technology adoption in multiple service industries in Saudi Arabia

The current convergence of information and communication technology (ICT) is found to be creating new opportunities. Business organizations are leveraging this technology in response to the need for greater business integration, flexibility, and agility. One of the technologies that have been utilized quite aggressively by firms is the Self-Service Technologies (SST). Although the proclaimed benefits of SSTs are enormous, few institutions which have adopted the SST have achieved its intended objectives. Even thought the use of the SSTs in the service settings within the developed economies has attained an increasing level of acceptance by consumers, little is known about the consumer‟s adoption in the Arab world, particularly in Saudi Arabia which is still lack of research in this area. Therefore, the main aim of this thesis is to explore the SST adoption in multiple sectors in Saudi Arabia as well as the usage of all types of SST. The main focus of this thesis, is to explore the consumers‟ adoption of the SSTs through the users‟ seek values. The users‟ seek values construct is a new construct proposed in this study to complement the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) framework. The research model composes of four variables: the antecedents of users‟ seek values; the users‟ seek values; the customers‟ intention to use the SST; and the customers‟ adoption of the SST. Using a mall-intercept technique, a sample of 400 respondents was collected in three major cities in Saudi Arabia. The hypothesis was tested using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results showed that, for the antecedent factors, demographic profiles and personality traits were found to influence the users‟ seek values. In addition, users‟ seek values were found to mediate the relationship between the consumers‟ characteristics and their intention to use the SST. In addition, the intention to use the SST also mediates the relationship between users‟ seek values and the SST adoption. Finally, the direct positive relationship between customers‟ intention and adoption was also confirmed. The research concluded with a discussion on the management implications as well as the recommendations and the future research that need to be carried out

A business model design framework for viability:a business ecosystem approach

Purpose: To facilitate the design of viable business models by proposing a novel business model design framework for viability. Design: A design science research method is adopted to develop a business model design framework for viability. The business model design framework for viability is demonstrated by using it to design a business model for an energy enterprise. The aforementioned framework is validated in theory by using expert opinion. Findings: It is difficult to design viable business models because of the changing market conditions, and competing interests of stakeholders in a business ecosystem setting. Although the literature on business models provides guidance on designing viable business models, the languages (business model ontologies) used to design business models largely ignore such guidelines. Therefore, we propose a business model design framework for viability to overcome the identified shortcomings. The theoretical validation of the business model design framework for viability indicates that it is able to successfully bridge the identified shortcomings, and it is able to facilitate the design of viable business models. Moreover, the validation of the framework in practice is currently underway. Originality / value: Several business model ontologies are used to conceptualise and evaluate business models. However, their rote application will not lead to viable business models, because they largely ignore vital design elements, such as design principles, configuration techniques, business rules, design choices, and assumptions. Therefore, we propose and validate a novel business model design framework for viability that overcomes the aforementioned shortcomings