Business reputation has economic value and can be a source of competitive advantage.

For consumers, reputation signals quality or reliability of a product/service features, for investors it increases confidence in investments, for employees it positively affects their behaviour. Speaking generally, reputation ‘attracts more and better resources’ (Fombrun, 1996) and is closely related to brand.

Companies can manage their reputation and be active in shaping it and there are ways to measure and increase it but it does not mean that every organisation should invest their resources into reputation building.

Skim Pricing – setting high prices relative to competitors. Your product/service needs to be differentiated to justify the price. But as the product moves through life cycles you need to either reduce the price or add value to the product/service. Sticking too much to skim pricing attracts new competitors.

Neutral Pricing – prices are close to the competition. Second-tier competitors use the strategy particularly when they want the basis of competition to be something different than price.

Penetration Pricing – used when price is the primary driver of purchase decision. It may work if you are certain that you can win the price war and stay profitable. However, the strategy creates more problems.
(Holden, Burton, 2008)

But businesses should not simply choose a strategy that they think will work for them. Pricing strategy should be a natural outcome of marketing strategy and the marketing strategy should be a way to execute business strategy.

Among pros and cons of outsourcing there is one aspect that is critical for future of the company who decides to subcontract work.

It is organisational learning, a crucial concept for organisations who want to grow, improve, innovate, and, in knowledge-intensive sectors, survive.

If the firm outsources, it does not learn, develop competencies, accumulate knowledge, or exploit synergies, all of which will endanger the firm’s existence.

Employee segmentation is a powerful practice which can help you realistically look at the talent pool, or lack of it as not everyone is a talent as business utopians would like us to believe, in your organisation.

Think about how you can segment your employees, help them develop for their and your organisation’s benefit, and how to manage them. This process has to objective so eliminate the impact of politics.

An example of employee segments and managerial actions is presented below.

What a difficult choice: short-term efficiency or long-term effectiveness?

The better an organisation is fitted to serve a particular niche, the more rigid it becomes to respond to changes, or as Karl Weick puts it: “adaptation precludes adaptability”.

Companies tend to prioritise short-term efficiency to grow fast but the pandemic has exposed the fragility of the choice.

It is not possible to provide business advice that would be simultaneously general, accurate and simple. Why?

Accurate and generally applicable advice cannot be simple because it needs to take into account all organisations operating in various environments, which creates complexity.

Simple and accurate advice can only take place when the number of variables has been reduced, which allows for a bespoke solution.

For advice to be simplistic and comprehensive, there must be assumptions made, which in effect reduces accuracy. This is the realm of cliché, off-the-shelf and silver bullet solutions, which are prevalent in today’s business discourse.

“[…] in most circumstances advertising is only one of a whole host of important determinants of sales levels (such as product quality, prices, customer service levels, the competence of the sales force, and so on).” (Wilson & McDonald, 2016)

“[…] views, clicks, likes and shares can be counted […] Of course, these numbers do not correspond to sales, market share or revenue, but they are often used as a proxy simply because they can easily be measured.” (Hackley & Hackley, 2018)

We are seriously damaging businesses because of ignorance in this matter. Business owners throw money away on advertising and complain about marketers. Marketers in turn cannot perform well and are obsessive about the proxy measures. It must stop.

Business owners, put your business and marketing strategy in order before investing in promotion. Marketers, educate the customer and be more careful about claims on your impact on ROI. We all need to become better in business, particularly in current economic situation.

Most SMEs are internally focused. Their attempts to improve business by attending to internal factors may not necessarily work because the factors inhibiting the performance may reside in the external environment.

performance = ƒ (market structure and company’s internal variables)

And although the PIMS principle mostly relates to big business, it emphasises the interplay between the internal and external environments.

We need to understand how an organisation, with its resources and capabilities, can operate and perform in the market.

But what happens when the function (of PIMS) is weak, meaning that there is not enough ‘space’ for your organisation to perform well? Reconstruct the market i.e. modify the rules or create new ones.

1. Think what your business does not have time to do.

2. Write a job description that addresses the above.

3. ‘Spray and pray’ a job ad on job boards and send it to sales people from recruitment agencies.

4. Look for key words and the same experience on CVs.

5. Ask candidates competency -based questions found on the Internet and listen to the answers that the candidates found on the Internet.

6. Hire who you think is a good candidate after 30-minute pseudo-conversation or complain about labour market and skill shortage.

By the way, the assumption, on which the competency-based interviews are based, that the past behaviour is a good predictor of future behaviour is seriously flawed.

One of the main reasons is that you can find an opportunity for your business. Seeing is one thing and your whole organisation should monitor markets but acting is an entirely different animal as it requires a number of capabilities to act early on the trends before they become ‘common wisdom’. And there are ways to enable your organisation to be fast (one of which is Resource Allocation).

We can learn from Amazon (Source: HEC Paris):