Archives tagged: Apple
Another argument against the planned obsolescence argument is that Apple is not so much trying to convert its existing users to the newer models, but that its innovation is superior to the competion and users of other products should switch to the iPhone.
More Market share is not intrinsically valuable. In the world of business, good profit dollars are what has intrinsic value. Profit dollars, earned by serving customers, are the existential purpose of a firm. Anything else is merely instrumental.
More Millward Brown’s brand valuation analyses provide strong evidence of the importance of branding for business leaders. Brand is about reputation. A brand generates trust for a company, for its products, and for its services. The brands mentioned in the BrandZ top 100 list are the world’s most trusted.
More I suspect Mr. Woodman believed that the GoPro could become the hot item for the holiday season. But $400 seemed a bit high for the average consumer. Why not drop it? If the price was lower, then more people may buy it, and GoPro may become a consumer product giant. Perhaps it could join the leagues of Apple, Cannon, and Sony?
More Not that I can or am stating that everything Sony did was perfect. And I am definitely not stating that everyone will find Sony’s design tradeoffs to result in a good offering. But they did define their target market and product design requirements in such a manner broadly appearing to be compatible with a highly successful product, launch.
More Neither revealing the company’s cost structure to front line salespeople, nor managing sales performance metrics and salespeople’s compensation with constantly varying variable costs isn’t strategically beneficial or managerially realistic. Alternatively, profit sharing plans have been used, but they don’t reward individual performance, just team performance.
More Not all products however enjoy the ‘soap & detergent’ kind of stability. Phones in 1990s were used for calling and today calling is one of the many functions of a phone. Cars back then were mechanical marvels and now they’re practically computers on wheels. In case of software and applications, the product life-cycle graph is even thinner and very well summed up in a comment by Reid Hoffman (Linkedin Cofounder): “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
More High barriers to entry must be keeping competitors from providing alternatives to off-patent generic drugs. What could be the source of these barriers to entry?
It isn’t the lack of know how. Many firms are able to produce chemicals, even specialized chemicals in the life sciences. And, that is what a drug is: it is a chemical. As observed in animal health care, agricultural chemistry and many other specialty chemical companies: competition keeps prices relatively low. Yet, in human life sciences, there is insufficient competition.
The use of comparable equivalents leads to an improvement in the meaningfulness and accuracy of the benchmark approach, yet the determination of what constitutes the comparable equivalent is made by the consultant him/herself. This approach is fraught with error. Does the lawyer think too highly of him/herself or is he/she being too timid?
More Disputing the economic turbulence over the last decade, the BrandZ ratings show that most brand categories increased in value. Leaders were fast food and technology. Seven categories doubled their values—fast food, technology, beer, apparel, telecom, soft drink and retail.
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