Brand Management
Essays

Using Nike's relationship with Federer as an example, the paper analyzes the use of celebrity endorsement strategy of the brands beginning from choosing the right celebrity figures until the final results of the strategy. Many industries promote their products by hiring the services of influential celebrities who advertise the products in question. The celebrity has to have various characteristics in order to be seriously considered as endorser. The company also has to take various steps to protect itself. The whole process of considering, finding, and finally hiring a celebrity is one that is done incrementally and thoughtfully with the whole, actually, occurring in four stages. Celebrity and brand are closely intertwined. Just as celebrity may profit the brand, the brand also effects the reputation of the celebrity. The company-endorser relationship, in other words, can provide potential benefits to both with both brand and endorser receiving increased attention and both benefitting from deal in various other ways. On the other hand, potential hazards include the fact that the endorser may overshadow the brand, may become involved in public controversy hence tarnishing the brand, and may be too expensive. Ultimately, research shows that the product has to be good to begin with and that The trend seems to be that celebrities are losing the appeal in marketing. A worthwhile product and ad will always attract notice regardless of endorsement. A poor one will fail for the same reason. Nonetheless, given the appeal of celebrities, it is likely that celebrity endorsement will always be around with their accompanying benefits and risks.

This paper presents an analysis of the Boeing Company using different management tools and techniques. The major sections of the paper include: the impact of mission, vision, and stakeholders on the company's success, SWOT analysis, Michael Porter's Five Forces Model, strategies in the light of SWOT analysis, communication plan, leadership effectiveness, corporate governance mechanisms, and corporate social responsibility efforts.

Amazon's remarkable ascent as one of the top online global retailers can be attributed to the foresight they had in creating a comprehensive distributed order management, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and e-commerce series of systems. The many other e-commerce sites that rose quickly with massive infusions of venture capital just as quick exited the market, flaming out due to a lack of system and process scalability, lack of understanding of customer dynamics, and a complete loss of focus on scalable business models. All of these factors are what caused competitors to Amazon to exit the e-commerce market either through acquisition, merger or complete exist from the market. When starting Amazon, Jeff Bezos invested heavily in the distributed order management, ERP, SCM and e-commerce integration points to book distributors initially, and then expanded into a broader product mix. This allowed the enterprise to quickly scale as volumes increased during the first five years of the company's existence. Having creating this reliable, scalable and secure platform, Mr. Bezos and the Amazon founders concentrated on creating an analytics layer throughout their architecture that could quantify customer, distributor, dealer and even competitor activity on the site (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). This reliance on analytics also gave Amazon executives and technical staff the insight they needed to launch quickly into entirely new product categories, get the complex and often confusing task of localization right, and also create a highly popular and profitable Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform and hosting platform for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications (Mitchell, 2012). From a technology standpoint the performance of Amazon today can be directly attributed to the insightful decisions made in 1994 and 1995 when the company founders prioritized the development of enterprise-wide platforms and a strong focus on analytics over spending all their time on the front-end website and its façade (Lindic, Bavdaz, Kovacic, 2012). As Jeff Bezos would later remark in interviews, by investing to create a truly world-class enterprise back-end system first, his company was freed up to fast track the actual user interface of the e-commerce sites globally at a pace that left comp[editors far behind in terms of functionality and product breadth (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). Mr. Bezos chose in 2007 to also institute a culture of metrics that also capitalized on the nearly two decades of investment in their infrastructure (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). Combining the global e-commerce, enterprise-tested infrastructure and the most robust set of analytics that any e-commerce provider had, Amazon was ready to begin expanding their product strategies, start offering greater options in their Amazon Web Services initiative which today is expected to be a $1B by 2015, even by conservative forecasts (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012) and also invest heavily in their state-of-the-art recommendation engine technology that seeks out products and services customers may be interested in and present them during shop[ping sessions in real-time (Sun, 2012). It's important to appreciate just how vast of an e-commerce infrastructure Amazon has in completing this analysis of their e-strategy. They have greater agility, flexibility and capability to execute than any other online retailer globally today. How they choose to use these technologies to attract new customers and keep existing ones loyal, a point the case study makes in greater detail, is predicated on the ability to get the most value from this infrastructure while still staying focused on delivering a world-class customer experience in each transaction. Based on the analysis undertaken for this case analysis, it is abundantly clear that Jeff Bezos and the executive management team are passionate about keeping the company as customer-focused as possible, including the continual selective use of technology to accentuate and strengthen the user experience online and off (Murphy, Narkiewicz, 2010). With these foundational aspects of Amazon defined, the seven areas of focus in this analysis are next presented. The overarching objective of this analysis is to understand the value of e-strategies in organizations, with Amazon being the organization of interest in the analysis. Specifically concentrating on the benefits of having an e-strategy at Amazon, defining how e-strategies contribute to Amazon's broader accomplishments, and an analysis of how Amazon aligns their e-strategy to the overarching organizational strategy as well., The analysis continues with an analysis of the key business factors that are the catalysts of the e-strategy at Amazon, followed by a suggested strategic plan for ensuring e-strategy initiatives at the company continue to lead to profitable growth. The final section of this analysis provides an assessment of the technical infrastructure needed to accomplish the proposed strategic plan. As Amazon has continually evolved its position as a global force in online retailing, its command of supply chains globally has also evolved very quickly. In the latest rankings of the highest-performing supply chains completed by Gartner, a leading research consultancy, Amazon has ranking within the top twenty five for five years running (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). What this signals is that Amazon has progressed from relying on enterprise-wide infrastructure to compete and is now on the growth trajectory of making supply chain processes their competitive advantage.

A strategy is needed for P&G management to continue to compete in the market for one of its major products, Scope. P& G has a long history of success however there had been little change in their product lineup from the mid 1960s. This allowed competitors who listen to the voice of the customer to move ahead of P&G in the market. Competing companies have taken away market share from P&G. The competition has responded to the trend of healthier hygiene plus taken advantage of the latest technology to improve processes that reduce labor and distribution costs.

Logistically, the different strategies employed by a B2B (Business to Business) versus a B2C (Business to Consumer) in managing their supply chain strategies stem from the nature of the customers of the different…

The tutorial is mainly focused on the concept of product and marketing of the products that different organizations have to offer to the consumer. There is a dissection of what defines a qualified customer for each…

Classic Airlines (CA) must compete in a dynamic 21st century global economy with a limited budget and the prospects of limited capital resources. Therefore, profit maximization becomes a function of performance…

Apple's primary business is the development, manufacturing and selling of personal computers, accessories, peripherals, networking and personal MP3 players including the best-selling iPod and complimentary music…

This paper is about J C Penney, which is now emerging from a somewhat disastrous CEO, but in the midst of an unfinished process of revitalizing the brand. Some of the company's recent strategies are analyzed in this paper, including its courting of celebrity brands and its online strategy as well.