netrashetty
Netra Shetty
Atmos Energy Corporation (NYSE: ATO), headquartered in Dallas, Texas,[1] is the largest distributor of natural gas in the United States, serving 3.2 million customers nationwide.[2][3] Atmos acquired TXU's natural gas and pipeline holdings in 2004. The company began as Energas in 1983, a spinoff of the natural gas distribution division of Pioneer Corporation. In 1988, the company changed its name to Atmos and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.[4] Atmos Energy is incorporated in Virginia and Texas
Hypothesis
With respect to the research questions, this project works out on the following hypotheses:
Ø Global integration has no significant effect to the marketing process of Mobile Phone Service Company.
Marketing involves activities related to notifying current and potential customers of the product and services and inducing them to purchase it. Such activities include promotion, advertising, branding, market research, pricing, and channel selection.
With the pressure of integration, Jain (1989) justified that the activities of marketing need to be connected across borders through information flows and communications to enhance global marketing innovation and learning. Basically, information systems can satisfy this need (Carpano & Rahman, 1998). Information technology can efficiently transport information on market trends, pricing, competitor behaviour, sales trends, and changes of regulations and local laws, and can be a significant means of impersonal communications. Nevertheless, without mutual understanding and trust, managers are less willing to accept and/or less able to attach meaning to the information transferred from other units. Hence, as in R&D and manufacturing, shared strategic objectives, shared values and norms, and trust-building among members through socialization are desirable for effective integration of marketing worldwide.
For businesses like Mobile Phone Service Company operating in integrated global industries, unifying important decision issues in marketing such as brand names, product positioning, packaging, and pricing is effective (Laroche et al., 2001). The business head office, with a broader picture of worldwide processes, can make more organized marketing decisions. For instance, central coordination of service allocation and positioning permits for the transfer of a service that has been tested in other markets. Ultimately, the method of performing promotion seems to be comparatively amorphous because it engages subjective judgment, trial and error, and various contingencies. This recommends that it tends to be complex to codify its procedure into well-specified measures, policies and manuals. Therefore formalization is likely to be moderately less efficient in integrating marketing actions globally.
Ø There is a significant relationship between global integration effectiveness and business management process of Mobile Phone Service Company.
As revealed in the study of Hitt & Ireland (1985), the effective management of business functions contributes positively to firm performance. For multinational companies in integrated global industries, a vital part of the management of business functions is their efficient global integration, which fundamentally necessitates the employment of an ideal usage outline (configuration or pattern) of combining modes. This ideal outline signifies the extent to which companies should use the modes to efficiently incorporate a business function globally.
Kano method
Rather than a standard conjoint study, which it had used in the past, Carrier and its research partner, BAIGlobal, Tarrytown, N.Y., conducted face-to-face interviews with potential commercial and residential users of the ductfree systems in Italy, Spain, Korea and Singapore using the Kano method.
Based on the work of Noriaki Kano, a professor at Tokyo Rika University, the Kano method aims to uncover the subtle reasons why certain product attributes are more desirable than others by requiring respondents to answer two-part questions for each attribute: "How do you feel if a feature is present in the product?" and "How do you feel if the feature isn’t present?" Respondents must answer each part with one of five replies:
I like it that way.
It must be in the product.
It does not make a difference to me.
I can live with it that way.
I dislike it that way.
The Kano method tells you how attractive a feature is and how a person views it by classifying it into one of six categories based on the combination of answers to the two-part questions:
Attractive - The customer is more satisfied when the product has this feature, but is not necessarily dissatisfied if it doesn’t. On a car, for example, an automatically retracting radio antenna is nice to have but its absence wouldn’t make a person choose not to buy the car.
Must-be - The product must have this feature or the consumer would be dissatisfied, but the consumer is neutral about it otherwise, because it’s an expected feature. Continuing with the car example, you expect a car to have good brakes.
One-dimensional - The more of the feature, the better. The better a car’s gas mileage, the happier the consumer is. If it doesn’t have it, people are dissatisfied.
Reverse - The customer does not want the feature and having it means dissatisfaction. An example might be a car’s color.
Indifferent - The customer doesn’t care either way. Having the feature doesn’t mean satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Questionable - The customer’s responses on this feature contradict themselves.
"We had proposed using conjoint but there was a curiosity about this methodology," says Gunilla Broadbent, president of the Worldwide Services Division of BAIGlobal. "The client wanted to see if it might give more nuance. Conjoint gives you values which are linear, which is an advantage. You can really look at the difference in importance between attributes because the level of the utility is totally linear, which makes it easier to interpret but isn’t always totally correct, because there are certain things that, from an emotional point of view, might be more or less important to a person but they don’t come out."
"We were trying to look for an alternative that wouldn’t involve the cost and limitations of the traditional types of trade-off, conjoint and discrete choice," says Joe Lanzetta, director of global marketing research, Carrier Corp. "This approach allowed us to construct a survey where respondents could answer questions on 15 or 20 attributes and give us an idea of the importance of each. In the past we had used conjoint and discrete choice, which are good techniques, but one of the limitations is the number of attributes you can efficiently test. You can test a lot of attributes but it requires setting up more and more scenarios, and that can be time-consuming and expensive."
Broadbent says that while the Kano method does provide insights to the subtle reasons why one feature is preferred over another, the technique isn’t a replacement for conjoint. "This method presents a challenge, especially when you’re dealing with several different languages, to find the right nuance and the right way of expressing it, so we did a lot of pretesting before we were satisfied with the wording. It’s very difficult to always find exact equivalents to what you had in English, and here it’s especially important because if the nuance is wrong, the whole analysis becomes wrong. That’s a drawback to the technique; it is very sensitive to language."
Hypothesis
With respect to the research questions, this project works out on the following hypotheses:
Ø Global integration has no significant effect to the marketing process of Mobile Phone Service Company.
Marketing involves activities related to notifying current and potential customers of the product and services and inducing them to purchase it. Such activities include promotion, advertising, branding, market research, pricing, and channel selection.
With the pressure of integration, Jain (1989) justified that the activities of marketing need to be connected across borders through information flows and communications to enhance global marketing innovation and learning. Basically, information systems can satisfy this need (Carpano & Rahman, 1998). Information technology can efficiently transport information on market trends, pricing, competitor behaviour, sales trends, and changes of regulations and local laws, and can be a significant means of impersonal communications. Nevertheless, without mutual understanding and trust, managers are less willing to accept and/or less able to attach meaning to the information transferred from other units. Hence, as in R&D and manufacturing, shared strategic objectives, shared values and norms, and trust-building among members through socialization are desirable for effective integration of marketing worldwide.
For businesses like Mobile Phone Service Company operating in integrated global industries, unifying important decision issues in marketing such as brand names, product positioning, packaging, and pricing is effective (Laroche et al., 2001). The business head office, with a broader picture of worldwide processes, can make more organized marketing decisions. For instance, central coordination of service allocation and positioning permits for the transfer of a service that has been tested in other markets. Ultimately, the method of performing promotion seems to be comparatively amorphous because it engages subjective judgment, trial and error, and various contingencies. This recommends that it tends to be complex to codify its procedure into well-specified measures, policies and manuals. Therefore formalization is likely to be moderately less efficient in integrating marketing actions globally.
Ø There is a significant relationship between global integration effectiveness and business management process of Mobile Phone Service Company.
As revealed in the study of Hitt & Ireland (1985), the effective management of business functions contributes positively to firm performance. For multinational companies in integrated global industries, a vital part of the management of business functions is their efficient global integration, which fundamentally necessitates the employment of an ideal usage outline (configuration or pattern) of combining modes. This ideal outline signifies the extent to which companies should use the modes to efficiently incorporate a business function globally.
Kano method
Rather than a standard conjoint study, which it had used in the past, Carrier and its research partner, BAIGlobal, Tarrytown, N.Y., conducted face-to-face interviews with potential commercial and residential users of the ductfree systems in Italy, Spain, Korea and Singapore using the Kano method.
Based on the work of Noriaki Kano, a professor at Tokyo Rika University, the Kano method aims to uncover the subtle reasons why certain product attributes are more desirable than others by requiring respondents to answer two-part questions for each attribute: "How do you feel if a feature is present in the product?" and "How do you feel if the feature isn’t present?" Respondents must answer each part with one of five replies:
I like it that way.
It must be in the product.
It does not make a difference to me.
I can live with it that way.
I dislike it that way.
The Kano method tells you how attractive a feature is and how a person views it by classifying it into one of six categories based on the combination of answers to the two-part questions:
Attractive - The customer is more satisfied when the product has this feature, but is not necessarily dissatisfied if it doesn’t. On a car, for example, an automatically retracting radio antenna is nice to have but its absence wouldn’t make a person choose not to buy the car.
Must-be - The product must have this feature or the consumer would be dissatisfied, but the consumer is neutral about it otherwise, because it’s an expected feature. Continuing with the car example, you expect a car to have good brakes.
One-dimensional - The more of the feature, the better. The better a car’s gas mileage, the happier the consumer is. If it doesn’t have it, people are dissatisfied.
Reverse - The customer does not want the feature and having it means dissatisfaction. An example might be a car’s color.
Indifferent - The customer doesn’t care either way. Having the feature doesn’t mean satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Questionable - The customer’s responses on this feature contradict themselves.
"We had proposed using conjoint but there was a curiosity about this methodology," says Gunilla Broadbent, president of the Worldwide Services Division of BAIGlobal. "The client wanted to see if it might give more nuance. Conjoint gives you values which are linear, which is an advantage. You can really look at the difference in importance between attributes because the level of the utility is totally linear, which makes it easier to interpret but isn’t always totally correct, because there are certain things that, from an emotional point of view, might be more or less important to a person but they don’t come out."
"We were trying to look for an alternative that wouldn’t involve the cost and limitations of the traditional types of trade-off, conjoint and discrete choice," says Joe Lanzetta, director of global marketing research, Carrier Corp. "This approach allowed us to construct a survey where respondents could answer questions on 15 or 20 attributes and give us an idea of the importance of each. In the past we had used conjoint and discrete choice, which are good techniques, but one of the limitations is the number of attributes you can efficiently test. You can test a lot of attributes but it requires setting up more and more scenarios, and that can be time-consuming and expensive."
Broadbent says that while the Kano method does provide insights to the subtle reasons why one feature is preferred over another, the technique isn’t a replacement for conjoint. "This method presents a challenge, especially when you’re dealing with several different languages, to find the right nuance and the right way of expressing it, so we did a lot of pretesting before we were satisfied with the wording. It’s very difficult to always find exact equivalents to what you had in English, and here it’s especially important because if the nuance is wrong, the whole analysis becomes wrong. That’s a drawback to the technique; it is very sensitive to language."
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