Ibn Zohr University

ENSA- Agadir
Dr. Mohamed Nouhi

Market Language and Communication

Business Philosophies
 Business philosophies
What is the Rationale Behind Business Philosophies?
 Business environment is very dynamic and competitive

 Bringing changes in the organization's performance is crucial

 There is an urgent commitment to improving customer satisfaction.

 Attaining efficiency, quality, and good governance are the foundations

of continuity

 There is an urgent need to understand the multidimensional

1. Internal environment: staff, customers, office technology, wages and finance, etc.
2. Micro-environment: external customers, agents, distributors, suppliers,
competitors…
3. The macro-environment: These are known as PEST factors comprising:
a)Political and legal forces (political stability, government policies, trading
agreements…)
b)Economic forces (Interest rates, inflation and employment levels per capita,
Long-term prospects for the economy Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita )
c) Sociocultural forces (the dominant religion, language, lifestyles, modes of living,
attitudes to foreign products and services…)
d)Technological forces (Information and Communication Technology, Internet
banking, new generation of mobile phones…)
 1-Total Quality Management
 (TQM) is a structured approach to overall organizational management.
 It is an ongoing process of detecting and reducing or eliminating errors.
 The specifications or specs of a product are exact instructions about its design,
including its dimensions, how it is to be made, the materials to be used, etc.
 The objective of quality control is in conformity to specifications, the idea that
the product should be made exactly as it was intended, with zero defects: no
faults at all.
 Things should be done right first time so we don't have to correct mistakes later
in a process of reworking.
 It is used to manufacture to streamline supply chain management, improve
customer service, to promote the quality of an organization's outputs, and ensure
that employees are trained through continual improvement of internal practices.
 2- Benchmarking:
Jim, production manager at an electricity power station in the UK: 'We use a system
called benchmarking to compare our performance to other power stations. We've
recently been to the US to see how the best power stations operate - best practice -
and try to copy it and increase productivity.

 Benchmarking is a tool applied both in the private and public sectors. It was
originally intuitively used in business via the observation of partners and
competitors and the adaptation of their good practices.
 is perceived as a tool for increasing productivity, competitiveness, improving
quality, and accelerating changes. It facilitates strengths and weaknesses
identification and delivers solutions checked by others.
 As an instrument for steering competitive processes, it is undertaken to make
the necessary adjustments according to individual circumstances.
 It is a method of searching for model solutions to gain the best results by
Types of Benchmarking:
A-Product Benchmarking B- Process Benchmarking
C- Strategic Benchmarking D- Organizational Benchmarking
Benchmarking Steps:
 3-McKinsey and Company 7-S Model
This model comprises the following items:
 Strategy: it can be described as a means to ensuring an organization has a market advantage
over the competition.
 Systems: The term “systems” refers to the entire methods and procedures put in place within
an organisation in order to assist management and increase effectiveness.
 Structure: Structure prescribes how people within an organisation are grouped and indicates
where control of that organisation is located and increase business efficiency by concentrating
the staff’s minds on the tasks to be undertaken.
 Skills: They refer to the particular talents that are held within an organisation. These talents can
be held not only by individual members of staff but can also be embedded into the ethos of the
company.
 Style: It is an assessment of the manner in which output is produced.
 Staff: How a company selects, integrates and develops its staff and chooses the employment
and deployment of particular people to particular areas has a profound effect on the overall
performance of it.
 Shared values: These are beliefs that are central to the company’s ethos and mould the
approach that those within the organization apply in the everyday situations.
 4- Business Process Re-engineering
Susanna, head of personal banking at an international bank: 'Business process re-engineering, or
BPR, applies in service industries as well as in manufacturing. We didn't want to change existing
things in small ways. We completely redesigned all our processes in management,
administration and customer service. We eliminated three levels of management and
installed a completely new computer system. The gains in productivity have been very good.
 It involves the radical redesign of core business processes to achieve dramatic improvements
in productivity and quality in addition to reduce costs and cycle times.
 Managers should take five major steps that in their change initiative:

 Refocus company values on customer needs

 Redesign core processes, often using information technology to enable improvements
 Reorganize a business into cross-functional teams with end-to-end responsibility for a process
 Rethink basic organizational and people issues
 Improve business processes across the organization
 5-Continuous Improvement:
Data-driven philosophy of improvement that values defect prevention over defect detection
It is a structured approach to problem-solving. It minimizes the weaknesses and amplifies the
strengths.
Ray, at Lightning Technologies: 'We are always making small improvements or enhancements;
this is continuous improvement. We refer to it by its Japanese name: kaizen.‘
Lean manufacturing is a systematic method of eliminating waste within the
manufacturing process. The concept itself was devised by Toyota Motor Corporation.
 The main goal is to recognize and increase the value of products or services for customers
 According to James Womack and Daniel T. Jones, lean enterprise is characterized by the
following five chief tenets:
1-Value: how the customer perceives the important value of a product or service.
2- Value stream: it denotes the life cycle of a product or service, including the acquisition of
raw materials, the manufacturing of goods, the sale and delivery of inventory, and the ultimate
consumption of items.
3- Flow: the value stream is stagnant or inefficient, it is considered wasteful and antithetical to
creating customer value.
4- Pull: There must be a clear demand or official purchase orders from customers for a specific
product or service before its production.
5- Perfection: inefficient element in the product quality or in the manufacturing process should
be eliminated.
 The Acronym ‘DOWNTIME’ Representing the Eight Wastes of Lean
Manufacturing:
•Defects – Rework, scrap
•Overproduction – Producing more than required customer demand or at a faster pace than
needed
•Waiting – Waiting on people, material, machines, or information

•Non-utilized Talent – Not fully using the ideas, solutions, and creativity of employees

•Transportation – Movement of materials and finished goods more than needed

•Inventory – Raw materials, work in process (WIP), and finished goods stock levels are
greater than needed
•Motion – Movement of people and machinery that does not add value

•Extra Processing – Putting more work or effort into a part than is required by the customer
Practice:
1.A police service reduces the number of forms to fill in when a crime is reported, first from
fifteen to twelve, then to ten, then to seven, then to three.
2 A travel company closes all its high street shops, lays off middle managers and half of its sales
assistants and retrains the others to sell on the phone. It also starts an Internet service.
3 A telephone company looks at other telephone companies to see which one issues bills with
fewest mistakes to customers. It then copies this company's methods to reduce the mistakes in
its own bills.
4 Most parcel delivery companies deliver 70 per cent of parcels by 10 am the next day, but one
company has an advanced computer system that enables it to achieve an 80 per cent delivery
rate.
5 An Internet banking service starts by allowing customers to see how much money they have in
their accounts, and the latest transactions in the order they took place. Six months later
customers can view the transactions in different orders. Three months later, they can make
payments using the Internet service, which they couldn't do before.
7Ps of Marketing
Companies and markets
If a company:
Enters/penetrates the market: it starts selling there for the first time.
If a company abandons/gets out of the market: it leaves or it stops selling there.
If it dominates a market it is the most important company selling there.
If it comers the market it monopolizes it and becomes the only company selling there.
More word combinations with 'market‘
Target Market: Clearly identified group of consumers with needs that business wants to satisfy
Market Research: The gathering of information that businesses can use to determine what kinds
of goods or services to produce. It includes clustering (grouping into categories), community
analysis (population statistics, their attitudes, their relationships and behaviors), consumer
characteristics and satisfaction. Most often, it is conducted using diffusion model (a model
representing the spread of something through a population), environmental analysis (data
regarding political, cultural, social, economic, legal, international and ecological forces)
Market Segmentation: The process of subdividing a market into distinct subsets of users that
behave in the same way or have similar needs.
Nonprofit Marketing: The marketing of a product or service in which the offer itself is not
intended to make a monetary profit for the marketer.
Consumer Motivations: Forces that cause consumers to act including the desire to fulfill
their needs and wants. It is associated with acquisition value: the users’ perception of the
relative worth of a product or service to them. These comprise the following:
1. Rational Motives: A reason for consumers to buy a product/service based on facts or logic.
2. Emotional Motives: A reason for consumers to by a product/service based on feelings or attitudes.
3. Patronage Motives: A reason for consumers to buy a product/service based on a desire to be loyal
and a feeling of comfort with that product/service.
Word combinations with 'price’ Low-priced/ mid-priced / high-priced / expensive(high-end or
top-end product). We have a policy of discounting, but if we continue undercutting, we can not
stay in business.
We must sell our goods at cost (what you pay for them) or at loss (even less)
Price boom: a good period for sellers, when prices are rising quickly
Price controls: government efforts to limit price increases
Price cut means a reduction in price
Price hike is an increase in price
Price war when competing companies reduce prices in response to each other
Price leader designates a company that is first to reduce or increase prices
Price tag: label attached to goods, showing the price; also means 'price‘
Chain Store System: A groups of retail stores of essentially the same type, centrally owned and with
some degree of centralized control of operation .
Demarketing: The process of reducing the demand for a product--or decreasing consumption
Destination Merchandise: A type of merchandise that motivates or triggers a trip to a specific store.
Marketing Channel: A set of institutions necessary to transfer the title to goods and to move goods
from the point of consumption(Vendors, publishers, library facilities.)
Word combinations with 'product'
Catalogue/mix/portfolio: a company's products, as a group, whereas a company's products of a
particular type are known as product’s range/line.
Product lifecycle: the stages in the life of a product in terms of production, growth, maturity, and
decline.
Product positioning: how a company would like a product to be seen in relation to its other
products, Products placement: when a company pays for its products to be seen in films and TV
programs. Will-Call refers to the products ordered by customers/users in advance of the time
delivery desired. Cash Cow: a profitable product generating steady flow of sales and revenues.
Convenience Product: A consumer good and/or service that is bought frequently
Core Product: The central benefit or purpose for which a consumer buys a product or service.
The core product varies from purchaser to purchaser.