Introduction
There are many factors which are essential for success in business. Those factors range from proper and professional management of business resources to adoption of up to date business models in order to ensure continued existence and growth amid ever stiffening competition.
The main conventional goal of any business organization is to maximize profits and to remain solvent throughout. Achievement of this goal largely depends on an organization’s capability to sustain its client base and win new business by growing into other markets and winning customers from other competitors within its current markets.
The ability of a business organization to win new business, maintain a happy workforce and consistently keep up a superior customer service depends to a large extent on its ability to adjust to changes occurring in its area of specialization in order to sustain its competitiveness (Pinson 2008, p.56; Waddell, 2004, p.112).
Failure to adopt the relevant technological changes as well as appropriate business models in this age can be the main cause of a company’s dwindling profits and eventual fall down due to its inability to offset liabilities.
Surprisingly, there are business organizations such as Tod’s Luxury Shoes which sticks to old fashioned business models and still manages to sustain and even increase their client base and remain solvent and competitive.
Growing Tod’s Luxury Shoes
All business organizations are constantly on the lookout with respect to how they can expand their client base in order to maximize their profits. Business organizations expand their customer base by accessing new markets and winning competitors’ customers at the national level and international levels.
Organizational marketing strategies are critical in establishing a ground in new markets and winning over your competitors’ clients because marketing function forms the important link between the company and the target audiences.
Kurtz, MacKenzie and Snow (2009, p.37) notes that it is important for companies like Tods which are seeking to grow their business to change the way they interact with their present and new customers.
Tods should substitute the conventional view of marketing as a plain exchange process or transaction-based process by a long-term approach that put emphasize on building strong relationships with each an every customer Kurtz, MacKenzie and Snow (2009, p.37).
Unlike traditional marketers who focus on attracting customers and closing deals, Tods marketers should recognize that even though it is important to attract new customers, it is even more significant to create and preserve a strong relationship with them so they become loyal repeat customers Kurtz, MacKenzie and Snow (2009, p.37).
It is important to note that strong relationships should not be limited to customers alone and must be expanded to include suppliers and employees.
Tods marketers should realize that customers are getting more and more complicated. According to Pinson (2008, p.32), increase or decrease in the sales of the product or service of your company depends largely on the taste and preferences of your customers.
You are therefore bound to effect changes on the basis of changes in their tastes and preferences in order to raise your sales, preserve you client base and win new business. In the clothing industry in which Tods is a player for instance you have to keep up to date with fashion styles and color preferences.
Technologically, it is naturally expected that you have to adjust your business in order to stay modern with the shifting business world or become obsolete by clinging to old technologies (Pinson, 2008, p.33; Waddell, 2004, p.78).
Change is inevitable in business and how well a business organization manages change and adapts to changes determines its future survival and ability to preserve its solvency and continue making profits in a business environment that is highly competitive and increasingly risky.
According to Kurtz, MacKenzie and Snow (2009, p.37),the present day customers understand marketing messages and may turn away from them if the.messages do not have the kind of information that they want and need.
Therefore, Tods executives and marketers should come up with new methods for creating and developing trustworthy relationships between their company and their customers (Kurtz, MacKenzie and Snow 2009, p.37;
Thurau and Hansen 2000, p.4). In a nutshell, Tods should embrace relationship marketing in place of transaction-based marketing which puts emphasize on development, growth and maintenance of lasting, cost-effective exchange relationships with employees, individual customers, suppliers, and other persons for mutual benefit.
Relationship marketing offers a company new opportunities to attain a competitive edge by moving customers up the loyalty ladder (Kurtz, MacKenzie & Snow (2009, p.37). Clients move from new customers to regular buyers, then to loyal supporters of the company and its goods and services and eventually to advocates who not only buy its goods but propose them to others (Kurtz et al. 2009, p.37).
Relationship development should start early in marketing. It should start with determining what customers need and want then manufacturing high-quality goods to satisfy those needs.
It should then continue with superior customer service before and after the acquisition. In should include programs that encourage repeat buying and promote customer loyalty (Kurtz et al. 2009, p.37).
In short, over the long term this relationship should be transformed to a lifetime value for customers who are represented by finances and intangible benefits that a client brings to an organization over an average lifetime less the investment the company has made to catch the attention of and maintain the customer.
To attain growth, Tods should develop partnerships and strategic alliances. Tods should form strategic alliances, that is, partnerships that generate competitive advantages. These alliances would particularly prove important in international markets where Tods seeks to access new markets.
For instance, Tods can form product-development partnerships that entail joint costs for research and development, marketing partnerships and vertical alliances where one company provides a product or component to another company which then distributes or sells it in agreed geographical locations or markets (Kurtz et al. 2009, p.38).
To minimize marketing costs in international markets where Tods has not yet established itself properly it should form marketing partnership with a company that will be selling its products in those new markets.
Where possible Tods can form an alliance with local companies in international markets to allow them produce their products in order to minimize production costs.This will mark a radical shift from its current old fashioned model thereby enabling it to access new markets and grow its business.
Human Resources Management
Introduction
As mentioned earlier, proper and professional management of a business organization and its resources is a major prerequisite for success.Exelllent business management to a large extent depend on the kind of a workforce that an organization has and how well that workforce is managed.
Employees of an organization add value to other organizational resources, that is, physical, financial and technological resources. Nevertheless, however adequate and good these resources may be within any given organization without a well organized and managed personnel an organization cannot achieve its economic as well as its social and environmental goals.
The capability of an organization to maintain its client base and win new business in order to facilitate growth depends on an organization’s ability to give its customers value for their money, produce and sell safe and worth products and go an extra mile to serve their customers needs satisfactorily through its employees (Pirnes & Lutolf-carroll 2009, p.54).
According to Pirnes and Lutolf-carroll (2009, p.54) these steps are commonsense business values which pay off in the long run.
Managing an Increased Workforce
Real life business experience have shown that happy and satisfied employees in turn gives happiness and satisfaction to customers who are the main source of financial resources needed to generate profits and maintain solvency Evans(2007,p.379).
Businesses have found that as workers satisfaction increases so do consumers satisfaction and loyalty to the organization. Cook (2008) argues that “…there is a correlation between employee satisfaction measures and external customer satisfaction measures” (16). Happy and satisfied workforce is also critical in establishing and building beneficial relationships with other businesses and stakeholders like shareholders, suppliers, authorities, financiers, the wider society as well as competitors.
Cooperative and friendly relationships with these groups of people in modern business world are significant especially for a business like Tods which seeks to expand its business (Kurtz et al 2009, p.37; Nalbantian 2003, p.359).
Tods should commit itself to employee and customer satisfaction and engagement. To achieve this it should embrace a democratic human resource management styles. Employees should be viewed as human beings with economic, social and emotional needs to be fulfilled and not mere objects for achieving organizational goals.
Tods should make sure that their new and old employees are satisfied with their working conditions and jobs, so that they can stay with Tod and become familiar with customers and their needs (Evans 2007, p. 379).Continued stay with Tods by the employees will give them an opportunity to correct mistakes because customers know and trust them.
This will enable employees to attain and enjoy outcomes of higher productivity and superior customer service (Evans 2007, p.379).Tods should comprehend and appreciate that if its customers are served by employees who are satisfied they will become more reliable thus facilitating more repeat business.
Customers of an organization whose employees are satisfied are usually ready to protest about service problems prompting employees to fix them, they benefit from the good relationships by enjoying lower costs and better service and this results into a new sequence of increased customer satisfaction (Evans 2007, p.379).
Tods should make sure that its employees are hired through professional recruitment and selection process in order to ensure that employees with skills and experience match Tods’ need to grow its business are hired. Once they have been hired through such a process Tods should engage them in its work and make them part and parcel of the “fabric” of Tods (Evans 2007, p. 379).
Extensive employee engagement will ensures that Tods workers have a strong emotional bond to their organization, are actively involved in and committed to their work, feel that their work in put is significant, know that their opinions and ideas have value and over and over again go beyond their immediate prescribed work duties for the good of the organization.
In short, engagement results in to bigger levels of satisfaction among the workforce which in turn improves organizational performance. It is important to note that employee satisfaction and engagement is firmly related to employee retention, employee safety, profit and overall productivity (Evans 2007, 379).
Employees’ performance should be regularly appraised through fair and transparent means in order to measure their performance and reward them accordingly. Tods should adopt a known culture of promoting excellent performers in order to motivate newly employed workers to work smart and hard.
This will inspire them to exploit their potential for the good of the organization. In simple terms, meritocracy should underpin compensation of an individual employee work (Edwards & Rees 2006, p.14).
It is noteworthy that increased workforce will inevitably be accompanied by increased workforce diversity which if managed well and on basis of sound management knowledge can be exploited for the good of the organization.
Increased diversity implies that the organization shall have employees with different cultural backgrounds and indigenous languages trying to work together Bronwynne (2007, p.115). Managers should ensure that all workers are heard understood and appreciated by all members of an organization (Bronwynne 2007, p.115).
To achieve this, they should ensure that there are clear channels of communication in their organization and between their companies and others to avoid preventable work place conflicts.
Tods should put in place mechanisms that facilitate and build good employee relations within the organization and a fair reward management so as to make sure that everyone gets what he or she deserves. It can organize regular workplace leisure activities.
In order to improve employee performance and take care of the employee career development, on job training should carried out regularly so as to ensure that employee keep up with changes in their department and thus prevent them from becoming obsolete.
Tods should comprehend and appreciate that proper and professional management of its employees is essentially the basis of the kind customer service that it is going to offer to its clients. In short, the happier and satisfied the employees the better the customer service will be and hence the volume of sales.
Benefits and disadvantages of the marketing strategies adopted by Tod’s Luxury Shoes
Introduction
Marketing is an important process in business without which your better-quality products or services may not fulfill its intention which is satisfaction of your customer needs. According to Silk, marketing is the process of strategizing and implementing the development, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to facilitate exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives (Silk 2006, p.3). The objects of the Tods marketers should therefore be to make sure that their clients understand the basic concept underlying their goods; explain to them the significance of the Tods’ products to their needs; get rid of or alleviate barriers to exchange so that customers can engage in an exchange with minimal effort and to build up and manage dependable relationships with customers, thereby providing the framework within which exchanges occurs (Silk 2006, p.3).
Extending the product line
According to Farrils, Moore and Buzzell (2004, p.82), an extended product line enables a company to increase the productivity of other features of the marketing communication mix. Extending product lines may increase the productivity of the in-passageway promotions because the whole product line profits from advertisements for individual goods in the line (Farris et al. 2004, p.82).
Fundamentally, an extended product line allows a company to better leverage a fixed expenditure on in-passageway promotions ( Farris et al 2004, p.82). According to Bennett (2009, p.426) one of the main disadvantage of extending a product line is the lack of depth within the product lines carried in numerous departments.
Therefore, sales persons are not able to specialize fully in a given product. As a result, sales persons may tend to be inclined into the selling of their favorite products at the expense of others. In the long run, this may lead to lower volume of sales which is not good for a company like Tods which is seeking to expand its business.
Seeking New Markets
Seeking a new market for a company’s products has many advantages. First, new markets enable an organization to win new business and thus expand its client base and eventually its revenue. Secondly, seeking a new market enables a company to access valuable information it would not have otherwise obtained.
New markets enable seeking opportunities to move into new markets to obtain first hand product ideas with regard to the new market needs. New markets can also assist a Tods to access valuable resources like cheap raw materials and labor once it establishes itself in the new market (Burrow 2008, p.78).Thirdly, new market enable an organization to identify potential other markets within the vicinity of their current new markets.
However, in the initial stages of seeking new market for its products Tods should be ready and willing to spend without necessarily making any substantial profits in those markets (Needle 2004, p.324).
Apart from extra costs that a firm is bound to incur while seeking new markets for its products, it is bound to encounter challenges that may arise from diversity among its new workforce as well as its customers and other parties like authorities.
This may imply the need for more resources to facilitate training of its managers and employees on how to deal with multiculturalism. All these may derail its grounding within new markets.
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