Topics.

• Brands. What are brands and why do we need them? Brand promotion. Brand stretching.

A brand is like a set of associations in the mind of the consumer. Consumers tend to form emotional attachments to foods and household goods they grow up with. These brands gain mindshare in consumers at an early age and new brands find it hard to compete with the established brands.

We tend to think of brands in relation to consumer marketing and packaged goods, and consumer goods companies will often employ brand managers to develop their brands. But the use of brands and branding is also important in industrial or business-to-business marketing, where companies are selling to other companies, rather than to consumers. In business-to-business, the company name itself is often its most important brand. A company's image and reputation will clearly be key to its success.

The most distinctive skill of professional marketers is their ability to create, maintain, protect and enhance brands. But, despite the best efforts of professional marketers, the list of top brands of today is not so different from that of 30 or 40 years ago: Coca-Cola, IBM and Ford are all still there.

Brand management is application of marketing techniques to a specific product line or brand to attract the attention of customer to them. We need new brands because customers want new brands. They want choice they want a selection of different products. They like to rely on quality levels guaranteed by company. They like to trust products. Its makes shopping so much caser for them. Also the like to identify with brands. Brand stretching is using a successful brand name to launch a product in a new category. For ex, Mars has successfully produced ice creams branded with the names of its Mars and Sinkers candy bars. These are all “sweet tooth products. PROMOTIONS: Harley Davidson typical customer was abous 46 years old compared with 36 for the rest of motorbikes. Outsourcing occurs when a company purchases the product or service from the outside supplier, in order to cut costs.

For example Burberry has many Asian licensing arrangements. But the companies producing luxury fashion products usually do not want to move their production off-shore because it may damage the reputation of their luxury brands. Customer want see MADE IN ITALY logo.

Most experts believe that brand stretching works because of the way consumers view products psychologically. Many people are very distrustful of new products when they’re shopping and may even prefer to buy things they don’t especially like in order to avoid the risk of buying something they don’t recognize. This sort of resistance and anxiety about the unknown can make it very difficult for a company to successfully launch something new, and brand stretching is a way of reducing the risk. When consumers see a brand they know and trust from some other market sector on a new product, they might be more inclined to give it a try, especially if the product name has a good association in their minds.

Brand: loyalty, image, stretching, awareness, name.

Product: launch, lifecycle, range, placement, endorsement.

• Travel. Business travel. Business traveller's priorities and problems met at the airport and on board.

Business travel refers to any type of geographical transportation that someone undergoes at the behest of his or her employer to perform the duties of a job. One simple way in which an employee may undergo such travel is for training, in which an employer may require that employees go to a central location to receive instruction. Business travel can also include ongoing and regular visitation to various locations in order to provide service or otherwise work with remote teams. This type of travel is always temporary, as the employee eventually returns home, as opposed to “relocation” that is typically permanent.

Travel for business is an activity that can have a variety of different purposes, from scouting new business opportunities to entertaining clients. Many jobs require no travel at all, while others are likely to require a business trip from time to time, and certain professions involve constant travel.

Businesses typically reimburse employees for business travel, or provide them with funds in advance to cover travel costs. An employee who has to drive to a sales pitch, for example, may be reimbursed by an employer for the cost of the gas used in doing so. Airline tickets are often purchased for employees by a company, and the costs for hotel rooms and food while traveling are typically provided. Additional expenses for business travel may also be covered, especially for charges that are made as part of an employee’s work.

Due to the many different reasons for this type of travel, each business trip can be different. It is sometimes even possible to combine a pleasure trip with a business trip, though that can depend on the policies of the specific company. This type of combined trip can affect the expenses that may be deducted for tax purposes, because lavish and unnecessary spending does not usually qualify for tax deductions. Some employers may also disapprove of family members or friends accompanying their employees on business trips, due to potential for distractions and other factors.

Everyone has travelled somewhere at least once in his life. Nowadays you can travel abroad by using such kinds of transport like bus train ship or airplane. But to my mind travel by air now is the most convenient and fastest (not only because there are no traffic jams in the air) type of travelling that is why it’s so demanded. However it’s have a lot of disadvantages. Processed and packed food, overcrowded terminals, delays in take off, not enough leg-rooms - all this facts irritate common customer. Moreover some airlines cut costs by cramming passengers into the aircraft or reducing cabin crew and quality of service. Such bad attitude to consumers from airlines increase people frustration and sometimes leads to air rage incidents as in the case of the convict who recently went crazy on a flight, attacked the crew and tried to open a door in mid-flight.

That is why you should choose airlines and aircrafts very carefully. You should find the information and reviews about the airline that you have chosen. Also you should look for some advices from regular travelers---some of them are really important and useful. And don’t miss a chance to establish good face-to-face relations with staff or other travelers.

Another aspect of travel is, of course, the hotel industry. Each chain is a brand and, wherever you go, you should know exactly what you are going to find when you get there. And if you are booking rooms by telephone remember to be polite and formal.

The existence of teleconferencing and telepresence technologies, especially those that make use of the Internet, can affect the decision making process when determining whether to send an employee on a business trip. These trips are often expensive, and can result in reduced productivity due to disrupted work schedules. Many activities that were traditionally accomplished during business trips, such as training personnel in other company facilities, can be easily accomplished using various teleconferencing solutions. Some businesses still see an advantage in face to face contact, especially when entertaining clients, but the choice of whether to use a business trip or long distance communication technologies can often be purely economic in nature.

Not enough leg room, lost or delayed luggage, long queues, poor quality food and drink, no baggage trolleys available, overbooking of seats, jet-lag.

Subway – underground, city centre – downtown, carry-on baggage – hand luggage, one way – single, return – round trip, freeway – motorway, rest room – public toilet, elevator – lift, coach class – economy class, timetable – schedule, car park – parking lot.

• Organisation. Describe a company structure. Give an example of a successful organisation and describe peculiarities of this company.

A corporate structure is essentially the layout of the various departments, divisions, and job positions that interact to conduct the business of the company. Generally, a corporate structure is necessary in order to ensure that all-important tasks are conducted according to the guidelines of the corporation, as well as providing lines of communication and authority for the overall function of the company. Even the smallest of businesses have a corporate structure, although the exact format for the structure may be extremely simplistic.

A corporate structure usually helps to accomplish three things. First, the corporate layout helps to define all the areas of responsibility within the company. Along with providing reference points for the handling of various functions, a corporate structure also helps to establish a line of communication for employees to utilize. By establishing this line of communication, the corporate structure helps to ensure effective interaction and also minimize time wasted by information moving through the company in a disorganized manner. Lastly, the corporate structure helps to establish a working chain or line of authority. Corporations often require responsible persons placed at various points in the structure to ensure tasks are handled properly and in accordance with company bylaws.

Organization is a necessary part of every company. It’s a secret of successful business. And Businesses come in many guises, from the lonely-sounding self-employed person and sole trader, through the SIVIE, (the small to medium-sized enterprise), to the multinational with its hierarchy and tens of thousands of employees. But the questions about what motivates people in work are basically the same everywhere. Some organizations (such as advertising agencies) want to find ways of motivating their people to be ever more productive and creative.

In organizations of all kinds, the tendency is towards relatively flat structures, with only a few levels of hierarchy - this way the senior management is relatively close to the people dealing with clients.

And the way service staff deal with their customers reflects clearly how they themselves are managed. Employees express attitudes, behavior and emotions towards customers that reflect their own feelings towards their work, and these sentiments are determined by their managers. When organizations and the work group have policies and practices aimed at maintaining service quality, customers will be happier with those services. The more a company's employees have contact with customers, the more its morale and organizational policies affect customer satisfaction.

The secret to keeping an organization alive and youthful is to keep it operating at its maximum capacity and to keep increasing that capacity by constantly upgrading the building blocks of organization (job positions, activities, and systems).

Nowadays particularly successful companies tend to be similar in three ways. They’re future-oriented: they have a very clear sense of where they are headed. Second, they’re customer driven. And third they are values-driven. Also it’s very important to understand the personality of a business because it shapes and defines everything the organization does and can do.

As an example of a successful organisation I can name SOL Cleaning service mentioned in our textbook. Located in renovated film studio in the heart of Helsinki its office explodes with colour. Liisa Joronen developed SOL 11 years ago out of a 150-year-old industrial empire owned by her family.

Employees have individual freedom. It means abolishing all the rules and regulations of conventional corporate life. There are no titles or secretaries at SOL, no individual offices or set hours of work. The company has eliminated all perks and status symbols.

SOL's training programme consists of seven modules, each of which lasts four months and ends with a rigorous exam. SOL employees also study time management, budgeting and people skills.

SOL decentralizes responsibility and authority. The real power players of the company are its 135 supervisors, each of whom leads a team of up to 50 cleaners. These supervisors work with their teams to create their own budgets, do their own hiring and negotiate their own deals with customers.

SOL is fanatical about measuring performance. It does so frequently and visibly, and focuses on customer satisfaction. Every time SOL lands a contract, for example, the salesperson works at the new customer's site alongside the team that will do the cleaning in the future. Together they establish performance benchmarks. Then, every month, the customer rates the team's performance based on those benchmarks.

Laptops and cell-phones are standard equipment for all supervisors at SOL, freeing them to work where they want, how they want. Inside the offices there's almost no room for paper. So the company stores all critical budget documents and performance reports on its Intranet, along with training schedules, upcoming events and company news.

Subsidiary, factory/plant, call centre, head office, distribution centre, warehouse, branches/outlets.

• Change. Managing of change. Change in retailing.

Everything must change, nothing stays the same. That is why company should renew itself, leaving the past behind, adapting to change. Some companies downsize in order to become leaner, flatter, supposedly more efficient organisations. With fewer organizational layers, top managers can communicate more directly with front-line employees, the people who actually produce the goods or services and deal with customers. With less direct supervision, employees have often been encouraged to make more decisions on their own in a process of empowerment. But you should remember that in such way workers feel themselves demoralized, wondering when the next wave of change was going to come and whether it would be their turn to be thrown out. That is why you should give them the rationale for change, laying it out in the clearest, most dramatic terms. Only then they would see change as an opportunity.

You should remember that gradual change doesn't work very well. If your change isn't big enough, the bureaucracy can beat you. Also don’t forget about IT departments. Nowadays there is zero separation between IT execution and business strategy. So you should upgrade your IT as fast as you can. Of course don’t forget about stuff. Only then CEO takes a personal interest in his employees, staff morale becomes extremely high and they should feel themselves released and able to embrace new ways of doing things.

And always check your current situation in company with last year’s. Only in this way you can understand was you change successful or not.

A change management process is a series of business practices used to control and manage change within a large system or organization. The purpose of change management is to ensure there is clear communication between the client and the service provider about the requested variation from the accepted specifications, the impact on the time line, and the projected cost of those changes. An added bonus to this process is the validation of authorization for the change requests.

The entire change management process is comprised of three items: requesting the change, evaluation of time and cost to make the change, and implementing the changes. It is worth noting that a strict adherence to a formal change management process is recognized by the courts as a valid tool for managing changes to contracts. Changes requested and approved through the process must be paid for by the firm, regardless to the authority of the requester. It is assumed that the firm designed a business practice that followed its internal approval process.

Change in retailing means transformation their organizational marketing structure from mass marketing to targeting specific groups of customers by moving away from a centralized organizational structure that manages all marketing, assortment, and distribution channels to a decentralized approach. Many retailers have now restructured their marketing departments to be able to respond locally to consumers. The main idea underlying localized marketing is the creation of an environment where customers can feel completely at home, relate with ease to the shopping experience, and see themselves reflected in the marketing

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• Money.

One of the main features of globalisation is that capital can flow freely to and from almost everywhere. Money is always looking for places where it will be most profitable and earn the greatest return on investment.

• How to invest money? Risk and profitability, financial institutions.

As an individual, you can put your money on deposit in a bank and you will get interest. Your money is lent out to people, businesses and governments who need it to finance their own projects, and the bank will make its money on the difference between what it pays out in interest on deposits and what it gets in as interest from its loans.

If you want to live more dangerously you could buy some bonds and, as long as the organisation or country you have invested in by lending it money does not default, you will get your interest payments and later your bonds will eventually be repaid. If you live even more dangerously, you want to buy some sliares and share in the profitability of your chosen company. In good times, the dividends will be more than what you would get from bonds and the shares themselves will increase in value, giving you a capital gain if you sell them. But, if the company runs into trouble and goes banlirupt, you will be among the last to be paid back and you may get only part of what you put in or you may lose all your money.

This is the trade-off between risit and return. The higher the risk of your investment not being repaid, the more you will want it to pay back in return on investment. Venture capitalists like the ones in the case study in this unit of the Course Book will invest in many different start-ups, knowing that most will fail but that a few will do reasonably well and one or two will, with luck, hit the jackpot, paying back all the money they lost on unprofitable projects and much more.

Investors use the world's financial markets to channel money into profitable investment activities and projects. Borrowers such as companies and governments use them to find capital on the best terms.

Most investors are not private individuals but institutions like banks, insurance companies, mutual funds (unit trusts in Britain) and pension funds who are, of course, investing the money of private individuals indirectly. The markets they invest in include the money and currency markets, stock markets for shares (also known as equities), commodities markets for anything from gold to pork bellies (used for making bacon) and property: buildings and land.

There are also markets for futures in currencies, equities, bonds and commodities: a future is a fixed- price contract to buy a certain amount of something for delivery at a fixed future date.

There are markets for options in currencies, equities, and bonds. Here, an investor buys the right to buy or sell a certain amount of these things at a certain price and particular date in the future. This is a form of betting on how prices will move.

Some of these markets, like stock markets, are based in particular buildings, some with trading floors, but most trading is now screen- and telephone-based. Others, like bond and currency markets, are 'virtual', in the sense that selling and trading takes place by phone and computer between the premises of issuers, brokers and traders. (A broker is an intermediary between an issuer of securities such as bonds, a seller of a property, etc. and potential investors who buy the securities. Many brokers of securities are also traders, having their own supplies of securities to sell and make money on trading or dealing, hence the term securities house.)

Central banks like the Bank of England and the European Central Bank are linchpins for financial centres (even if the Fed in the US is in Washington and the two main financial centres are New York and Chicago) because they set basic interest rates: the 'price of money', and control money supply: the amount of money circulating in an economy. These controls have an enormous effect on the economy as a whole, and on the financial markets, even if the link of cause-and-effect between the fundamentals of the real economy and the financial markets is not always clear.

• What are the best ways for new business to raise money?

Financing a new business can be one of the most important parts of starting any new venture. Steps such as creating a business plan typically come first and can be just as important, but a business without solid financing in place can be doomed from the start. New business owners often have anywhere between six months and three years worth of income saved up to cover their own expenses during the start up period, but they often fund the initial business operations as well. This can present a very large strain on an individual's finances, so alternate means are often explored.

There are many different ways of financing a new business, though not every option is viable for all companies.

When you need to raise business start up money, your first step may be considering funding sources you already have. For example, if you have a savings account from which you can take start up money, you may be able to avoid taking on business loans. Likewise, if you have property you do not need or want, you may consider selling it for the purpose of raising start up cash.

Most small businesses start up with what is often referred to as a friends and family financing round. This involves the owners of a new business borrowing money from their friends and family or using their own money. Most business owners will try to raise enough money through friends and family to last until the company can become profitable or enter a growth phase and require subsequent funding rounds from angels or venture capitalists. Informal friends and family financing can include loans, though most businesses provide securities instead.

Certain businesses can also apply for bank loans or look to angel investors or venture capitalists. The availability of financing sources such as these can hinge on what type of business it is and whether the principals have extensive prior experience or contacts.

Bank loans can sometimes be used in financing a new business as well, particularly if the principals have good credit or assets. Most new businesses lack any assets to use as collateral, so the owners will often have to take on the financial liability. The advantage of financing a new business through bank loans, lines of credit, and other similar methods is that total control of the company is typically retained. Any other type of financing, including money from friends and family, can lead to some loss of control through the issuing of securities.

Angel investors and venture capitalists are sometimes available to new businesses, though they typically prefer to invest in established companies. Exceptions to this rule usually involve principals that have a strong track record in a particular industry. If an individual has started one or more successful business ventures that reached an initial public offering (IPO) or sale, angel investors and venture capitalists may show interest in subsequent startups.

Grant programs are another good source of business start up money. There are many programs that provide grants, which do not need to be repaid, to entrepreneurs. In most cases, you will need a good idea, a business plan, and a grant proposal to apply for a business grant. It is important to keep in mind, however, that you may face stiff competition when you apply for a business grant. As such, you may need to seek other ways of raising business start up money as well.

In almost every business, there are steps that a business owner can take to move the business forward with little or no money. A business that has gotten started with its pursuits looks more viable to potential donors or investors than a business that has not progressed much beyond being an idea or a dream. Internet resources can help find information to get a business into a position where it looks more lucrative and realistic to potential investors.

Though it may seem an enticing idea to acquire funds from several investors in excess of what is necessary to start the business, the business still needs to run well to attract more investors. Spending too much time raising capital and too little time running the business may cause business failure in the face of plenty of capital.

Decline, double, decrease, gain, fall, fluctuate, drop, halve, improve, increase, level off, peak, rocket, triple, rise, plummet, recover, jump.

• Advertising. Advertising media and methods. Successful advertising campaigns.

Whether or not you agree with communications guru Marshall McLuhan that advertising was the greatest art form of the twentieth century, it is a big part of modern culture. Shared references feed into it and it in turn feeds into daily life: advertising catch phrases turn up in TV comedy sketches and everyday conversation. And we become 'ironic' about advertising, perhaps to show that we think we are able to resist it.

TV advertising is still the most glamorous, even if its heyday is over with the proliferation of channels and the saturation of the markets (at least in advanced economies) of the consumer goods it normally promotes. But the other media are not to be ignored: radio, cinema and the press, while hoardings (BrE) and billboards (AmЈ) are an integral part of the urban landscape. All these will be around for some time.