Situational Price Sensitivity in Marketing Essay

Situational Price Sensitivity in Marketing - Essay Example Each customer will have a certain price acceptability window and different customers have different limits in their perceptions of what price is within their range. Pricing is an extremely important part of the marketing mix that has been neglected for a long time. It is the only marketing strategy variable that generates a positive cash flow. The remaining variables (Advertising and promotion, product development, selling effort, distribution, packaging) all create costs. To optimize pricing and all related marketing mix instruments, price sensitivity is an essential contract. Sensitivity is defined as "the response of an organ or organism to external stimuli" (Webster's Third New International Dictionary 1993). Price Sensitivity is used by organizations that are working with unknown pricing situations, new products, products that offer thin margins or products that offer improved benefits to established products. Put together, the term price sensitivity clearly refers to the response of an individual to the amount of money asked or paid for a good or service. This commonsense definition is generally agreed upon (e.g., Hoch et al. 1995; Tellis 1988). It indicates what effect a price change will have on the buyer's intention to purchase a given product or class of products. If buyers are considered price sensitive, changes in price will cause (definite) changes in their buyer behavior. If they are not price sensitive at all, price changes will not result in a change in their purchasing behaviour. In this study, price is assumed to have a negative effect on the purchase probability. A higher price will normally lead to lower demand.(1) Price is hence a negative attribute of an electronic entertainment product. Price sensitivity is defined as the degree to which consumers use price as a decision-making criterion (Lichtenstein, Bloch, and Black 1988). However, its analysis has been mostly focused on traditional consumer goods like groceries or apparel, which have different characteristics in production and consumption than electronic entertainment or media products. In order to assesses what actions have to be taken by media companies to react to price sensitive consumers, the price sensitivity construct and its determinants and consequences have to be scrutinized. There have been many prior studies of how advertising affects two equilibrium quantities: the price elasticity of demand and/or the price level. Our work is differentiated from previous work primarily by our focus on how advertising shifts demand curves as a whole. As Becker and Murphy pointed out, a focus on equilibrium prices or elasticities alone can be quite misleading. Indeed, in many instances, the observation that advertising causes prices to fall and/or demand elasticities to increase, has misled authors into concluding that consumer "price sensitivity" must have increased, meaning the number of consumers' willing to pay any particular price for a

Managing Job Design and Flexibility Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Managing Job Design and Flexibility - Essay Example   Right from the data collection and analytics of job information to incorporating dynamics into static job design documents, several challenges mar the success of job design as a useful management tool in today’s competitive environment. Impartial ratings by supervisors and non-familiarity on the part of incumbents worsen the effectiveness of job design. As a result, HR practitioners have to rethink the ways of job design in terms of various approaches which include all the essential components of work as well as worker characteristics. Background Flexibility and innovation have been the talk of the town lately in business. With the introduction of new activities every day in business practices, it has become a pre-requisite to change the structure and contents of jobs so as to make them compatible with the current job demands. This feat encounters numerous challenges and hurdles in terms of analytical hiccups and consensus building between people supplying information for job designs. As such, identification and removal of such shortcomings in the inception stages of job design are crucial to the human resources and organizational success. This paper allows making an attempt into finding out what challenges or threats are posed in front of HR practitioners when job design is the task. The discussion extends further to recommend the choices which these HR practitioners can adopt in tackling those challenges. The paper will commence with an introduction of job design and its components. Factors affecting job design have also been discussed in brevity to equip the reader with a thorough understanding of the background and enable him to correlate the recommendations well with the initial problem. Challenges of job design in terms of static job analysis output documents, more emphasis of a job designing on work rather than the worker, behavioral challenges in job design, reliability and validity issues in data collection techniques and the trade-off betwe en generalist and specific work design have been elaborated upon in detail. The four approaches to job design will form the basis of knowledge and future comparison for recommendations. Findings Objective of the paper The objective of the assignment is to delve deep into the job design aspect of human resource management by identifying and elaborating upon its probable challenges and available remedies to handle those challenges. Building upon the basic knowledge of job design, the primary task is to critically examine the topic of job design by highlighting how it has become ineffective and obsolete in today’s business scenario.