The Final WebLog

When I got to Chapter 7, I got to learn all about how a global perspective on world trade views exports and imports as complementary economic flows, which are a country's imports affect its exports and exports affect its imports. It was really interesting to read how all that worked. I loved doing the questions on Chapter 7 the most, really interesting information about Japan and how an American commercial wouldn't be as successful in Japan like it would in America.

While reading Chapter 10, I learned that from the important perspective of the consumer, newness is often seen as the degree of learning that a consumer must engage in to use the product. With continuous innovation, no new behaviors must be learned. With dynamically continuous innovation, only minor behavioral changes are needed. With a discontinuous innovation, consumers must learn entirely new consumption patterns. I never thought of it that way, so this was a new learning experience for me.

While reading Chapter 13, I learned how to build the price foundation by the ratio of perceived benefits to price. Pricing has a direct effect on a firm's profits, which is determined by the profit equation, which is “Profit = Total Revenue – Total Cost”. That pricing objectives specify the role of price in a firm's marketing strategy and may include profit, sales revenue, market share, unit volume, survival, or some socially responsible price level. Pricing constraints that restrict a firm's pricing flexibility include demand, product newness, other products sold by the firm, production and marketing costs, cost of price changes, type of competitive market, and the prices of competitive substitutes. This was nice to read about, very fascinating.

While reading Chapter 14, I learned that demand, cost, profit, and competition influence the initial consideration of the approximate price level for a product of service. Demand-oriented pricing approaches stress consumer demand and revenue implications of pricing and include eight types, which are skimming, penetration, prestige, price lining, odd-even, target, bundle, and yield management. Cost-oriented pricing approaches emphasize the cost aspects of pricing and include three types, which are standard markup, cost-plus, and experience curve pricing. Profit-oriented pricing approaches focus on a balance between revenues and costs to set a price and include three types, which are target profit, target return-on-sales pricing, and target return-on-investment pricing. All of this was interesting to read, figuring out all these steps was nice to learn.

And finally when reading Chapter 15, I learned that a supply chain refers to the various firms involved in performing the various activities required to create and deliver a product or service to consumers or industrial users, and that supply chain management is the integration and organization of information and logistics across firms to create value for consumers. Logistics involves those activities that focus on getting the right amount of the right products to the right place at the right time at the lowest possible cost and that logistic management includes the coordination of the flows of both inbound and outbound products, an emphasis on making these flows cost effective, and customer service. I didn't think of it this way and it was nice to read and learn about it.