The results of a three-year study of the objectives, strategies and organization of American subsidiaries are presented. Their operations are compared against a matched sample of competitive British and Japanese subsidiaries. American subsidiaries were found to be less ambitious, more orientated...

A study of 379 of Britain's largest companies suggests ways of improving a firm's capacity to innovate. It is shown that innovation is not about new technology but rather about developing brands which meet the needs of customers more effectively than products or services currently on the market....

Western companies tend to over focus on profitability as a measure of performance. Exceptional success on one such measure of performance invariably creates organisational instability because it implies minimising expectations. Peter Doyle introduces the notion of a tolerance zone whereby the...

Marketing has not had the impact in the boardroom that its importance justifies. The major reason is that marketers have failed to show how marketing activities and costs influence shareholder value. Instead they have relied on metrics such as sales volume and customer awareness that are...

History suggests that the success of many of today's most admired companies is likely to prove illusory. All too often their current performance is not based on superior competitiveness and is not sustainable. Companies exhibiting high growth can be described as following one of three paths:...

The allocation of scarce shelf space among competing products is a central problem in retailing. Space allocation affects store profitability through both the demand function, where both main and cross space elasticities have to be considered, and through the cost function (procurement, carrying...

Channel optimization in multiple-channel systems is a basic problem in marketing and one which has not received much attention in the literature. A model is presented which simultaneously solves three distribution decisions--the manufacturer's choice of channels (channel strategy), the number of...