Business Life

As companies have grown larger they have become separated both geographically and culturally from the markets and customers they serve. Disney, an American corporation, has operations in Europe, Asia and Australasia, as well as in the USA. Benetton, the French fashion brand has operations across fi ve continents. In retailing alone it operates over 7000 stores and concessions. Companies such as these generate a huge volume of data that  needs to be converted into information that can be used for both operational and analytical purposes. The data warehouse is a solution to that problem. Data warehouses are really no more than repositories of large amounts of operational, historical and other customer-related data. Data volume can reach terabyte levels, i.e. 2 40 bytes of data. A warehouse is a  repository for data imported from other databases. Attached to the front end of the warehouse is a set of analytical procedures for making sense out of the data. Retailers, home shopping...

Privacy and data protection are major concerns to legislators around the world. Customers are increasingly concerned about the amount of information commercial organizations have about them, and the uses to which that information is put. In fact, consumers are not aware of just how much information is available to companies. When you use the Internet, small programmes called cookies are downloaded onto your hard disk from the sites you visit. A  very small number of websites obtain permission from their site visitors prior to the download; most do not. There have been two major responses to the privacy concerns of customers. The fi rst is self-regulation by companies and associations. For example, a number of companies publish their privacy policies and make a commercial virtue out of their transparency. Professional bodies in fi elds such as direct marketing, advertising and market  research have adopted codes of practice that members must abide by. The second response has be...

Fourthly, the demand for input goods and services by companies is derived from end user demand. Household demand for bread creates organizational demand for fl our. Fifthly, organizational buying is conducted in a professional way. Unlike household buyers, procurement offi cers for companies are often professionals with formal training. Buying processes can be rigorously formal, particularly for mission-critical goods and services,   a decision-making unit composed of interested parties may be formed to defi ne requirements, search for suppliers, evaluate proposals and make a sourcing decision. Often, the value of a single organizational purchase is huge: buying an airplane, bridge or power station is a massive purchase few households will ever match. Finally, much B2B trading is  direct. In other words, there are no channel intermediaries and suppliers sell direct to customers. These differences mean that the CPM process is very different in the two contexts. In the B2B ...

As the use of the internet increases, so does the use of social media channels. These channels have become a part of everyday life and are changing the way of communication and information exchange. Today, more and more business-to-business (B2B) companies are adopting social media marketing (SMM) to communicate with their customers. Although small  and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) have also started adopting SMM to increase their brand awareness, the existing literature is very limited on this subject. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to identify and describe challenges SMEs face adopting social media marketing in order to increase their brand awareness. In order to achieve the purpose of this thesis a qualitative research method was selected and four semi-structured interviews with marketing  directors and coordinators at three SMEs were conducted. The result of this thesis shows that SMEs face some common challenges like financial and human resources, lack of time ...