Background
Discuss About The Journal Of Engineering Technology Management.
All businesses, regardless of the sector or industry require appropriate or quality marketing to enable their services and products become common to customers and attract investors. They make assurance of providing every embracing correspondence in standards expansion via working practices innovation in marketing. It is therefore necessary to conduct a research so as determine the most appropriate approach a business can employ to enhance products and services marketable features. Such are features that deal with comprehensive and conform to the correct statutes of profitable, social, trustworthy and lawful aspects which are environmentally conscious. This article proposes and research to be undertaken for the aforementioned purpose while highlighting the best procedure Tony Bianco fashion footwear should adopt to increase marketability of its brand. Firstly, there is a keen glance on the prior conducted studies and research on the topic thus drafting a literature review to make the researchers gain awareness on what issues to concentrate on during their research. It points out on decisions the shoe company is expected to make as regards marketability of a Tony Bianco brand and the impact of the research. A research design that is deemed most appropriate to the kind of research intended is proposed as well with all procedures highlighted step by step. The article does not end without discussion of the ethical issues to be observed during the research as well as stipulated the anticipated time frame of the research.
The management of a product or service involves a wide scope of management practices. It ranges from the period there is a new ideology for a product to finally offering a continuing support to clients and purchasers of the new service or product. Each organization carries out a product development. It might be done intentionally or happen unintentionally. This research proposal focuses on broad overview of considerations in product management and development. This includes activities such as branding preference which attracts both the customers and investors who have interests in the product. The target market of Tony Bianco is women and mostly the young ones who like designer and trendy shoes. The development or management of a product is highly dependent on the nature of the management system of the organization. It is important to note that different individuals possess different activities categorization. That is why it is important to conduct a research in order to determine the best and productive approaches in making a product or services marketable. The trading approach on communication is necessary to improve the marketable features of services and products. Features are essential since the offers customers with hints on how a certain product or service will be able to deliver its benefits. Even if benefits are more important than features in general, at times features can make all the difference. Due to the mergence and flooding of shoe companies in Australian market, Tony Bianco has been compelled to up their game through provision of creative and unique feature on their product thus the reason for thus study.
Managers’ Problem
Tony Bianco’s management is tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that their shoes conform to the current market need and trends. If there is no conformity with the current market trends, customers might opt for alternative products in the same line of business. This can greatly affect the revenue and profits of an organization as there is no one to sell their products to. If no sales are made there is no generation of income and eventually the business might end up shutting down. That is why it is important for the management of to develop correct approaches and strategy of ensuring the product is in the best marketable condition. After this research, the shoe line will be able to have their products in the best and presentable condition, including labeling, branding and features making fashionable women opt for them instead of other competing brands such as Alias Mae, Jaggar Footware and Wittner. Various shoes vendors will also be attracted to the brand due its high rate of moving off the shelf.
This literature review aims at presenting current knowledge on the present management issue. It is carried out on the basic disciplines of product or service development to make marketable and appealing to the customer. According to Steve Olenski, (Aug 29, 2017) it is more challenging for small or starting brands to make their product or service marketable than it is for larger established brands. The more a person continues to explore the literature the more they realize that the said larger and established brands are usually guilt of complacency (Baker, et. al., 2015). From different sorts of archived literature, it is evident that prior research and study has realized some of the essential elements that make a product or service appealing to the clientele base outside there.
A brand image that is consistent assists customers to recognize an organizations products and services as soon as possible (Gitter, 2014). The brand image can turn out to be anything that a business posts online or offline including such things as paid advertisements, posts on social media platforms, blog articles, packaging of the product, website design, and flyers and brochures. Numerous factors can be an influence to the image of the brand from fonts and colors chosen to once content tone. The consistent image can be used to enhance brand awareness that drives engagement and render a brand more marketable.
Literature Review
Amid key performance indicators, a business will not have the knowledge of the sort of metrics to track it as it pursues advertising and marketing efforts. For instance, managers in younger entities/businesses might need to track key performance indicators such as cost per lead and conversion rates while brands that are more established might find more value, inbound marketing return, and traffic-to-lead ratio on investments.
Once the management is aware of their business KPIs, they should religiously track them. Adjustments that are deemed to move the needle in the right direction as a brand becomes more marketable are worth making. For example, specific statistics like a higher customer rate of retention might be marketing tools by themselves.
In addition, management is expected to let key performance indicators evolve as the business continues to grow. As the business wins more clientele base and stock keeping units in the entire market, it can consider shifting towards new metrics. KPIs which are more advanced like NPS (net promoter score), can assist in making a decision on where to concentrate marketing efforts.
The business might not be reaching an audience that is not wide enough. For example, in case much of the efforts in marketing revolve such or general marketing, management should consider branching into outbound or even social media marketing. Through the development of content for a new channel, an entrepreneur gains the opportunity to present their brand to a different new audience. For example, one’s friends on Facebook may not be their followers on Instagram and Twitter accounts and the vice versa is true. Management should make a keynote on their reach expansion to upgrade market share and visibility of the brand.
Telling appealing stories about a brand can make it more marketable. It transforms an emotionless brand to an empire followed by real people. Begin with the business’s corporate “about” page. Tell the audience how the brand t started, its founders and the reason behind starting the business. Develop narratives into different pieces of content as well. Opt-in soliciting user-generated content from influencers and customers. Allow them to put their experiences in their own words (Mattson, 2012). Testimonials and other kinds of social proof can provide the marketing campaign with some teeth and offer an opportunity for it to spread faster.
In the present day, consumer desire to get engaged with companies which are socially responsible. A brand can be differentiated from the competition with corporate social responsibility through different them (Davis, 2018). Some the practical activities include provide improved work-life benefits for the staff, supporting local charities, try to keep the environment within which it operates clean and green and ensuring that those policies are known.
Form a consistent brand image
Some organizations host volunteer weekends with their staff and sponsor youth sports team in the locality. Think of posting pictures in social media platforms. For example, in case of a voluntary service with the staff, the group can take a shot and post it online before starting the work. Nevertheless, consumers of today have become overly smart (Healey, 2011). They have the ability to detect untrue CSR. Therefore, the management should focus their efforts in maintaining advertisement legitimate CSR.
It is not very complicate to make a brand more if the management is committed to it. All that is required for them is to formulate a good plan before. With the awareness on the way to enhance marketability it is possible to track relevant metrics and make adjustments as the business progresses. By going through the history of research and recorded literature on the issues, it is determined that all mechanisms of increasing the marketability of a brand are not exhausted or rather realized. Therefore, this research proposal suggests a research that is aimed at revealing more ways to increasing marketability of a brand and providing managers with appropriate approaches to develop and implement them.
- Research Design and Method
After literature review completion, it is evident that there is the necessity for two-phase research design. The reason is the nature of the research objective and targeted market should be further specified prior to employment of any descriptive designs. Therefore, the proposed research design will be categorized into an exploratory phase and later the descriptive phase.
The research will initially start with exploratory stage, since influential dimensions will be examined prior to targeting of the descriptive research properly. Thus, the first stage should diagnose the dimensions the dimensions influencing attitudes towards preference and choice of brands. This will enable an efficient following descriptive research. Qualitative data regarding attitudes, opinions, and feelings by consumers towards specific brands is necessary for collection to clearly understand the issue. Thus, this initial staged is employed as a concept tester examining the perception toward marketability of a product. It should be noted that exploratory research provides indications that cannot be generalized. Therefore, the hypothesis developed in this stage should be examined with the application of descriptive design of research.
The main objective of the descriptive phase of research is to examine the hypothesis derived from the prior stage, to build an outcome that can be generalized (Buchbinder, 2013). Therefore the reason for the second phase is to point out and define partial variables influencing the capacity of management to develop a service or product brand that is highly marketable. So in this phase it will be describe specific issues particularly identified which are well suited by the descriptive design. Additionally, a descriptive design will enable managers to apply the results in making valuable decisions regarding the marketability Tony Bianco brand. Before starting the hypothesis, it will be necessary to gather conclusions from the exploratory phase. Therefore, in this research proposal there will be no further consideration of the descriptive stage.
Adoption of Realistic and Relevant KPIs
Questionnaires and interviews are considered as the most appropriate method to conduct this survey (Cervone, 2010). It is important to derive first information from the managers, business owners, and current and potential customers of different brands. This will enable the researcher to understand the reason why customers prefer certain brands over the other in the open market. It will also be possible to determine what approaches managers are using to render their shoes marketable and the form of challenges they encounter while trying to do so.
- Conduct the research outside the clientele base – It is valuable to get the consumer fulfillment feedback from the presently existing customers. However, for expansion of the audience and the will be need for opinions from people outside the clientele base. Find different individuals to interview and respond to questionnaires. This might lead to realization of other issues that no one thought of before. Instead of only focusing on women who where their shoes, men and older women can also be question on what they think of the brand, and how they perceive women who where them.
- Be specific – start with demography study of direct customer such as shoe wearers and vendors. This mighty target a particular audience or groups but ensure that the questions have features that can go diverse.
- Be broad – interrogate workers from other shoe manufacturers to get a wide scope of the problem solving in different dimensions. Go for the customers of these different brands as well. Collect as much information as possible and try to found out if there are different preferences for different shoes and how they are impacted by marketability.
Given the three months time frame provided to conduct the research, there is no need to overspend to get answers. The researcher is required to take advantage of the smart cost-effective tools. For instance, survey monkey audience offers an opportunity to reach millions of respondents willing to respond to the questions posed. Make sure that the efforts are possibly effective to enable reaching out to the target market.
Find out the extent to which customer are satisfied with by use of different other brands. Ask what they would prefer done better for the products and services they do not like. Learn about consumer experience by asking questions such as “what appeals you to another shoe line?” and is it likely for to recommend your supplier to others?
Product and service development
Some of the businesses have a great ideology for particular service or product. But competing with other brands is in the management is challengeable. Regardless of the services and products quality and efficiency over others in the market they might still lag behind due to their poor marketability. Apply relevant researchers research questions to get the participants explain how likely they are to reuse Tony Bianco shoes and if not or yes, why? Or, what would make them opt for upcoming shoe designs?
Demographics
Income, age, and gender of the consumers and the target audience of a particular business are the characteristics which lead to its development successfully and marketing of their product (Von, 2013). This will make it possible to better understand target customers preferences and whether their vendor is able to meet them and if so how? This part of the questionnaire will definitely target business owners and managers. Pose to the questions like how do your brand your products and what platforms you use to market and advertise the products to the target market. What is the age of typical customers and how frequent do they purchase your products? Have they recommended other people to come and purchase your products?
Expound business boundaries
Industry-specific surveys
Get into detail with shoe dealers in particular and ensure that like questions are posed both to the managers of the business and their clients. For instance, questions such as when selecting a shoe for your feet, what matters the most to you? Or, “is this the first time for you to Wittner shoe brand, how perfectly do you feel that this brand and design suits your preferences?”, will be viable to provide a quality response.
It will be important to observe survey ethics in order to ensure legal protection and appropriate conduct of the research without offending any participant. One of the benefits of research that is based on questionnaire or interview is that it is usually a cheap tool to collect information from a massive population (Chopra & Gajjala, 2012). Ensuring ethics are met is promise to the Tony Bianco that their actions are in good faith and safeguards the resulting data integrity.
From the design of the questionnaire or the interview is where ethics begin. The question posed in either way must be objective and clear. There should be the avoidance of leading queries that prompt a response via selection of words or insufficient rage of response. Interview and surveys are supposed to have hypothetical question or those that are developed in a way to make respondents feel embarrassed.
There should be tricking or compelling respondents to participate in the interview or questionnaire in any case. Respondents are supposed to be told the nature and reason for the study and any consequences of participating. Participants are to be permitted to forward questions and if they wish they can quit the survey.
In case participation has caused harm to the participant debriefing is important. For instance, surveys on sensitive issues such as health matters make participants to have anxiety moods and false positive anticipations for a number of the respondents. Debriefing session is critical in ethical research in order to give support to the respondents who might feel negatively impacted by being part of the survey. When dealing with people who have deformed feet, in this kind of study, they should be asked questions that do not make them embarrassed about their condition.
Confidentiality must not only be promised to the participants but should also be protected. Regardless of the extent to which the results are interesting, surveyors should not expose obtained data with family members or friends (Vahidi and Eskandarian 2003). Information from a particular project must not be shared or sold to other projects.
Develop Appealing Narratives
Every specific survey requires an ample period of time to ensure that the study is conducted into details. Given the scope of the survey, and the procedure suggested by this proposal, it is estimated that three months will be the appropriate time to complete the study. The first two to three weeks will be a preparation of the researcher with several meeting being carried out by the surveyors. During this step questions and timetables will be formulated which must be adhered to throughout the process. Week three to week nine will be on the ground research conduct. All groups will alternate periodically to ensure that they conduct research on the all the selected sectors and bring forth their findings. The last three weeks will be used to analyze the findings and make conclusions as well as recommendations.
Task |
Period |
Moderators training |
1st week |
Material preparation and participant identification |
2nd & 3rd weeks |
Data collection |
4th to 9th weeks |
Result analysis |
10th and 11th weeks |
Drawing conclusions and recommendations |
12th week |
This kind of research was selected due to its inexpensive nature and easy to reach out to a greater audience. Therefore, minimal expenditure is expected for this kind of research. A few bucks will be set aside for the refreshment while the survey groups meet. Other expenses to be used include those for purchasing papers, pens, and transportation of the research personnel. Since the survey will mostly be done in a few hours of the day, there will be no need to set aside money for meals.
Item |
Amount in USD |
Stationary |
200 |
Refreshments |
90 |
Commuting |
350 |
Fees |
500 |
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