Graeff´s Blog

international Communication

pricing strategy

Good Consulting Company Simon, Kucher and Partner

• skimming pricing

Market Rollout is normally done with a waterfall modell, US / Western Europe Markets, Developing Countries, non – developed countries

• penetration pricing

concentration on unit sales and scale effects

dynamic Pricing modell

07:00 rain, therefor no jogging

09:00 strategic Management

The theories about Michael Porter are today in the center of my studies. Strategy is about finding a sustainable competitive advantage.

We see a nice case study about Ivory Soap Bar – it is a story about how to to change the SCA of a product without loosing customers.

Later on we are talking about value chain and a case study about cochelar. Last case study is about morgan car

07:00 get up for jogging, 5km through the nice old town of krems

09:00 strategic management – professor stockport

We are doing a nice case study about airtransport deregulation efforts in australia during the late 1980´s.

We´re doing a 5 forces analysis – a toolset developed by michael porter – of this case study. there are two issues with that toolset, first of all it is static in time, and second of all there is an issue with business boundries.

An important outcome for me is the following sentence:

Price is never an strategic issue, it is only a variable of marketing costs.

Next Theory we´re playing with is game theory – it´s all about PARTS. we go through different models like egocentric and allocentric games. Great ideas about changing the game from playing win – loose games to win – win situations like cooptition.

We learned that price wars are not a good option for capturing the value – so it´s better sometimes to

Raise the fog

After looking onto a nice Michael Porter Video about his 5 Force Analysis we´re getting again to the core of strategic management, it´s all about

Creating Value and capturing it.

if the businesses are not capable of capturing it, it is a industry which is not favourable and we should focus on a strategy for improving this. For example frequent flyer programs of airlines or credit card programms are solutions for getting out of the price war trap.

we finished with a video about apricot computer, which has three different lines of business but one of them is in a quite bad shape.

Business is very often about killing your favorite child to save the family.

a hard lesson to learn.

20:30 Weingut Nigl – after a hard day some nice food.

great day, it starts to get really cold here – 1° celsius and some snowrain.

07:45 business english

09:00 again professor stockport

The Art of Strategy is to maken it happen.

Donald Sull

• find the right anchor
• secure the anchor
• realign the people

today we are talking about the strategic Proces and the Management of the key stakeholders.

Strategic Process

• Plan – Andrews SWOT / Ansoff / Argenti
• Crafting /Learning Henry Mintzberg / Peter M. Senge
• culture – Edgar H. Schein -  stratey process is about culture
• political – Jeffrey Pfeffer – power in organisations
• entrepreneurial – Daniel Katz and Robert L. Kahn – it´s about leadership and vision
• environment – michael porter – 5 forces analysis, hamel + pralahad / hamel skills competences, ressources
• stakeholders – stockport

Strategic Management by Professor Gary Stockport

so, I´m back to good old krems. today I start with my 8th module about strategic management. after preparing about 5cm double printed case studies and theory articles we start today with two very interesting case studies about a company called semco which was originally founded by an emigrated austrian engineer.

the first case study is about the inner picture of the company, the key issue is to change cultur to achive trust by the people.

the second case study is about the external environment of the company, the so called brasilian roller coaster economy.

we´re talking a lot about how to implement strategic management, which steps have to be taken, which fields should be covered by strategic management.

we´re talking a lot about the 6 mayor theoratical frameworks of strategic management, which we are going through the next seven days.

principles of strategic management:

• focus
• ask the right questions
• value creation, capture of value
• trade offs
• reduce complexity, try to get simplier
• doing the right things versus doing things right
• strategy is through ALL people
• be proactive
• look at the critical success factors
• choose the right theory and frameworks and use them proberly
• nothing feels like success !!!

befor we leave we see a video, a nice case study about not to implement strategic mangement. It´s about interflora and their former senior manager Doug and Dave – the failed in implemented a mayor strategic transformation because of not asking the right questions, listening to their stakeholders, but instead rushing directly into an implementation of a new strategy.