MARKETING RESEARCH

The principal activity of General Mills is to produce and market packaged consumer food products. The products include cereals, desserts, flour and baking mixes, dinner and side dish products, organic products, snacks, beverages and yogurt products. The products are sold under the brand names namely: Cheerios, Wheaties, Lucky Charms, Total, Chex, Pillsbury, Haagen-Dazs, Betty Crocker and Bugles. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is one of the major customers of the Group. As of 2005, the company operated in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe and Asia/Pacific.

In order to determine the impact of an important strategic move, such as lowering prices or introducing new products, General Mills uses marketing research. General Mills ran into problems when a pesticide panic hurt sales and private label makers started to cut into their market share. Store brands have become increasingly popular with consumers. Store owners took advantage of cereal prices of up to $5 per box, resulting in increased market share for the store brands. At least one cereal maker, Quaker Oats, started making a house brand version of its cereal. Quaker’s lower priced-bagged-copies of leading brands have grown rapidly and advanced Quaker’s market share to over 10%. Ralcorp Holdings Inc., the leading maker of private label cereals, expects the trend of house or private brands gaining increased market share to continue, since only about half of the leading cereals have private label competition. Ralcorp expects to gain a larger portion of the market as it continues to introduce more imitations. Some industry experts believe that unless the big brand name cereal prices are cut, or the promotions increased, this trend will continue.

In order to address this problem, General Mills conducted problem solving research to determine what, if any changes they should make to their price and promotions strategy. In order to determine the effects of changes, consumer surveys were undertaken followed by test marketing. The results of General Mills test markets suggested several pricing and promotional changes that would help increase their success. General Mills cut prices on several of its cereal lines. Along with this price reduction, General Mills cut its coupon and promotion budget in an effort to halt spiraling costs and to reduce the price gap between General Mills’ products and the competition, which had been as high as 25% in the past.   

In addition to lowering prices, General Mills launched sweetened cereals to capture the aging baby boomer market. In January 2005, the company introduced Fiber One Honey Clusters, which has slightly sweetened flakes instead of the original Fiber One’s fiber twigs. This introduction was based on the belief that if a product does not taste good, it does not matter what the nutritional benefits are. It is not going to be a success. The sweetened cereals have also helped to insulate General Mills from price competition. Private labels are less likely to knock off the sweetened brands, either because they are too narrowly targeted at market niches or because store labels cannot compete with the hefty marketing budget of General Mills. These moves have increased General Mills’ sales and profits. The strategy of consistently low prices and introducing niche products, supported by marketing research, is paying high dividends for General Mills.

Questions

2.              If General Mills decides to conduct causal research to determine the effects of the "Fiber One Honey Clusters' flavor" on demand for cereals by baby boomers, what type of true experiments would you advise them to design? why and how? . (20 points -200 words approx.)

ASAP PLEASE!!!!

1. Jamison Day Consultants has been entrusted with the task of evaluating a business plan that has been divided into four sections?marketing, finance, operations, and human resources. Chris, Steve, Juana, and Rebecca form the evaluation team. Each of them has expertise in a certain field and tends to finish that section faster. The estimated times taken by each team member for each section have been outlined in the table below. Further information states that each of these individuals is paid $60 per hour.

Table 1: Times Taken by Team Members for Different Sections (minutes)

1. Assign each member to a different section such that Jamison Consultants’s overall cost is minimized.
2. What is the total cost of these assignments?

1. Note taking is an important academic task. What advice will you give students who do not write notes in class? Why?

2. Methods for making notes from reading are different from those from lectures. Mention FOUR methods of making notes from reading ?

3. What does setting a priority mean? Give an Example.

4.STUDY SKILLS can be viewed as four categories of skills. They are

You have just been appointed as an innovation manager in an ambitious medium-sized company designing and producing power tools (such as drills and saws). The company wants to promote breakthrough innovation. One of your first tasks is to think about innovation performance metrics to use. What advice will you give to the CEO regarding the metrics?

Please read and answer questions

Freshdesk is a cloud-based platform that offers Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions for common customer service functions, such as automated handling of customer support tickets, maintenance of community forums, live chat support and phone support, and an automatically updated knowledge base that converts common customer service responses into permanent articles. Businesses sign up for one of several payment plans depending on their budgets and needs, ranging from as low as $15 per month to pricier plans for businesses with more significant customer service demands.Founded in 2010, Freshdesk has found a niche among companies requiring a customer support platform that could scale along with their growth. Along with competitors Zendesk and Salesforce.com’s Desk.com, Freshdesk has experienced rapid growth, reaching over 80,000 customers as of 2016. As an SaaS-based platform, Freshdesk realized that it made more sense to move its own operations to the cloud than to invest heavily in its own in-house infrastructure. So while thousands of companies are now relying on Freshdesk for their customer service software, Freshdesk itself relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to house its software platform.When Amazon revamped its retail computing infrastructure over the course of several years starting in 2003, it also had the idea to sell access to its virtual servers to other companiesin need of computing power. Today, AWS has grown far beyond that initial idea, offering a full suite of remote computing services that are distributed across 11 geographical regions across the world to maximize availability and speed. AWS data and applications are stored redundantly in multiple regions to ensure uninterrupted uptime. The most well known AWSservice is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which offers virtual computing power to customers to run their own computer applications. Customers pay by the hour for the computing power they use and select the geographical location that optimizes speed. Amazon’s own flagship retail website is also housed on EC2 and is fully powered by other AWS services. AWS also includes products for databases, networking, security, analytics, mobile services, deployment and management, enterprise applications, and more.When Freshdesk decided that it would use the cloud to power its software platform, it selected AWS over competing services like Google Compute Engine and Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines. AWS appealed to Freshdesk because of its wide variety of services, its rapid scalability, and its pay-as-you-go payment plan. AWS Enterprise Support also helped Freshdesk minimize its costs further by picking the most efficient services for operating its platform. For Freshdesk, that meant Amazon Redshift database services and Amazon OpsWorks deployment and management services. Amazon Redshift is one of Amazon’s data warehouse services. The primary selling points of Redshift are its scalability, its ability to seamlessly integrate with all of the major business intelligence tools needed to run queries on and analyze the data it contains, and its built-in encryption feature. Building a data warehouse is a challenging task, requiring expensive.investment and in-house infrastructure and staff. Scaling the system to grow as the business grows is also challenging. Freshdesk preferred to use Redshift for its data warehousing needs for these reasons.As with the rest of AWS’ offerings, payment for Redshift is pay-as-you-go, with options to commit to full years of service for a discount. There are also options for type of storage. Dense Storage (DW1) nodes allow for very large data warehouses using hard disk drives. Dense Computer (DW2) nodes allow for higher performance with large amounts of RAM and solid- state disks. DW1 nodes are more cost-effective, but DW2 nodes are better for performance.Scaling is as easy as updating the number of nodes in your Redshift console.Redshift houses Freshdesk’s data, but Amazon OpsWorks manages its software applications, the cornerstone of Freshdesk’s business. OpsWorks is an application management service that allows companies to use Amazon’s computing resources to deploy and run their applications. Coding and operating applications is a complicated, time-intensive task. OpsWorks minimizes the effort required for Freshdesk to maintain its customer service applications. With OpsWorks, Freshdesk can use Amazon’s application servers and databases, and use simple tools to manage application deployment, software configurations, software package installations, and database setups.OpsWorks offers more convenience tool than other Amazon offerings like CloudFormation or EC2, at a cost of some customizability. But it also offers more customizability than Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk service, which is intended to simplify the application deployment process as much as possible. Freshdesk opted for OpsWorks to maintain control of its applications, while allowing Amazon to manage many of the tasks relating to the operation and deployment of the applications. An increasing number of businesses are turning to remote computing services on the cloud to reap benefits like these.

1. Why was Freshdesk a good candidate for remote computing services on the cloud?

2. What was Freshdesk’s experience working with AWS?

3. What made Amazon Redshift and OpsWorks good fits for Freshdesk?

A company is trying to reduce inventory by installing a kanban system for compressors on one of its assembly lines. The setup cost = $10, Annual holding cost per compressor is $100, Daily production is 200 compressors, Annual usage is 20000, The lead time is 3 days, safety stock is 12 day’s production of compressors. Determine the size of the kanban and the number of kanbans (containers) needed.

what are various Business environments that Hungry Lion operates in as they have an impact on the successful operation of the business?( 20 Marks)

Question 2 1 Point A manager is best described as a person who is responsible for ________.

accomplishing the organization's goals

communicating with stockholders

teaching new employees basic skills

delegating authority to subordinates

Question 3 1 Point Which of the following represents the five functions of planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling?

management process strategic

management succession

planning adaptability

screening

Question 4 1 Point Which basic function of management includes developing rules and procedures?

planning

organizing

leading

staffing

Question 5 1 Point What specific activities listed below are part of the planning function?

developing rules and procedures

giving each subordinate a specific task

training and developing employees

establishing quality standards

Question 6 1 Point Which function of the management process includes delegating authority to subordinates and establishing channels of communication?

organizing

motivating

leading

staffing

Question 7 1 Point All of the following are activities performed within the staffing function of the management process EXCEPT ________.

recruiting employees

maintaining morale

evaluating performance providing

training

Question 8 1 Point In the management process, which activity is part of the staffing function?

evaluating performance

maintaining morale

developing rules

setting production levels

Describe using appropriate examples from real life products, the characteristics and benefits of Group Technology and Cellular Layout. Please be very detailed in your answers.

1. The following jobs are waiting to be processed at the same machine center. Jobs are logged as they arrive:

In what sequence would the jobs be ranked according to the following decision rules: (a) FCFS, (b) EDD, (c) SPT, and (d) LPT? Which decision is best and why?

All dates are specified as manufacturing planning calendar days. Assume that all jobs arrive on day 275.

What is a good Incident response plan proposal for a power failure before the incident, during the incident, and after the incident occurs? what is to be done by IT staff (technical operations), and what is to be done by non-IT staff (end users)?

“The process of new product development is typically a linear process”. Do you agree with this statement? Why (not)? Illustrate with an example / examples.

Explain the significance and importance of the warehousing industry using examples from real life. Also, considering the fact that the US is moving from a manufacturing economy to a Service oriented economy, do you think the warehousing industry will become obsolete in the future? Give appropriate reasons from your answer and be very detailed in your answers.

1. What are the economics of social networking? What does it take to win? Facebook Fake News in the Post -Truth World topic

300 words