Question

5. Why is planning so important? If this is so important why do businesses, choose to neglect planning? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

6. What is a competitive edge? Why must businesses have them? What if they don’t? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

7. What is marketing research? How can it benefit a business? What all does it involve? How do you develop a strategy? Why have a target market? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Answer 1

5. Planning helps the project manager to systematically plan the execution of a project. It includes estimating the required manpower, equipment and resources (funds and materials), assigns tasks and duties to individual team members, forms a mechanism to monitor and control processes, schedule activities and multi-projects, risk mitigation and management, and so on. Thus, it is important to ensure the project is successfully completed

Though business leaders and professionals know the importance of planning, they often ignore it or miss it. They either are over-confident or are too eager to deliver results, rather than ensuring the project success.

6. Competitive edge is the advantage or key selling point which differentiates one product from other similar or substitute products of different brands. Therefore, it results in giving a leverage to the product. It helps businesses earn preference from customer perspective and increase sales of the product.

However, if an organization fails to win the competitive edge, then it must face a tough competition from it's rival firms. Also, in case the rival firms possess competitive edge, then the organization would suffer in terms of low sales and low market share.

7. Marketing research is a systematic process of identifying market related opportunities and threats. It helps business realize the opportunities and tap them to maximize profitability and gain higher sales. Also, risk identification and management is facilitated through the threats and problems in the market. This makes the firm stronger and more proactive than reactive.

Having a target market will help you focus better, i.e. the firm is able to customize and attend to customers better. The strategies are more successful and organizations reap higher benefits.