Question

Identify two successful new venture/ start-up businesses of accounting and explain the key marketing strategies contributed their success. Analyze the superior value created by the marketing strategies.

Answer 1

successful new venture/ start-up businesses of accounting

1. Passion and Motivation

Although there are many traits that make an entrepreneur successful, perhaps the most important are passion and motivation.

• Is there something you can work on over and over again without getting bored?
• Is there something that keeps you awake at night because you haven't finished it yet?
• Is there something you have built and want to continue to improve upon?
• Is there something you enjoy so much you want to continue doing it for the rest of your life?

From building and implementing a prototype to pitching your idea to venture capitalists, success is a function of passion and determination.

2. Not Afraid to Take Risks

Entrepreneurs are risk takers, ready to dive deep into a future of uncertainty. But not all risk takers are successful entrepreneurs. What differentiates a successful entrepreneur from the rest in terms of risk? Successful entrepreneurs are willing to risk their time and money on unknowns, but they also keep resources, plans and bandwidth for dealing with "unknown unknowns" in reserve. When evaluating risk, a successful entrepreneur will ask herself, "Is this risk worth the cost of my career, time and money?" And, "What will I do if this venture doesn't pay off?"

3. Self-belief, Hard Work and Disciplined Dedication

Entrepreneurs believe in themselves and are confident and dedicated to their project. Their intense focus on and faith in their idea may be misconstrued as stubbornness, but it is this willingness to work hard and defy the odds that make them successful.

4. Adaptable and Flexible

Being passionate and dedicated is important, but being inflexible about client or market needs will lead to failure. Remember, an entrepreneurial venture is not simply about doing what you believe is good, but also making a successful business out of it. Successful entrepreneurs welcome all suggestions for optimization or customization that may enhance their offering and satisfy client and market needs.

5. Product and Market Knowledge

Entrepreneurs know their product inside and out. They also know the market. Most become successful because they create something that didn't already exist or they significantly improve an existing product after experiencing frustration with the way it worked. Remaining unaware of changing market needs, competitor moves and other external factors can cause even great products to fail.

6. Strong Money Management

It takes time for any entrepreneurial venture to become profitable. Until then, capital is limited and needs to be utilized wisely. Successful entrepreneurs plan for present and future financial obligations and set aside an emergency fund. Even after securing funding or going fully operational, a successful businessperson keeps a complete handle on cashflow, as it is the most important aspect of any business.

7. Effective Planning (Not Over-Planning) Skills

Entrepreneurship is about building a business from scratch while managing limited resources (including time, money and personal relationships), which requires planning. However, trying to plan for everything and having a ready solution in place for all possible issues may prevent you from ever taking the first step. Successful entrepreneurs have a business plan in place, but remain capable of dealing with unforeseen possibilities.

8. The Right Connections

Many people seek comfort in commiseration—friends, colleagues and neighbors are happy to complain about "the global slowdown,” poor demand, or unfair competition—but that won't improve the bottom line. Successful entrepreneurs reach out to mentors with more experience and extensive networks to seek valuable advice. If they don't have the necessary technical or marketing skills, they find someone who does and delegate these tasks so they can focus on growing the business.

9. Exit Preparedness

Not every attempt will result in success. The failure rate of entrepreneurial ventures is very high. Sometimes, the best solution is to call it quits and try something new instead of continuing to dump money into a failing business. Many famous entrepreneurs weren't successful the first time around, but they knew when to cut their losses.

10. Ability to Question Themselves – But Not Too Much

You may ask yourself, am I an entrepreneur? The very question may make you doubt the answer. Even if you don't have the flair of Steve Jobs or the hair of Elon Musk, if you have the courage to ask yourself intimidating questions—"Can I do this? Do I want to do this?"—you have the stuff to be an entrepreneur.

Analyze the superior value created by the marketing strategies.

In the age of drastic changes organizations need sustainable competitive advantage to cope with changes and to succeed. They can create, sustain and use competitive advantage through strategic management. Organizations can formulate strategies that their implementation results in sustainable competitive advantage. Marketing strategies seem to be an important type of these strategies. Traditionally, according to an integrated approach which integrates resource-based view (RBV) and market-based view, organizations could develop marketing strategies based on their internal capabilities and external position. Then they implement these strategies to create competitive advantage through their core competencies include creating value for customers, attracting and satisfying them. Marketing strategies play two important roles to sustain competitive advantage: (1) encourage customers to return (according to market-based view), and (2) create distinctive competencies through making core competencies VRIO (according to RBV). VRIO refers to Valuable, Rare, not Imitable and to be able to Organize. In today's turbulent environment, VRIO and customer retention are necessary but not adequate to sustain competitive advantage and achieve superior performance. Then organizations must be market/customer oriented, think and act based on innovative knowledge, make a useful and long term relationship with their customers. This qualification is for those organizations that are able to be knowledge-based, formulate its marketing strategies and sustain its competitive advantage based on its own knowledge. In other words its marketing strategy is intelligent. Organizations must consider innovative knowledge as a new input to sustain competitive advantage and to develop intelligent marketing strategy (more than internal capability and external position as existing inputs). In this paper, we are going to contribute a new perspective to develop marketing strategy. It is sustaining competitive advantage and developing intelligent marketing strategy (IMS) through innovative knowledge to achieve superior performance. Accordingly we have developed a comprehensive model of Intelligent Marketing Strategy.

Scholars identify the value proposition as representing the essence of strategy and the firm's single most important organizing principle. However, research suggests less than 10 per cent of companies formally develop value propositions. The purpose of this paper is to undertake case study research investigating the process by which leading companies develop their value propositions.