Strategic Business Activities Research Articles

L’Oréal’s Market Strategy: How Business Activities Shape Brand Performance

This paper examines the market strategy of L’Oréal, one of the world’s leading cosmetics groups, and the impact of its business activities on brand performance. The research focuses on the multifaceted approach of L’Oréal in leveraging its global presence and diverse brand portfolio to enhance market performance. By analyzing L’Oréal’s strategic initiatives, including product innovation, digital marketing, sustainability efforts, and regional market adaptation, the study explores how these activities contribute to the company’s competitive advantage and financial success. The paper draws upon a comprehensive analysis of L’Oréal’s business activities review to understand the correlation between strategic and brand performance. It also considers the role of L’Oréal’s marketing mix and the application of SWOT analysis to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats faced by the company. The findings contribute to the existing body of knowledge on corporate strategy and brand management, offering valuable insights for both academicians and practitioners in the field of marketing and business management. The study concludes with recommendations for L’Oréal to sustain its market leadership and further enhance brand performance through strategic business activities.

SELECTION OF SUPPLIERS IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN

In recent decades, procurement has been defined as an integrated strategic business activity that aims to create high added value based on the focus company’s relationship in the supply chain with its suppliers. The selection of suppliers in the supply chain is a complex task that should be performed in a cost-effective manner, taking into account the numerous requirements of business practice. The optimal supplier choice affects not only the product quality but also the formation of its price. The right choice of suppliers leads to timely, continuous and quality production. The decision on the choice of a supplier is a multi-criteria problem. A large number of models and techniques are used to make such a decision. The paper develops a framework to support decision-making and criteria-based prioritization of suppliers. The aim of this paper is to present the elements and specifics of the application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process as one of the multi-criteria decision-making techniques and SpiceLogic Ration Will software package as well as their relevance for supplier selection. In addition, based on the analyzed literature, the paper indicates the criteria used when choosing a supplier. The obtained results show that supplier 1 is the most important among the analyzed suppliers. The application of the SpiceLogic software package is justified, as the proposed package provides a platform for manufacturers to better understand the capabilities that sustainable suppliers must have in order to continue working with them and successfully manage the supply chain.

Sustainable development goals and the strategic role of business: A systematic literature review

AbstractThe United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an urgent call for action by all countries that provide a global framework for achieving global development while balancing social, economic, and environmental sustainability. SDGs are addressed to all actors in society, but both academia and professional recognize the particular importance of businesses. However, research is still needed to understand the role of companies as sustainable development agents. Relying on Scopus database consultation, the current research adopts an interdisciplinary systematic literature review to investigate, analyze, and present state‐of‐the‐art academic literature on the role of businesses in tackling SDGs. The final sample comprises 101 papers published between 2015 and 2020. It provides evidence that the main topics discussed by scholars are related to aspects of strategy execution. Recognizing different streams that are currently unexplored—despite strictly related to strategic business activities and to the sustainable development as a whole—the study provides many insights for future research on business and SDGs.

The Impact of IT‑Business Alignment on SME Performance: The Mediating Effects of Strategic Collaboration, Coordination, and Responsiveness

The alignment between information technology (IT) and business strategy is regarded as an ongoing issue for information systems (IS) researchers and practitioners. Although prior studies suggest the enabling role of IT‑business alignment on firm performance, our understanding of the processes through which such gains are achieved in the small‑to‑medium enterprise (SME) context still remains unclear. Moreover, there is limited research exporing how SMEs employ the alignment between IT and business strategy to work closely with their business partners in order to achieve business competences. In order to address these research gaps, this study investigates whether and how IT‑business alignment enables SMEs to achieve performance goals through developing strategic business activities effectively and efficiently. Using structural equation modelling analyses of survey responses collected from 211 Australian high growth SMEs, we find positive, significant, and impactful linkages between IT‑business alignment, strategic collaboration, coordination, responsiveness, and SME performance. The results also show that strategic collaboration, coordination, and responsiveness fully mediate the relationship between IT‑business alignment and SME performance. This study contributes to the IS research by providing empirically‑supported explanations for the critical role of IT‑business alignment in SME success. More significantly, through investigating the effect of IT‑business alignment at the inter‑mediate business process level, this research provides new insights to understand the underlying influential mechanisms of IT‑business alignment in the SME context. These findings have important implications for SME business managers.

A novel text mining approach for scholar information extraction from web content in Chinese

Text mining is the process of deriving high-quality information from text so that it can focus on extracting useful information from text or web documents. IoT devices generate massive structured or unstructured data including text data. The opportunity coming behind big data and unstructured data is a great impulse for governments or companies to choose solutions based on text mining approaches to improve strategic business activities and boost decision making. Expert information is an important reference information for decision making. How to collect the expert information from text or web documents is a problem. In this paper, a text mining approach is introduced to crawl and extract expert information from Internet. We build a basic framework and main modules including information extraction, data cleaning and deduplication, expert recommendation model to cope with text data from Web content. We also define several metrics, data structures and propose some algorithms to help text mining. Finally, the experiment is implemented with datasets and the results show that our text mining approach can extract expert attributes accurately.

Identifying Strategic Factors of the Implantation CSR in the Airline Industry: The Case of Asia-Pacific Airlines

Sustainable development has always been the objective of many fields, including the tourism and transportation sector. However, a major part of this sector, the airline industry, deals with many negative impacts, such as air pollution, noise, CO2 emission, and labor practice. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a strategic business activity that can enhance the sustainability of the airline industry. The results of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) reveal that airlines of Western countries exhibit a more remarkable CSR performance than Asia-Pacific airlines, suggesting that the CSR programs of Asia-Pacific airlines need improvement. By constructing an evaluation hierarchy and applying the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method, this study found that the key strategic factors in the airline industry’s implementation of CSR include corporate governance, risk and crisis management, brand management, and product responsibility (safety).

Forget the Past? Or History Matters? Selected Academic Perspectives on the Strategic Value of Organizational Pasts

Abstract Corporate archives are rarely considered strategic by their parent organizations, and their funding levels tend to reflect that lower priority status. This article suggests that corporate archivists could benefit from looking outside the profession for insights on how to build more compelling statements of their strategic value. To illustrate the potential utility of this cross-disciplinary approach, more than eighty articles from academic journals were reviewed for examples of strategic value derived from the business use of organizational pasts. Two examples of the application of organizational pasts to strategic business activities drawn from this literature are highlighted—organizational change and corporate identity mix.

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER

OVERVIEW:The significant role of technology in strategic business activities and new-product development has driven companies to create a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) position to lead and direct technology development activities. The CTO is a new and evolving role, having been first utilized only within the last few decades. Although the position is becoming more widely used, there is still a lack of understanding as to the specific benefits a CTO position can bring to an organization. There has been little research to date focusing on the CTO role and even less with empirical data. The purpose of this paper is to fill an important gap by analyzing a number of innovation and financial metrics to assess the impact of the CTO on an organization's performance. An analysis of the data shows that the CTO role is effective in promoting both innovation and financial improvements. This provides support for the creation and continued use of the CTO position in companies. An unexpected outcome of this research was a reduction in CTO effectiveness with increasing company size.

The Effectiveness of the Chief Technology Officer

OVERVIEW:The significant role of technology in strategic business activities and new-product development has driven companies to create a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) position to lead and direct technology development activities. The CTO is a new and evolving role, having been first utilized only within the last few decades. Although the position is becoming more widely used, there is still a lack of understanding as to the specific benefits a CTO position can bring to an organization. There has been little research to date focusing on the CTO role and even less with empirical data. The purpose of this paper is to fill an important gap by analyzing a number of innovation and financial metrics to assess the impact of the CTO on an organization's performance. An analysis of the data shows that the CTO role is effective in promoting both innovation and financial improvements. This provides support for the creation and continued use of the CTO position in companies. An unexpected outcome of this research was a reduction in CTO effectiveness with increasing company size.

As in the Composition of a Fugue: Capturing the Flow of Strategic Business Activities

Drawing inspiration from classical music, the author introduces in this article a musical metaphor, the fugue, to capture a flow of strategic activities, highlighting the motion aspect. This particular metaphor connotes dynamism, constituted in themes that are repeated, expanded, and varied through human voices and their communication. By giving voice to people who share and participate in globalization, internationalization, and customization related to the efforts of a company to grow continuously, elevating movements inherent in these activities, a fugue is composed. As argued in the article, there is potential in “musicking” interpretation of human activity. The fugue metaphor could assist our efforts to methodologize strategy process as dynamic multidirection and multivoice construct. While directing more attention to a musical, arts-based form of communicating research, we could be able to listen more carefully to the moves inherent in a flow of human activity.

New Product Blockbusters: The Magic and Science of Prediction Markets

New product innovation is a strategic business activity that involves significant financial resources and managerial attention. Most new product launches fail because existing methods are unable to forecast their commercial successes accurately. In this article, we describe a market-based method to address this gap. This method capitalizes on the power of the wisdom of crowds by allowing people to interact in organized markets governed by well-defined rules. The working of these markets relies on five scientific principles referred to as I4C (pronounced as I foresee). These markets motivate people to share information freely through a price discovery process. Prediction markets seek information aggregation from a large group of diverse individuals by encouraging active participation. We demonstrate the power of the markets with real application examples from a wide variety of industries.

Is Communications a Strategic Activity in UK Education?

This qualitative exploratory paper investigates whether communications/public relations is regarded by opinion formers in UK education as a strategic business activity or a tactical marketing tool. It is based upon depth interviews with 16 senior managers with strategic roles in UK higher or further education, or Government bodies, conducted between June and September 2004. The findings seem to suggest that communications/PR is ideally seen by leaders as a strategic function, but that there are limitations to this vision becoming a reality. The research goes on to offer initial conclusions on some of the issues surrounding perception, resource, and implementation of strategic communications/PR in UK education, with implications for practitioners considered.

Involving purchasing in new product development

Purchasing is evolving into a strategic business activity and thus also a potential contributor to the successful development of new products. However, the literature on the involvement of purchasing in new product development (NPD) is sorely lacking. We conducted an exploratory study to investigate purchasing’s involvement in NPD, the drivers of this involvement and the influence on new product success. We conducted telephone interviews with purchasing and NPD managers from 43 firms. The results show that firms differ in the extent to which they involve purchasing in NPD and that higher involvement has a positive effect on NPD performance. R&D managers can use the results to design a more effective purchasing–R&D interface and increase the success of NPD.

Using soft systems methodology to manage hotels: a case study

Complexity and a focus upon operations characterize the modern hospitality industry, and this often prevents management from spending time on reviewing strategic business activities. This article argues that soft systems methodology can be a useful tool to understand and map complexity and to solve problems. This approach is demonstrated in practice through the use of a fictional case study of the Faraway Hotel, where soft systems analysis helped the owner to think more objectively about improving his business.