Strategic Management and Unilever Essay Example for Free

Strategic Management and Unilever Essay Introduction: Unilever is a multinational corporation with â€Å"extensive product offerings in the food, detergent, and personal care business.† Because Unilever is organizing its companies on a decentralized structure, they are falling behind their competitors. In order for Unilever to succeed as a company they must look over their whole business strategy starting from their foundation and working their way through each and every subsidiary. In making minor adjustments for improvement, Unilever might pull through and have a chance of becoming a successful company once again. Case Problems: Unilever is facing many problems not only within the company but with competition as well. â€Å"Competitors are more successful by building global brands, reducing cost structure, and executing simultaneous product launches in several national markets.† In Unilever’s case, the decentralized structure is working against any efforts of building both global and regional brands. Because of many duplicates in â€Å"manufacturing, a lack of scale economies, and a high-cost structure,† they are trailing behind competitors in bringing new products to the market. Alternatives: One alternative Unilever could take would be to focus more on the products that bring in the most profit. In this case it would be the food products, which account for â€Å"60 percent of sales and include strong offerings in margarine, tea, ice cream, frozen foods, and bakery products.† Mainly because not everyone is willing or able to buy name brands or certain detergents, but there will always be a need for food. If they put more of their focus on this they would be able to exceed the already 70 percent of market share in other countries. The only downfall I see in this would be the extra profit that would normally come in from the other two options would decrease. Another alternative Unilever might consider might be to focus its detergents and personal care products in accordance to the needs and wants of communities in certain areas. For example, while one country might see it more fit to have Omo, another region might prefer the personal care products of Calvin Klein. In researching the area and what customers seem more comfortable with would help enhance sales. However, if the company would be willing to invest both time and money in doing this would be upon them. A third alternative would be for the company’s financial and marketing team to use the SWOT analysis. By using this, the company would get a better understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This would give them the chance to take advantage of what they are doing well while also showing them what exactly they should focus on to improve. Again, it would just be whether the company is willing to take the time and money to put int o the analysis. Solutions: Unilever â€Å"introduced a new structure based on regional business groups.† By creating groups and divisions in the company, each team was able to focus on a specific category of products. In doing so â€Å"groups and divisions coordinated the activities of national subsidiaries within their region to drive down operation costs and speed up the process of developing and introducing new products.† However, even with this change in structure, Unilever was still lagging behind the competition. Therefore, the company cut the number of brands sold â€Å"from 1,600 to 400 that could be marketed on a regional or global scale.† They also â€Å"reduced manufacturing plants from 380 to about 280.† Even after proceeding with this new foundation, they were still behind the competition. Unilever then decided to establish just two global product divisions. This included a â€Å"food division and a home and personal care division.† Contingency: If the solutions and changes made to the company fail, one back-up plan would be to cut out either the food or home and personal care division. That way the company would be able to focus on just one certain area. In doing so they would cut back even more products and brands, as well as  reducing manufacturing plants even more. This would help cut not only labor costs, but operating costs as well. As far as competition goes, Unilever would fall behind competing companies even more, therefore, instead of going for a global business, they should start back locally and overtime work their way back up. If they keep going at the rate they are, the company would take a bigger fall and might be harder for it to bounce back. Overtime, as they work on building the business then they can look into adding the other division, and then eventually work into competition globally once again. Conclusion: Unilever took a big step in trying to change and improve the company. Most businesses find it hard to accept change and that’s always the downfall to any great company. As far as the competition goes, Unilever has a lot to catch up on. They fell to far behind other competitors and suffered greatly from this. As long as Unilever stays patient with building their company up to what it once was, I feel that they will have no problem accomplishing a very successful company overtime.

Presidential Campaign Financing :: essays research papers

Running Head: Presidential Campaign Financing Abstract President Bush won reelection against Sen. John Kerry in a presidential race that shattered previous fundraising and spending records to become the most expensive in U.S. History. Both candidates benefited from the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which went into affect just before the 2004 election cycle began and doubled the individual contribution limit from $1,000 to 2,000 dollars. Anyone trying to run for President of the United States must raise enormous amounts of money to keep there campaigns going. President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, for example, raised a total of nearly half a billion dollars in private contributions during the presidential primary season. More efforts are going to have to be made to keep the spending of non-party affiliated groups, such as the 527 groups, to a minimum. Presidential Campaign Financing and Spending: Election 2004 President George W. Bush took in a record $360 million for his 2004 re-election campaign, easily exceeding the $192 million he raised in his 2000 campaign. President bush spent $306 million of the money he raised which was also another record. John Kerry not only finished behind him in the election he also finished behind him in campaign funds, but still posted totals that far exceeded any other election period. Kerry raised more then $317 million and spent more then $240 million. Both partied during the campaign declined public matching funds, which would have not let them use all of the fund that they had raised, and would have limited there spending. Once they accept there partied nomination however they must accept the Public funding. For the 2004 election cycle the public matching funds they received were $74.6 million dollars. (Democracy 21.org, 2004;unknown author,2004)

Are We Happier Than Our Forefathers?

Long years ago stress was never a part of anyone’s dictionary. However, today it is the most common word used by everyone ranging from a 13-year-old child to a 95 year old adult. What is the reason behind the frequent usage of this word in the modern times? Earlier, primitive man survived on bare essentials of life & yet he was stress free but today even though technology has gifted a luxurious life to man we are stressed. Earlier man had to roam from place to place in search of food & shelter. Today the modern man can even work by sitting at home through technologies like laptops & cellular phones. Yet today man has been confronted by various diseases & has to tackle stress. Why is it that a primitive man working several times harder than the modern man had time for pleasure activities but a modern man has to make work his leisure and work to no end. Technology & modern equipments were to make man’s life stress free & relaxed but instead it had has adverse effects on man’s life. A few centuries man had not even heard of fatal diseases like â€Å" aids† however today every research & technology is being to find a treatment for this disease. Man has found medicines & treatments for the tiniest of the creatures on this earth but yet has failed to discover a cure, which would save the life of a fellow mate. Science and technology has made it possible to reach the moon but is it of any use because we don’t have time to go & even meet out old parents who have taught us what a moon is & how to reach there. These facts make me think, â€Å" Are we happier than our forefathers? † in my opinion we are not as happy as they were. Our forefathers lived a stress free, contented & happy life but today these words are only seen in the dictionary. If we desire to live like our forefathers then it could only be possible in the Himalayas because in this world we require money for minimal needs & necessities & to earn that also we have to work very hard. Working hard would mean work during the day accompanied by work through the night. Is this called being happy?

Improving A City Of Hamilton - 1344 Words

What can be done to improve a city that has already been developed? This was the question posed to the City of Hamilton in regards how Hamilton, a city that has been forgotten, could be revitalised. The best way to revitalise an area is to make it more accessible. The Light Rail Transit or LRT is key to ensuring Hamilton gets the improvement it needs to have the ability to be a major economic contributor in the future. What the City has proposed is the best way to improve the newly revitalised Hamilton. With a LRT along King connecting Mcmaster to Eastgate, the East and West of Hamilton will be connected in a more efficient way than ever before. Furthermore, with the LRT running along James street the waterfront will be connected to†¦show more content†¦However, with an LRT you would be building above ground and while this will cause a short term amount of heavy construction and traffic, it would not threaten the city’s structure, only further develop it. While many people would agree that a LRT is better than a subway to build, what about buses? Why can’t Hamilton just deploy more buses? While this seems like an easy solution, the LRT provides the better solution. Buses go with the flow of traffic, and have to stop more than LRT’s, causing backups on the road. With more buses on the road the traffic will only increase. However, with the LRT, they will get all the advances from the lights and will not stop a much as the average distance between stops is 800m-1km (Kalinowski. T. 2013, Oct. 28). As opposed to buses where the average distance between stops is half than that. In fact, an early study suggested that the inclusion of an LRT in Hamilton would not cause gridlock or conversion of major roads into two way roads (Dongen, M. V. 2016, August 03. LRT Would Have Mixed Results on Car Traffic: Study.). 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