Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 35

Marketing - Essay Example As noted by Masterson and Pickton, it is important in distinguishing a business function (23). Indeed, marketing is a major success factor for any business entity. First, marketing plays a crucial role in creation of utility. From the definition of marketing by Jain, it would be noted that marketing involves time, place and people (3). It is against this background that marketing is considered as a useful function in creating time, place and possession utilities. Jain supports this argument noting the critical marketing activities of transportation, storage and selling as the key players in effecting this creation of utility (32). Transportation creates the place utility by making goods and services available to customers at the desired place. Storage allows businesses to supply such goods and services at the time when needed. Finally, through selling, marketing provides the possession utility of the commodities being sold to the customers. Thus, marketing enables organisations to create utilities. For example, Coca Cola uses marketing to create the time utility by promoting its products during festive seasons, say Christmas Day. Such boosts t he sales of the products when needed. Indeed, marketing creates utilities for products of business entities. Marketing fosters the competitiveness of a business entity. This is particularly so through marketing intelligence. As defined by Masterson and Pickton, marketing intelligence refers to the information relevant for a business entity’s market which is gathered and analysed to help in decision-making (54). Marketing is the business arm that involves direct interaction with customers and prospects. It is therefore an appropriate strategy to use for collection of information from the market. Such information would be useful in the determination of market opportunity and penetration strategies. It provides business entities with appropriate

Implication of Bad Managerial Ethics in Enron Term Paper

Implication of Bad Managerial Ethics in Enron - Term Paper Example On the other hand, the failure of a business venture can be attributed to upholding unethical values such as deception and complacency. Ethics can be understood well by paying special attention to the Enron scandal. This paper discusses the implications of unethical practice. It begins by bringing out the unethical practices that occurred at Enron and the implications. To begin with, the Enron scam, unearthed in 2001, eventually caused the collapse of Enron, an Energy Corporation based in the United States and the complete closure of an accounting and re-organization firm called Arthur Andersen. Apart from being the mega insolvency reorganization in the history of the United States during that time, Enron was also regarded as the huge audit failure. Enron problems owe their origin to Jeffrey Skilling, who created a group of executives that used accounting loopholes, specific purpose entities and negative financial reporting to hide huge amount of dollars in the form of debts that cam e from scrupulous deals as well as projects (Swartz & Sherron, 2004). Chief Financial Manager Andrew Fastow together with other managers not only confused Enron’s management board and accounts committee on highly vulnerable accounting practices, but also forced Andersen to overlook the issues (Collins, 2006). Shareholders lost eleven billion dollars (Schein, 2005), when the price of stocks at Enron that had gained a peak of ninety dollars per share as of mid 2000, dropped by less than one dollar by the close of 2001.The United States Securities and Commission of Exchange started an inquiry, and rival competitor from Houston, Dynergy wanted to buy the firm at a subsidized price. The deal collapsed, and in2001, Enron petitioned for insolvency under chapter eleven of the US Bankruptcy Law (Cruver, 2003). Furthermore, the implication was that many managers at Enron Corporation were arrested for a several charges and later put behind bars. The auditor at Enron, Arthur Andersen, wa s proven guilty by a District Court in the US. However, when the decision was rescinded by the United States Supreme Court, the firm had lost many customers. Workers and shareholders got limited returns from lawsuits, despite forfeiting billions in form of pensions as well as stock prices. As a result of the scam, new rules and laws were passed to increase the validity of financial communication for public firms. The unethical events that took place at Enron included embracing a culture which regarded innovation coupled with unlimited ambition to be vital factors that produced good returns within a short time. However, this theory focused on the short term aspect rather than long term whereby achieving maximum profits becomes cumbersome. This forces employees to bend the rules until the limitations of ethics are ignored in the quest for success (Toffler & Jennifer, 2004). It is worth noting that Enron enjoyed a lot of success initially by raking in a lot of earnings as well as cash flows. Therefore, in order to maintain this trend they resorted to join a faulty network of partnerships and also employed questionable auditing procedures. Enron managers thought that it was the best path for the organization. The crucial question that comes out of this initiative is whether it was ethical for the executives to pursue that course. In my view, it can be said that to some extent it was given the fact that the company realized a lot of earnings. However, to a large extent the behavior depicted by the executives of Enron constituted the highest violation of ethical values since it is responsible for the collapse of Enron. In addition, my