Zaras Business Model Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 1

Zaras Business Model - Case Study Example This paper illustrates that establishing Zara’s Fast fashion apparel chains in Galicia (Spain) was a noble idea as the case study pointed that by late 1990s, only US exceeded Western Europe in terms of total retail sales where chains accounted for about 85% and 70% of the total sales respectively. Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe accounted for about half while the rest contributed less than 10% mostly coming from the poor markets. Any sensible business would focus on market expansion and consolidation within its current region as Zara did if the market had the right purchasing power and favorable cost for the various means of production. Galicia was one of the poorest regions in Spain with about 17% unemployment rate compared to a national level of 14%. This meant that labor was available cheaply. In addition, its rich tradition in textile and their non-discriminatory behavior provided a good opportunity for Inditex to develop and learn the tricks of developing tre ndier fashions that would suit high-end markets like Italy. However, the poor vertical integration in the textile value chain and poor communication networks meant the company had to invest heavily eating into its profits which erodes the gains. This made it sensible for the company to focus on other regions in Europe to maintain its competitiveness. Zara had an organized market entry strategy where it identified markets in Europe that resembled the Spanish market. Choice of product market selection is influenced by product, market and marketing factors. This was done by a team of commercial experts who analyzed the micro and macro variables and the future prospects to influence apparel retail chain with profitable gains. In addition, Zara’s designers tracked closely the trends in consumer preferences and made products to match the changes. Normally, when companies identify new markets with similar consumer behavior, tastes, preferences, and purchasing power, it becomes easie r to penetrate such markets. This assertion is supported by the case study which indicates studies that showed the different countries in Europe and their market behavior in relation to apparels.   Ã‚  

Analysis of the Harlem Renaissance

Analysis of the Harlem Renaissance The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through a variety of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. The outburst of creativity among black writers of this period was the productof the many moods and circumstances of the time. Therefore, the Harlem Renaissance was more than a literary movement; it was anexciting cultural expression of racial experience which extendedinto every area of black life. The significance of this movement to African American literary art lies in the efforts of its writers to praise the legacy of African Americans and to use their unique culture as a means toward re-defining African American literary expression Harlem Renaissance was the era when African-Americans for the first time had a real reason to experience pride and rejoice in their identity. In Harlem they found something that was uniquely their own. African-American literature, art, music, and beliefs were respected, appreciated and recognized on a national level. African-Americans were first time regarded as intellectuals before Harlem renaissance Afro Americans were generally considered a stereotype from the outside. This stereotype was an individual servile, unqualified, unskillful and with little potential other than as a laborer. After many years of suffering through imprisonment and domination by the White man, African Americans began to come together to express their strong beliefs of racial pride and self-identity. This movement increased self confidence of Afro Americans and made them feel proud and happy. For the first time, all publishers and critics took Afro American literature seriously and Africans Americans started to work with white people. The Harlem Renaissance was a turning point in African American literature; it was no longer read mainly by black people, but started to be absorbed into the whole American culture. Due to all reasons mentioned above Harlem Renaissance stands as one of the most celebrated movements in African-American culture and American history. It is known as the golden period of African American art and literature. The purpose of the Harlem Renaissance was for African Americans to express their need for racial equality. Civil Rights activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who helped to establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), decided that instead of using direct political means to achieve their goals of racial equality, that they would employ artists and writers of their culture to achieve their goals. During the Harlem renaissance there was an outburst of artistic creation in all fields including visual arts, literature and poetry, music and dance that both represented and gave voice to the afro American thoughts. Even Newspapers and magazines such as The Messenger, Crisis, and Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, were also highly important because they exposed the evils of discrimination. African Americans looked to these pieces of literature for leadership and direction. The main goal of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance was to show the Negro as a talented individual, worthy of the same respect given to white Americans. Writers such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes not only changed the way Negros have been portrayed in theaters throughout history but also blazed the path for the future generations to follow. The Harlem Renaissance was a transitional time when poetry changed a state of African-Americans to outstanding heights. It was one of the most vital expressive vehicles used for the promotion and celebration of African American history, culture and political awareness. The presence of many lower and middle-class blacks in theNorthern ghettoes who could buy books and magazines and go totheaters and clubs provided the financial backing to support thecreative blacks who contributed to the Harlem Renaissance. One of the chief poets who emerged from the period was Langston Hughes. He was born in 1920 in Joplin, Missouri and spent most his youth in the American Midwest. He first came to New York in 1921 to attend Columbia University. A year later he shipped out as a salesman and cook’s helper on a tramp steamer to Africa and Europe. He lived and worked in Paris and Italy and then returned to the United States, where he took a job as a busboy in a Washington DC, hotel. There in 1925, he was discovered by the poet Vachel Lindsay, who praised Hughes’s poems and advised him to devote himself to literature. His first books, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) won poetry prizes and brought him wide acclaim. Unlike many of his peers who were turning inward for poetic expression. Hughes explored the expressive validity of black vernacular in urban and rural black lifestyle. His dynamic and insightful representation of African-Americans touches the souls of many. His poetry paints a picture of the complications faced by African-Americans with a mixture of music, culture, happiness and environmental struggles. Langston Hughes lived ina society that was completely dominated by White men. Heremembers the company of his grandmother, â€Å"She†¦held mein her lap and told†¦stories about people who wanted to makethe Negroes free†¦.† (Emanuel19). Thus, not only social atmospherebut his family experiences have also made him touse poetry as a weapon by which he could give an effectiveexpression to cultural and ethnic qualities of his black race inorder to shape a society. â€Å"He has asserted his voice of selfacceptance†(Berry 87). For the first time, there has been aman on the literary scene to glorify his â€Å"Blackness† and not tofeel ashamed of his being Black. Hughes is most famous for his poetry but he contributed to numerous forms of literature and nonfiction throughout his long career.His first novelNot Without Laughter appeared in 1930. Hughes had a wide range of talent. He was a successful humorist and a historian of the lives of blacks. He wrote proudly and sanguinely about the African American conditions. His most famous fictional character is Jesse B. Semple, nicknamed Simple, who uses humor to protest and satirize the existing injustices. Apart from poems and novels he also wrote short stories, children’s books, song lyrics and operas. He translated foreign writers and wrote numerous plays, three of which were produced on Broadway. Langston Hughes in his essay The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain (1926), expressed the new rebellious mood of the Renaissance writers: Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of his own beauty.(Ervin 48) Much of his best writing was journalistic. In 1937 he served as a foreign correspondent covering the Spanish Civil war for the Baltimore,Afro American news –paper. His most popular works were news paper sketches written for the Chicago Defender in the 1940s .The sketches recounted the adventures opinions of an innocent downtrodden Negro, â€Å"Simple,† whose penetrating views of blacks and whites provided Hughes with the means for making broad satirical and critical commentary on society and government. Hughes was a worldly cosmopolite who lived an almost nomadic life. He traveled to Mexico, Cuba, and the Caribbean, to Africa, Western Europe, The SovietUnion, China and Japan. But he was most influenced by his American experience, by his black heritage, and by the vivid life of New York’s city and Harlem, with its blues and jazz music that so influenced the structure and rhythm of such poems as â€Å"The Weary Blues†. He was the first black American to support himself as a professional writer. In all, he produced more than sixty books. He was also one of the first American writers to receive extended and serious critical attention for realistic portrayals of black Americans. Through his poetry, fiction, and essays, he became one of the dominant voices speaking out for the significance of black culture at the core of life in the twentieth –century America. In the Twenty-first century his work still proclaims, â€Å"I, too, am America.† He created a new literary art form called jazz poetry.He was perhaps the most original of African American poets in the breadth and variety of his work and assuredly the most representative of African American writers. He believes in the ideals of liberty,equality and universal brotherhood. His creative oeuvrereflects that how he constantly struggled for the dignity andequal rights of African Americans. Claude McKay, from Jamaica, was another most influencing poet of the Harlem Renaissance. He was born on September 15, 1890 in, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, and West Indies. Youngest of eleven children he was sent to live with his oldest brother at an early age so that he could be given the best education. McKay was an avid reader who began to write poetry at the age of ten. Much of his writings are a reflection of that shock he felt about American racism. With the publication of two volumes of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire (1920) and Harlem Shadows (1922), McKay emerged as the most militant voice of the Harlem Renaissance. His poetry gained a lasting admiration among African-Americans during the Harlem Renaissance and addressed social and political concerns. McKay wrote three novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). He also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His book of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922) was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. His book of collected poems, Selected Poems (1953), was published posthumously. Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen identified McKay as a chief inspiring force, even though he did not put pen to paper for modern verse. His poem â€Å"If We Must Die earned excellent remarks for him from fellow writers such as James Weldon Johnson and Walter White. Lines from his poem, If We Must Die, indicate the spirit of protest: If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

Immigration and Immigrants are Destroying America Essay -- Argumentati

The U.S. is slammed by growing numbers in population. It seems that many do not think of the long term effects of this increase. This is one of the most significant problems Americans face today, yet no one talks about the problem, when it comes to the debate over immigration. â€Å"The current world population is over 6 billion and increases at a rate of 76,570,430 people every year. Since 1950, U.S. population has nearly doubled - growing from 151 million to over 294 million today. If present trends continue, our population will exceed 400 million by the year 2050. Immigration contributes over one million people to the U.S. population annually. The total foreign-born population in the U.S. is now 31.1 million, a record 57 percent increase since 1990. About 8 million of those are here illegally--a 4.5 million increase since 1990. Almost one-third of all immigration during the 1990s was illegal. An NPG demographic analysis of age distribution, fertility, and mortality data sho ws that if there had been no immigration to the U.S. since 1990, the population in 2000 would have been 262 million–19 million less than the 281 million counted. Thus, post-1990 immigrants and their children accounted for 61 percent of population growth during the last decade.† (Negative Population Growth. 2004. http://www.npg.org/index.html). Supporters of letting more immigrants come into the country claim that immigrants do not take away jobs from the hard working American. They have a claim that it actually helps boost America’s economy by increasing the purchasing of goods. Advocates of immigration, claim that Americans think they are too good to hold certain jobs and immigrants fill the jobs Americans do not want. The Director of Workforce Success, Phylis Eisen states, â€Å"Tens of thousands of jobs go unfilled in the high tech industry. The Hewlett-Packards, the Intels, the Motorollas, the entire semi-conducting industry has to fill forty-thousand jobs in the next three years. If they can’t do this, they have to go overseas. The companies always prefer to stay in America.† (Immigration: Promise and Hope for Generations. 1998). This does not seem to be the case when so many companies actually leave their U.S. home factories and build new ones in third world countries. (The Big One. Michael Moore. 1998). Why would any company prefer to stay in America when they could ... ... Jessica. â€Å"Should We Keep Them Out?† Time Oct. 2001.). If America would have tightened its security to begin with there would not be this problem. All because of the lack of the U.S. immigration policy, America is left only with the memories of those who lost their live on September eleventh. Where does America draw the line? America is literally destroying itself because there are no solid grounds on immigration in the U.S. After September eleventh, a new â€Å"secure† policy on immigration was launched. How long until this new way of controlling America’s immigration is forgot about like so many other actual laws that were proposed? The U.S. cannot let its land be turned into a madhouse where people are everywhere. American’s jobs, education, taxes, comfort, economy, and most important safety, are on the front line battlefield. The U.S. government and its people need to get serious about who is let into this country. A revolution needs to be made and engraved into the public of its new reform. If America continues to sit back and be overtaken by booming numbers from other countries, America will eventually destroy itself. It will be the death of a nation.

Pizza Hut Study Essay

1. What are the implications of Pizza Hut’s big price cuts for its brand image? As stated Pizza Hut’s brand image is neither fast food nor full-service. It delivers average quality products for average prices. Previously, it was marketed as a â€Å"more for the same† value proposition (Kotler & Armstrong, 2012). Yet, it has done something that shocked the whole market. It has cut the prices up to 50%. Doing that, Pizza Hut is fully reforming its brand image. They are implementing a â€Å"Same for less positioning† (Kotler & Armstrong, 2012). In a commercial, an actress playing a restaurant employee says, â€Å"We’ve changed just about everything, except how your favorite pizza tastes† (ELLIOTT, 2010). This move is due to a weakened economy and a drop of customers. But initiating a price change is not riskless. Customer may think that the quality has been reduced and Pizza Hut could lose its loyal customers. All this being said, I would say that Pizza Hut’s price cuts may tremendous increase its revenues and remodeling its brand image making good products for a really cheap price. 2. Can customer loyalty be generated through low prices? Customer loyalty can be generated in many ways such as good product quality, extra features, or cheap prices. Some ways can be very effective for some products while other are effective for different products. For example, what would you think if Rolex cut its prices in order to generate loyalty? It would not work because loyal Rolex customers are wealthy and would rather have extra feature than a cut in prices. On the other hand, would you pay much more to have a better pizza? The perfect example of a company who cuts its price is Wal-Mart. For this case, I do think customer loyalty can be generated through low prices. And so does Mr. Nicole – chief marketing officer at Pizza Hut- â€Å"We want to build loyalty beyond the price. † Indeed, with the crisis people tend to be more cost-conscious. Thus, Pizza Hut’s approach to deliver a good product for a cheap price is a good way of attracting customers. 3. Can Pizza Hut sustain such dramatically lower prices and still remain profitable? From my point of view, cutting prices by up to 50% is a real challenge. To remain profitable the company will have to manage its production costs, its marketing channel, and its extra costs. Moreover, as it is said in the text the new pricing mechanism will require some time before it proves itself. That is to say that at the beginning Pizza Hut may become barely profitable, but hope to gain more market share that will further cut costs through larger volume and increase its revenues. Finally, I strongly believed that a company like Pizza Hut would not have done such a thing if it were not fully thought out before. ELLIOTT, S. (2010, August 18). Pizza hut cuts prices again to counteract the slow recovery. Retrieved from http://www. nytimes. com/2010/08/19/business/media/19adco. html? _r=0 Supermarket news. (Marc). Retrieved from http://supermarketnews. com/latest-news/wal-mart-scores-highest-shopper-loyalty-study Kotler, P. , & Armstrong, G. (2012). Principles of marketing, global edition. (14 Int. E. ed. ). Boston: Pearson.

On A Portrait Of A Deaf Man Essay

Lines one and three also have more beats in them than lines two and four. (If you want to get a bit more technical, one and three are tetrameters, two and four trimeters! Tetrameters have four stresses, trimeters have three stresses). Sound As a reminder of ballad metre, think of the Christmas carol O Little Town of Bethlehem. Using ballad metre means that the poem lends itself to being read aloud and has harmony, rhyme and rhythm that are quite lyrical. Imagery The language used creates extremes of mood. A pattern develops whereby Betjeman uses positive, warm images to evoke happy memories: The kind old face, the egg-shaped head,The tie, discreetly loud,The loosely fitting shooting clothes And then he brutally undermines all this with an image related to death in the following line: A closely fitting shroud. This also happens in stanzas two, four and seven. In these stanzas the death imagery is even worse, bordering on horror: But now his mouth is wide to letThe London clay come in. maggots in his eyes †¦now his finger-bonesStick through his finger-ends Attitudes Although the narrator speaks warmly about his late father he doesn’t use euphemisms. (A euphemism is something said to avoid an unpleasant or offensive word or phrase.) Usually the subject of death is full of euphemisms such as ‘passed on’ or ‘gone to a better place’. Betjeman is more direct about the nature of death, although this can be upsetting. Themes Loss: Betjeman has to come to terms with the loss of his father. Lack of faith: the poet has no faith in God. Death: Betjeman is open and even brutal in the physical descriptions in this poem of the effects of death. Ideas One central idea, hinted at throughout the poem but then clearly revealed at the end, is that death is definitely the end of life. We do not go to heaven or anywhere else because there is no God. â€Å"I only see decay†. There is, however, the more positive proposal that one should cherish the time we have with the people we love, as Betjeman obviously did with his father. Comparison Casehistory: Alison (head injury) * Both poems deal with a before-and-after scenario. The present Alison is in some ways an entirely different character from the pre-accident version. Betjeman views the past and present versions of his father in very different ways. * Readers will perhaps experience sympathy in both poems. One might feel sorry for the post-accident Alison who has suffered brain damage. One might also feel sympathy with Betjeman because he has lost his father. * Both poems deal with death in one way or another: Betjeman’s father has died (as has his faith in God, if it ever existed); Alison is still alive but the Alison of the past is dead. Question How does Betjeman present the character of his father in On a Portrait of a Deaf Man? Answer Betjeman’s father has died and the poet writes this elegy to pay tribute to him. In doing so, he does two distinct things. Firstly, he creates an image of the living father as a warm, nice man. Secondly, he talks of the present state of his father – dead, buried and decaying. The first image is usual in an elegy, the second certainly is not. Betjeman creates a warm, positive image of his father in the opening lines: The kind old face, the egg-shaped head,The tie, discreetly loud,The loosely fitting shooting clothes The first adjective he uses to describe his father is â€Å"kind†, setting a pleasant tone. He then paints a picture of how his father looked and dressed. The following line is the beginning of the technique Betjeman uses to create a different character, his father as he is now, a corpse: A closely fitting shroud. Betjeman contrasts the cold image of death with warm memories of life and as a result, it has much more impact. This technique of juxtaposition continues throughout the poem and as we get to know and like Betjeman’s living father, we’re exposed to more graphic imagery of death: And when he could not hear me speakHe smiled and looked so wiseThat now I do not like to thinkOf maggots in his eyes.