Competitive Advantage Strategies Essays

Competitive Advantage Strategies Essays Competitive Advantage Strategies Essay Competitive Advantage Strategies Essay Differentiation relates to uniqueness of product characteristics, which identify consumers hard-to-articulate or latent needs and wants. Mandom strives to differentiate itself from competitors in such a way that when consumers use Gatsby products, they experience a sense of novelty and comfort that has been never found on other brands. To this end, scientists in RD department constantly research into consumers felt senses of novelty and comfort by looking at product functionality, effectiveness, usability, stability and safety, together with utilization of latest technologies and ingredients. The company puts RD as primary investment object. At present, it has buildings used specifically for RD purpose. The department also carries out research management to secure intellectual property by registration of proprietary patents. This maintains Mandoms technological dominance and helps it to excel in competition. As a result of extensive RD effort, Mandom has developed a board product line and unique features for consumers. For the brand Gatsby, the company has categories like hair styling, hair coloring, hair care. Under hair styling, it also has hair mist, hair wax, hair clay, hair foam, hair gel and so on. Even under hair wax, it has three different series. The hair wax has many unique features, such as ability to restyle many times, Smooth Polymer that produces less sticky and light finish and different shining or styling powers of hair wax for consumers to choose accordingly. Mandom maximizes lifestyle value through high-quality products at reasonable prices for the greatest number of consumers worldwide. It has developed mass production process to cut cost. At production sites, workers and technicians work together to continuously improve and standardize the technological capabilities to achieve maximal production efficiency. Besides, It built three out of its four plants in Indonesia and China for a purpose of lowering labor cost. Also, Mandom takes design and quality control initiatives to ensure that each product that consumer has bought in is exactly of the same quality as the one produced at research phase. The company wants to balance product prices to increase consumers perception of value and meanwhile, ensures quality and offers high-value products to delight consumers. For example, Mandom designs refill packs for many product kinds of Gatsby. Therefore, customers save money if they wish to continue using the original product and will appreciate the value of Gatsby products. For Mandom, prompt response to market is the key to business success. Since Mandoms core products life cycle is short, the success or failure of new products is a major factor underlying the success. Thus, it pursues the product development driven by a cyclic process of research, design, and verification to continuously give concrete form to meet consumer wants and needs. In addition, the company regularly holds cross-functional meeting to discuss consumer latent wants and generate new product ideas. It can always carry out brand renewal at the end of product life cycle. In product development, it responds to customer wants or needs wherever they exist. Even if this involves a product category where Mandom has no previous development experience, it will rise to the challenge to research, develop and sell a product to add diversity to the range of categories. Mandom has developed an efficient supply network in which it balances the consumer preferences and supply in each country by leveraging the distinctive characteristics and production mix of its 3 production sites. Then, the companys subsidiary in each region receives a supply of products from the nearest production site and distributes to outlets such as cosmetic shop, supermarket, pharmacy in shortest time. The supply network is supported by in-store promotions to enhance the visibility of Mandom products so that consumers will notice the latest Mandom offerings immediately.

Chebyshevs Inequality in Probability

Chebyshev's Inequality in Probability Chebyshev’s inequality says that at least 1-1/K2 of data from a sample must fall within K standard deviations from the mean (here K is any positive real number greater than one). Any data set that is normally distributed, or in the shape of a bell curve, has several features. One of them deals with the spread of the data relative to the number of standard deviations from the mean. In a normal distribution, we know that 68% of the data is one standard deviation from the mean, 95% is two standard deviations from the mean, and approximately 99% is within three standard deviations from the mean. But if the data set is not distributed in the shape of a bell curve, then a different amount could be within one standard deviation. Chebyshev’s inequality provides a way to know what fraction of data falls within K standard deviations from the mean for any data set. Facts About the Inequality We can also state the inequality above by replacing the phrase â€Å"data from a sample† with probability distribution. This is because Chebyshev’s inequality is a result from probability, which can then be applied to statistics. It is important to note that this inequality is a result that has been proven mathematically. It is not like the empirical relationship between the mean and mode, or the rule of thumb that connects the range and standard deviation. Illustration of the Inequality To illustrate the inequality, we will look at it for a few values of K: For K 2 we have 1 – 1/K2 1 - 1/4 3/4 75%. So Chebyshev’s inequality says that at least 75% of the data values of any distribution must be within two standard deviations of the mean.For K 3 we have 1 – 1/K2 1 - 1/9 8/9 89%. So Chebyshev’s inequality says that at least 89% of the data values of any distribution must be within three standard deviations of the mean.For K 4 we have 1 – 1/K2 1 - 1/16 15/16 93.75%. So Chebyshev’s inequality says that at least 93.75% of the data values of any distribution must be within two standard deviations of the mean. Example Suppose we have sampled the weights of dogs in the local animal shelter and found that our sample has a mean of 20 pounds with a standard deviation of 3 pounds. With the use of Chebyshev’s inequality, we know that at least 75% of the dogs that we sampled have weights that are two standard deviations from the mean. Two times the standard deviation gives us 2 x 3 6. Subtract and add this from the mean of 20. This tells us that 75% of the dogs have weight from 14 pounds to 26 pounds. Use of the Inequality If we know more about the distribution that we’re working with, then we can usually guarantee that more data is a certain number of standard deviations away from the mean. For example, if we know that we have a normal distribution, then 95% of the data is two standard deviations from the mean. Chebyshev’s inequality says that in this situation we know that at least 75% of the data is two standard deviations from the mean. As we can see in this case, it could be much more than this 75%. The value of the inequality is that it gives us a â€Å"worse case† scenario in which the only things we know about our sample data (or probability distribution) is the mean and standard deviation. When we know nothing else about our data, Chebyshev’s inequality provides some additional insight into how spread out the data set is. History of the Inequality The inequality is named after the Russian mathematician Pafnuty Chebyshev, who first stated the inequality without proof in 1874. Ten years later the inequality was proved by Markov in his Ph.D. dissertation. Due to variances in how to represent the Russian alphabet in English, it is Chebyshev also spelled as Tchebysheff.