Pravab

The Virgin Group At the age of 16, Richard Branson set up the student magazine. From the beginning his strategy was to identify the subjects that were neglected and not touched by well established companies and this gave him the competitive advantage (Pryce, 2009). In 1970, a mail order record was his new venture from where Virgin was founded. From that time on, he expanded virgin group into travel and tourism, mobile, leisure, mobile, finance etc and created a great empire – Virgin Empire consisting of more than 200 companies in more than 30 countries (Virgin, n.d. e). Branson has invested on companies with long term capital growth or which achieves long term value creation and feels this as the best approach for private companies (Pryce, 2009). Even when there were barriers in the virgin group journey, such as 1972-82 recessions, 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, Branson did not fall back. He continually expended the group into areas which were dominated by the big companies while select...

1.0 INTRODUCTION 1.1 CULTURE Culture has become one of the main areas of discussion in an organisation but there is no agreement on appropriate definition of culture. Culture may be understood as ‘The way we do things around here’ or ‘the way we think about things around here’ (Williams et al ., 1994). Culture comprise of at least four sub concepts: values, beliefs, norms and symbols (Jepperson and Swidler, 1994). Culture is a multi faceted concept and it is difficult to tell which components are most important for understanding organisation performance (Detert et al. , 2003 ). 1.2 ORGANISATION CULTURE ‘The collection of traditions, values, policies, beliefs, and attitudes that constitute a pervasive context for everything we do and think in an organisation’ (Mclean and Marshall, 1993 cited in Mullins, 2002). Organisations can have a culture if it has been a stable group for some period of time (Schein, 1988). Schein (1988) suggested three level of organisation ...

Although the services provided by an organization are very diverse, they have accounted for the performance of the organization (Kotler and Keller, 2007). There have been an increasing number in organizations that are selling services (Rotfeld, 2001). Since the early 1980’s, various author have recommended different service types based on different criterion (Chowdhary and Prakash, 2007). Kotler and Keller (2007) defined service as ‘any activity or benefit that one party can offer to another which is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything.’ Edvardsson (1998) suggest service to be viewed from the customer perspective as it is them who determines of the quality of the service provided. Service is very important in today context as it is the key for attracting new customers and retaining of existing ones. Bad service experience forces customers to switch the brand or the service provider in search for the one who provides them with satisfaction (Michel e...

When a company is established all they look for is sales, profit and market share. Without these, a company cannot survive for long. But there comes an instance where finance is not only the key to survival. Financially oriented marketing has been highly criticized as this objective may lead to socially irresponsive practices (Sirgy and Lee, 1996). The company not only has the responsibility to their stakeholders but the society in which they operates. Social responsibility marketing is a way in which the company manages marketing responsibly, which contributes to the society in which it operates for the well being of the society (Brassington and Pettitt, 1997). This doesn’t mean that the company is responsible to resolve all the issues in the society and it’s not practically possible too. What a company should do is to find out which issues to focus on depending on their resources so that they create a shared value and gain a competitive advantage (Porter and Kramer, 2006). This may...