Middle Europa: The Star Loses His Luster
Poland’s Donald Tusk might be in for a long second term if his first 100 days are any measure.
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Poland’s Donald Tusk might be in for a long second term if his first 100 days are any measure.
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Russia's presidential election was so predictable, and so disputed, that it's not the results that are the main topic of conversation.
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Plus, St. Petersburg's gay "propaganda" bill passes final vote, and are Poland and Ukraine ready for Euro 2012? Around the Bloc is TOL's daily digest of the important, the trivial, the tragic, the weird, and the sober from its coverage region.
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Plus, Georgia moves to drop visas for Russians and EU foreign ministers bless Serbia’s candidacy. Around the Bloc is TOL's daily digest of the important, the trivial, the tragic, the weird, and the sober from its coverage region.
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Prilepin is also engaged in opposition politics. He belongs to the “radical left opposition party coalition" Other Russia.
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TOL Talk: A Russian sociologist considers the divisions in his country and the chances for democracy to take root.
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Russia’s newly famous protest band continues to play cat and mouse with the authorities, even as criminal charges loom.
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Both the process of creating a business, but especially during the course thereof, the entrepreneur should consider a future in terms of domestic and international presence. This would require a marketing strategy for attracting and maintaining loyal customers domestic and international, for whose implementation it should be mentioned for specific tactics, identify ways to internationalize the business and choose the most appropriate forms of advertising.
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As the scale of tourism grows, the resource use threatens to become unsustainable. Withought environmental responsibility the levels of cheaper mass tourism will increase, forcing more “nature-based” tourism to move on to new destinations. This scenario is opposite to the “Croatian Tourism Development by 2010” strategy. With a favourable geographic position, almost at the heart of Europe, Istria has always represented a bridge connecting the Middle European continental area with the Mediterranean. This area is the most visited Croatian tourist region with 27% of all visitors and 35% of time spent in all of Croatia. The Croatian National Bank’s preliminary figures for 2007 show that international tourism generated 18.4% of Croatian GDP. For these reasons the Istrian tourism industry can not ignore environmental issues in its management and requires the informed participation of all relevant stakeholders (according to the Agenda 21 for tourism industry). Properly planned tourism development, combined with environmental protection, produces the concept of sustainable tourism. Environmentally sustainable form of tourism represents a step forward from "sea and sun" mass tourism developed at the coastal part of Istria. There are a myriad of definitions for Sustainable Tourism, including eco-tourism, green travel, environmentally and culturally responsible tourism, fair trade and ethical travel. Mentioned selective tourism forms are adopted as the concept of the present and future Istrian destination development.
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The amplification of extern economic activities made by firms demands new rules for those people that take part in transcultural actions. They have to deal with new challenges regarding the interpretation of actions or attitudes made by individuals or firms that have their activity in a cultural activity different from what they were accustomed to until that moment. International managers come in contact with people that not only have different objectives, but they also have different ways of achieving their objectives. The development of management activities is a laborious process that starts with the recurring and selecting of personnel and ends with the training and returning to their home country of the managers. The importance and the phases of the process of training managers that can action with competence in an intercultural context have represented the elements which I want to bring forward in this paper.
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Tourist information proved to have an important influence on the choice of holiday destinations. An important category of promotional means used tourism as a source of information is a tourist information documents in which graphical advertising has a great importance. In a harmonious combination between an informative text and a picture suggestive of its different forms (flyers, brochures, catalogs, guides and tourist maps, posters and billboards, advertisements in the press) visualize products of interest. This article highlights the importance of tourism information documents on the selection of destination, the requirements and recommendations for their design and the need arrangement advertisement to increase its impact on potential tourists. Tour operators in cooperation with advertising agency, choosing one means of communication and advertising medium itself, according to market research conducted, the production capacity or area of interest to prepare an advertising campaign, the level of tariffs and the type of benefits offered, the type of tourism product offered and the target market segment targeted.
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The relationship marketing aims the construction of a durable relation between the enterprise and the final client, identified at an individual level. The particular part of the relationship marketing has two main concepts: individuality and the relation. This paper presents the concepts of relationship marketing, database marketing and geomarketing. We present the importance of implementing a marketing database in a service providing enterprise and its implications on one hand for the client and on the other hand for the enterprise. The paper point out the marketing database instruments and the advantages for the elements of the marketing mix. The implementation of a marketing database will aid the enterprise to better target and attract the client, to transform them into loyal consumers and in the same time it can help refresh the image of the enterprise.
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The aim of the paper is to evaluate the influence of the financial crisis and corruption on the corporate social behaviour of Romanian organisations. Starting from the reference literature on financial crisis, corruption and corporate social responsibility, this article is an investigation of the impact that financial crisis and corruption characteristics have on the corporate social responsibility of the organisations. Our research underpins quantitative and qualitative methodology based on the outcomes of the HeRmeS international project.
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Marketing specialists widely accept that brand loyalty, as core component of brand equity, can leverage several positive effects on brand commercial performance and on other dimensions of brand equity, loyalty being both an input and an output from this perspective. Starting from the supposition that higher brand loyalty can generate higher market share, the paper investigates the relationship between the two, considering repurchase and recommend intentions as main measurements of loyalty. Analyzing the data collected through a questionnaire based survey among a representative sample of Romanian urban consumers, the paper comparatively investigates the potential positive correlations between loyalty and market share considering two market types and product categories: durables and non-durables. The results reveal that the relation is not sustained statistically in the case of non-durable, but can be modeled through exponential functions in the case of durables.
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Most research on market orientation, and performance was related to big firms. In this study, based on the theoretical framework, a model was developed to investigate the effect of market orientation on business performance in small firms. To test the relationships among the variables, data from 53 small firms in the small town of Chunglun at Sintok, Kedah was used. The findings show that the three components of market orientation are related positive to business performance of small firms. The further analysis also confirmed that customer orientation and competitor orientation are strong predictors of small firm performance. The findings of this study confirm that market orientation behavior also applies to small firms.
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Everyday, consumers are bombarded by messages inducing them to change their attitudes. These persuasion attempts can range from logical arguments to expressive images, from regular consumers’ advice to celebrities’ recommendation. The literature and the research on advertising indicates the benefits of using the right type of endorser as consumers respond in a different manner to the same advertisement conveyed by various endorsers. Thus the objective of this empirical research paper regards the evaluation of the impact of endorsers’ characteristics (credibility, attractiveness) on consumers’ reaction toward advertisements. Furthermore we examine the consumer’s perception of the credibility and expertise of, the resemblance to, admiration for, and attractiveness of the source used in advertisements. Our research shows that there are no universal recipes in the selection of the endorser of the advertisement. Rather, each endorser may become the optimal solution depending on the circumstances under which it will be used.
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Efficient distribution of human and goods transport has always been an important element in maintaining the economic systems cohesion. Together with the economic and technological development, the purposes to attain this goal have considerably evolved. .The integration of the Centre, Eastern and South-Eastern European countries’ infrastructure in the European transport networks has as a main goal the promotion of networks’ interconnection and interoperability. This is done through concentrating upon some specific infrastructure routes located on the trajectory of 10 pan-European transport corridors, which pass through geographical zones in many countries, some of them EU members, and others undergoing a process of negotiation (Turkey). Pan-European Corridors will have immediate effects like: the growth of investments in infrastructure thanks to European funds – for developing countries, this will represent an important part as it welcomes a development of the economy, especially in crises; the favoring of conditions for the functioning and administration of globalization; the growth of cooperation both among Eastern countries and between such countries and Western countries; conditions for the recovery of economic differences between West and East; conditions for the recovery of the development in accordance with the policy of European countries and other candidate countries.
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The purpose of this study is to evaluate the level of assimilation for the terms "Proximity Management" and "Proximity Manager", both in the specialized literature and in practice. The study has two parts: the theoretical research of the two terms, and an evaluation of the use of Proximity management in 32 companies in Gorj, Romania. The object of the evaluation resides in 27 companies with less than 50 employees and 5 companies with more than 50 employees.
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It is always costly to attract new customers, so the managers always try to find ways to retain their current customers and concentrate on different factors which enhances the customer loyalty among the customers of the organizations. This research attempts to find the factors of customer loyalty and their relationships with banking industry in one of the developing countries i.e. Pakistan. Then analyzing the relationship among different factors a model for the customer loyalty is proposed at the end of the research. In order to do this, a questionnaire is designed and validated, then based on the data which were gained from the 316 respondents' answers to the designed questionnaire, the analysis is done and the results and the relations among the factors are explained. Perceived Quality, Satisfaction, Trust, Switching Cost and Commitment are the factors which influence the Loyalty of the customers. Theses factors also influence each other as well. The relationships of different factors with each other are also studied and the SPSS software is used to analyze the data gathered from the respondents.
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Flexible work arrangements should focus on providing employees with more options for when and how they do their work. Organizations can provide a suite of flexible options to enable employees to choose the arrangements that best balance their work with family and lifestyle preferences. In this paper we intended to investigate the flexibilization process of working time determined by the new trends of work organization. For this purpose, the various aspects of woking time in a company were analyzed in connection with the employee’s life cycle.
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