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The article shows how to combine loyalty and segmentation tools to define attractive new customer segments.

Bain's research shows how companies that use the combination excel at three skills. Successful firms: firstly, broaden their appeal by narrowing their focus. They seek new opportunities to deepen relationships with the loyal, profitable customers they know best before trying to appeal to new groups. Secondly, they grow faster by staying close to what they do best. They look inward to identify and tap the capabilities that enable them to meet target customers' needs in unique ways. Finally, they spur innovation by listening patiently. They engage customers in an ongoing dialogue that guides decisions about how their products, services and business evolve.

Over a five‐year period, businesses that successfully tailor product and service offerings to desirable customer segments post annual profit growth of about 15 percent. By contrast, companies that fail to connect the right value propositions to the right customer segments have annual profit growth of only 5 percent.

Innovative marketers study consumer needs and wants in detail to develop insights about a small, attractive customer set that becomes the focus of their product development, a group called the Design Target.

The Design Target is the group that your company comes to understand so completely that when you design products and services for them, they say: “This is absolutely perfect for me.” They're the customers your company has the capabilities to serve better than your competitors.

Organizations create knowledge by making sense of new stimuli with which they are constantly being bombarded with. Furthermore, the knowledge created is transmitted through the application of knowledge. Language facilitates the sharing of knowledge created. The meaning which is collectively created in an organization has evolved within relationships over a period of time. Meaning is a product of interaction and does not take place in isolation. An increase in relationships means exposure to different knowledge which results in an increase not only in knowing, but also in what is known. Knowledge is not isolated from that which the individual considers reality to be. There are many interpretations as to what constitutes reality. Knowledge of the world does not reflect an objective world, but an understanding of the world as it is experienced.

This chapter explores the implications of patrimonial politics in the Dutch East India Company empire in the context of establishing a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa in the mid-seventeenth century. The Cape extended the reach of Company patrimonial networks with elite Company officials circulating throughout the Indian Ocean empire and consolidating their familial ties through marriage both within the colonies and in the United Provinces. These patrimonial networks extended to the Cape as elite Company officials created families locally or married Cape-born women. As the colony grew, the Company created a class of free-burghers some the wealthiest of whom were tied directly into elite Company patrimonial networks. But from the early eighteenth century onwards these elite Company networks came into conflict with the evolving free-burgher patrimonial networks with which they were in direct competition. This paper argues that local patrimonial networks can evolve in a settler colony that challenge the elite patrimonial networks of the imperial elite.

A goal of integrated reporting (IR) under the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC)’s leadership is to provide clearly written, comprehensible and accessible information. In light of this objective, the purpose of this paper is to explore the readability and accessibility of integrated reports, an issue magnified by the IIRC’s continual commitment to clear and readable report language, and its intention for IR to become the corporate reporting norm.

In a whole text software facilitated analysis, the study utilises readability measures and supplementary measures of reader accessibility in a multi-year analysis of a large sample of global integrated reports sourced from the IIRC examples database.

The findings highlight the low readability of analysed integrated reports and indicate that readability is not improving. The supplementary measures suggest sub-optimal use of visual communication forms and overuse of structural presentation techniques which may contribute to reader accessibility of the analysed reports.

The study extends readability analysis to an emerging corporate reporting phenomenon and its findings contribute to the growing IR literature. The study applies supplementary measures of reader accessibility which advance the methods available to assess the communication efficacy of integrated and other corporate reports.

The analysis of the readability and accessibility of integrated reports in the study indicates that the IIRC’s goal of clear, comprehensible and accessible reporting is not reflected by reporters’ practices. This has implications for the IIRC, reporting organisations, report readers and regulators.

The study represents the first large-scale analysis of the readability and accessibility of global integrated reports.

In developing countries, local buyers often rely on relational contracting based on reciprocity and trust. This paper analyzes relational contracting and global value chain (GVC) governance by focusing on how domestic and foreign coffee exporters in Rwanda confront challenges.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 representatives of Rwandan private, Rwandan cooperative-owned and foreign exporters, and four coffee sector stakeholders.

Foreign firms export most Rwandan coffee, and local exporters express concerns about their ability to compete. Rwandan exporters face challenges accessing capital, competing with foreign firms and managing high transaction costs. They use relational contracts to reduce transaction costs, and they benefit from a monopsony zoning regulation that reduces competition. Foreign exporters face regulatory challenges: a government-set coffee price and the zoning regulation. They vertically integrate to reduce costs and lock in suppliers through prefinancing.

Future research should analyze differences between local and foreign exporters in other contexts to advance understanding of the different challenges faced and contracting approaches used.

Few GVC governance studies address the role of relational contracts in contexts where enforcement is costly. Considering relational contracts within GVCs can improve value chain analysis, specifically in the developing countries where many GVCs start.

The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 prompted a significant debate on corporate governance and shareholder empowerment. A question arises as to whether shareholders ought to be further empowered to have a greater influence over the companies’ activities. Yet, it is not self-evident that shareholder empowerment ensures better-run companies’ corporate activities. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to critically examine, identify and explain the corporate regulation forms and control collectively to evaluate the effectiveness of shareholder empowerment fully.

To do so, this paper sets out a comparative analysis approach between two jurisdictions, the UK and Delaware in the USA. The paper further addresses by undertaking three case studies; Barclays Plc which illustrated the Comply or Explain role, AVIVA (2012) that concentrated on the impact of the shareholder revolt, and the case of Hills Stores Co. v. Bozic (2000), which involved a claim brought by shareholders on the grounds of a breach of fiduciary duty.

This paper argues that the shareholder empowerment theoretically provides an effective means through which corporate activities can be regulated. However, to do this, account must be taken that a distinction should be made between long-term and short-term investors to encourage shareholder engagement by responsible long-term investors. Furthermore, the shareholders can exercise their powers effectively and influence the Board’s decision to award executive compensation.

This paper offered two distinct contributions: assessing whether in times of crisis shareholder empowerment represents a way to regulate corporate activities and by assessing the distinction between the perception of shareholder empowerment and the reality in practice.

Family businesses feature prominently in economies, including the South African wine industry, using websites to convey their family identity. This research paper aims to explore the family identity elements that family wineries use on their websites, their alignment and how these are communicated online.

Based on Gioia’s methodology, a two-pronged approach was used to analyze 113 wineries’ websites’ text using Atlas. ti from an interpretivist perspective.

South African wineries use corporate identity, corporate personality and corporate expression to illustrate their familiness on their websites. It is portrayed through their family name and heritage, supported by their direction, purpose and aspirations, which emerge from the family identity and personality. These are dynamic and expressed through verbal and visual elements. Wineries described their behaviour, relevant competencies and passion as personality traits. Sustainability was considered an integral part of their brand promise, closely related to their family identity and personality, reflecting their family-oriented philosophy. These findings highlight the integration that exists among these components.

Theoretically, this study proposes a family business brand identity framework emphasising the centrality of familiness to its identity, personality and expression. Using websites to illustrate this familiness is emphasised with the recommendation that family businesses leverage this unique attribute in their identity to communicate their authenticity.

This study contributes to understanding what family wineries communicate on their websites, specifically by examining the elements necessary to create a family business brand based on the interrelationship between family identity, personality and expression with familiness at its core, resulting in a proposed family business brand identity framework.