Marketing report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Marketing report - Essay Example Unequivocally, firms have greater emphasis on marketing research to generate useful information that in turn facilitates in modifying business strategies, in decision-making and problem-solving. For instance, the emergence of mass media has greatly affected / influenced the attitudes, perceptions, behaviours, beliefs and lifestyles of people all across the globe, thereby creating new challenges for a firm to thrive in contemporary environment. Marketing research (exploratory, descriptive and causal) is also beneficial in analysing the business potential and viability of products. In addition, it enables the firm to gain insight over underlying factors and critical risks after which firms could amend their strategic objectives and product lines. Nevertheless, the research enables the firms to identify gaps in consumer markets, to innovate and differentiate their procedures and products followed by attainment of cost leadership. An important advantage of marketing research is that it f acilitates change management initiatives. In other words, it helps replacing the old workplace rules, regulations, requirements and criteria by new workplace standards and roles so that the organisations could flourish in an absolutely uncertain, unpredictable, unclear, unstructured and unexpected business environment. A professional or private sports / fitness club initiates marketing research after problem identification (for example – when sales decline because customers are switching to other centres, when top facilities in centre unable to attract maximum customers due to flaws in marketing strategy, when competition increased after inauguration of new clubs at nearby locations and other issues, when customers all across the city are unaware of the club’s product offerings etc.). In simple words, the research enables a sports / fitness club to draw useful inferences regarding external environment and to compare differences in their actual and perceived strengths. Having assessed the aforementioned, the club could then implement more ‘effective’ marketing and advertising strategies that can be utilised to enhance the profitability and long-term monetary gains. This paper will demonstrate the marketing strategies adopted by Lifestyle Aquatic Fitness Centre - a UK based sporting, exercising and gyming centre that provides premium quality fitness services to public across Liverpool. Nonetheless, Lifestyle Fitness has always focused towards brand recognition, innovation, differentiation and value proposition because these aforementioned are the foundations of success and sustainability of any group or business organisation. Indeed, the strategic planners pay special attention to maintain and improve service quality through induction of new equipment, training courses, facilities and sporting activities because it enhances market reputation and goodwill among stakeholders and customers. Total Quality Management principles such as benc hmarking, continuous learning and experimentation etc. are adopted for value creation, which then lead to improvement in sales and profitability. Without any doubt, the aforementioned provides Lifestyle a competitive edge over rivals such as Greens Health, Hercules Health & Fitness Centre, Novotel Liverpool, Absolutions Health Clud and others etc. in fitness and sporting industry .

Menos Paradox :: essays research papers

What is Meno’s Paradox? First, who is Meno? The Meno is one of the earlier Platonic writings, which include Socrates and which look to try to define an ethic, in this case virtue. Meno himself is seemingly a man who is greedy for wealth, greedy for power, ambitious, and a back-stabber who tries to play everything to his own advantage.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Meno starts by questioning Socrates. Can virtue be taught? Socrates says to Meno, well, what makes a virtue a virtue. Meno comes to the borrowed point that virtue is â€Å"to find joy in beautiful things and have power†. Socrates retorts by saying â€Å"do you think men desire just good things?† While explaining themselves they came upon what becomes Meno’s Paradox. Is virtue something learned and can we learn things without already knowing them?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Socrates defends the philosophy that if a man can recall one fact only, as long as he does not get tired of searching for it, then searching and learning are as a whole, a recollection. Meno does not understand this argument. Socrates uses a discussion with a Greek boy you explain this to Meno. â€Å"Do you know that I square figure is like this†, Socrates asks. â€Å"I do† the boy replies. He then asks, â€Å"Is a square is a four sided figure with equal sides?† Yes, he replies. Socrates questions the size, the lines and comes to asking that if the figure is two feet this way and one foot that way then the line would really be two feet. The boy agrees. Now if its also two feet the other way, then it would be four feet total. The boy agrees. Then he adds a figure the same size, this would make it eight feet. Boy agrees. He asks the boy to explain how long each side of the wall is. He responds with twice the length. Socrates then tells Meno tha t he didn’t teach anything; just questioned until the boy reached the answer he wanted.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  This brought them back to virtue. It is a type of knowledge; clearly able to be taught says Meno’s. They both question virtue. Does is make us good? Yes. Beneficial? Yes. It comes from the soul, Socrates states. He doubts that virtue is knowledge, therefore unteachable and coming from within. To really say who is virtuous, and if it cannot be taught, then there can’t be teachers because who is virtuous enough to teach it?

Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” Essay

Though there is no mention of race or slavery in Edgar Allan Poe’s â€Å"Ligeia,† the story is suffused with the symbolic interaction of light and dark, white and black, pallor and pigment. In a situation so fully charged with the symbolics of race, and in a story written in antebellum America by an author raised in Virginia, the lack of any mention of slavery is enough to indicate that this story, despite its studied silence on the matter, has something to tell us about the psychology of racialism in the United States. In the conflict between Ligeia and Rowena—though it takes place almost out of sight, at the edge of the real and of vision—Poe sets up Ligeia as the dark lady and Rowena as the fair one. The reader might expect this to play out as either an abolitionist or racist affirmation of equality or racial supremacy. The situation is complicated, however, by the presence and perceptions of the narrator, who is outside of the highly charged color scheme. Poe positions the reader as an observer of racialist dynamics, rather than as a racialized participant, to allow the reader a view of how a passive, dominant white class depends on, and is crippled by its dependency on, a black underclass that stands for everything it lacks and fears. The dichotomy of black and white emerges relatively late in the story, only after Ligeia has died and the narrator has taken Rowena as his new wife, but the coloring of Ligeia is present from the start. Among her other sublime attributes, the narrator writes that â€Å"She came and departed as a shadow† (111). However, she is also very pale. She has a â€Å"lofty and pale forehead –it was faultless† and â€Å"skin rivalling the purest ivory† (111). Her whiteness, though, is framed by â€Å"the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses† (111). Her eyes, the windows of the soul, are also â€Å"the most brilliant of black, and, far over them, hung jetty lashes of great length. The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the same tint† (111). While her skin is very white, every other feature of Ligeia is exceedingly black. In her shadowiness, Poe depicts her very being as dark. Ligeia’s white skin might be attributed to Poe’s desire as an artist to keep this story from being overtly racialized or didactic or scandalous. His presentation of intense blackness as the frame of intense whiteness, however, is actually a better representation of race in America than a simple schematization of white versus black. Over against the â€Å"one drop† rule that determined a person to be â€Å"black† if they had any black ancestors, the reader determines Ligeia to be â€Å"white† based on one attribute against many dark ones. In fact, Ligeia’s blackness is more than skin (or hair) deep. She is a mystery even to her lover, the narrator, who associates her with the religious mysteries of ancient civilizations. Like the African slaves brought to America, she has a connection to a cultural past that is lost to the narrator and which can only play on his fancy. Her family, which he does not know the paternal name of, â€Å"is of a remotely ancient date. † Musing on his ignorance of his beloved’s family name—which must seem a little unusual to any reader—he wonders why this is: â€Å"was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own –a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? † (111). The proposed solutions ironically obscure the possibility of repression, that he does not know because he does not want to know, that he is afraid to know. The narrator can only imagine that he does not know her name because he loves her so much. The narrator’s conspicuous forgetting begins to trace the mechanism by which Americans repress blackness, and the dependence of whiteness on a black contrast, for the sake of keeping whiteness unquestioned as a positive attribute. Part of the narrator’s madness, though, is that he continues to fixate on the blackness in Ligeia as the symbol of depth and plenitude. Through this obsession with blackness in what is supposed to be a white face, Poe uses â€Å"Ligeia† to pose an inquiry into American racialism that escapes from traditional dualisms of good versus bad into an examination of the psychological mechanisms that make such a debate possible. At the same time that the depth of Ligeia’s learning provides a viable historical representation of the white slave-holder’s ignorance of African cultures, it also comes to assume sublime proportions that simultaneously remove that knowledge from history. Using the fetishization of Orienal cultures as a model, the narrator transports Ligeia’s difference into a realm beyond the earthly. The same mechanism was applied to blackness in America: when whites could not fathom the difference between European cultures and African cultures, they wound up believing that blacks and blackness were unfathomable. This set the stage for blackness to be aligned with other things white European culture did not understand—with animals, for example, or sexual appetite. The narrator’s visible obsession with Ligeia’s blackness as a symbol for his inability to comprehend her exposes the way in which American culture could both deify African culture as more authentic and denigrate it as more base. For the narrator, of course, this dissonance takes the form of his love for Ligeia. He cites Bacon on beauty: â€Å"’There is no exquisite beauty,’ says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, ‘without some strangeness in the proportion’† (). The narrator agrees that there is something strange about Ligeia but he cannot find it. Each individual part, it seems, is perfectly wrought. The strangeness, though, is as Bacon would have it: in the proportion of all these perfections to each other. Metaphorically, the perfection of the white and black face is the perfection of a racially segregated society viewed from within the heavily repressed white perspective. The concepts used all make sense by themselves: that Africans have different cultures, blackness and whiteness are beautiful in their own ways, some things are beyond human understanding—but the particular way they are connected in a slave-holding society has more than a little â€Å"strangeness in the proportion. † Poe’s presentation of the narrator’s consciousness directs the reader to precisely this perspective, focusing not any individual part but on the framing of the whole, because it is here that the psychological dependence of whiteness on misappropriated conceptions of Africanism functions. The narrator’s repression of blackness into a transcendental white worldview—in which blackness only exists at the fringes to serve whiteness and make it more beautiful, both literally and metaphorically—results logically in the death of Ligeia and her replacement by a very white English girl of known parentage but not much depth of soul. The Lady Rowena is â€Å"fair-haired and blue-eyed,† a perfect Aryan, in contrast to Ligeia’s dark hair and eyes, and her family, like the economic system of chattel slavery, is enthralled to a â€Å"thirst of gold. † When the narrator describes their wedding his memory catches more on the blackness of their surroundings than on the European whiteness of his bride. â€Å"I have said that I minutely remember the details of the chamber—yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment,† like Ligeia’s parentage or the wedding itself (). The details he remembers include a â€Å"bridal couch—of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony†¦a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite†¦[and a tapestry with] patterns of the most jetty black† (111). The blackness that he has banished from the person of his bride he has recreated in their surroundings. The composition of black and white is by now recognizable to the reader: the alabaster centerpiece that was Ligeia’s face is now the person of Rowena, and the black hair and eyes of Ligeia are the room and its contents. The tableau that was beautiful when contained within the frame of Ligeia’s face becomes, when extrapolated onto the greater scale of the mansion or estate, somber and terrifying. Blackness looms everywhere in the bridal room. By being marginalized, blackness also comes to surround whiteness and threaten it. The climax of the story comes from just such an incursion of blackness into the white center. Ligeia seemingly poisons Rowena from beyond the grave and uses her body as a medium for return. From the narrator’s earlier adulation of Ligeia, it seems that he might be happy with this turn of events, but he has enough of his wits about him to be terrified that a ghost has returned to life. His terror also has a deeper cause. The displacement of blackness that has guided the story’s logic thus far means that the narrator is at last implicated in authorizing a racial economy. In the black room (with black curtains) Ligeia has supplated Rowena—and now Ligeia really is a dark figure, bearing with her the real abyss of death—the only place for whiteness to flee is into the face and person of the narrator. Throughout the story, however, the narrator has been fully invested in a white moderate-centrist repression of race, as seen in his convenient forgettings and fetishizations of Ligeia. Furthermore, the version of blackness that he has set up is dangerous to whiteness; blackness holds such an anxious sway over his mind that he sees it everywhere, and now it everywhere threatens to engulf him. The anxiety that invigorates the finale differs from the immediate horror of â€Å"Ligeia,† the transgression of the natural order through the return of the dead, in that here the horror is not within the story as an object of narration but surrounding the story as the ground on which it stands. For the reader, the immediate shock is Ligeia’s reanimation, but at the subconscious level this is enacted through reader response as the experience of the text stepping beyond its boundaries and into the real, the objective correlative of a corpse stepping beyond the boundary of death back into life. The doubling of conscious and unconscious horror in the story’s climax gives it affective power in that the reader is now fully identified with the narrator: as the text reaches its unholy apotheosis in moving beyond itself, the next target in the spread of the imaginary blackness is the reader. This movement might provoke a strong reaction formation—the condemnation of the work as unliterary or obscene—or, in a more tolerant reading, a shudder. All of the above explication of how darkness forms an invasive dialectical presence in â€Å"Ligeia† allows us to expand an interpretation of the work from the formal interplay of light and dark to the real, instantiated, and historical discourse of domination and slavery. On this ground, the message of â€Å"Ligeia† about slavery is as tangled as the rendering of color. Ligeia, the dark lady, seems to dominate the narrator from the beginning of the tale, and in her return via the corpus of Rowena she exerts power not only over another person—one marked as fair, as white—she demonstrates her mastery over life and death itself. Ligeia’s empowerment seems paradoxically at odds with aligning this story with the historical circumstances of slavery: black African slaves were legally considered chattel, moveable property, and had all the same rights that cattle or the like would have, that is, virtually none. If we remember, though, that as a tale of the grotesque—an imaginative exaggeration that partakes of the inversions and reinvestments of the subconscious—â€Å" Ligeia† does not disclose its truths at the level of literal or represented but in the language of (bad) dreams. What correlates the play of power in â€Å"Ligeia† with the logic of slavery is that the very idea of total domination—or rather, since we are dealing in inversions, the total subjugation of the narrator—can operate so freely in the story. The historical domination of the white slave owning class is represented here in its inverted form as the grotesquely hyperbolic empowerment of blackness through occultation. Ligeia’s transcendent power does not correspond to the real configuration of social forces in 1830s America, which was already being marked by ambivalence toward the national sin, but to the idealized racial superiority that white ideology purported to itself—though it could not, ever, live up to its own fantasy of itself either in terms of exacting submission or conversion of the â€Å"heathens†Ã¢â‚¬â€and to the equally idealized mystery of blackness empowered through an assumed (and constructed by apathy) opacity. The form of domination operating in the story is evidenced largely by the formal construction of the narrator’s discourse. Instead of pronouncing at the outset his obsession with Ligeia, the narrator demonstrates his relationship of submission/domination by overwhelming the reader with intricate, over-detailed descriptions of Ligeia. The narrator is dominated by his own telling, by discourse itself, and the telling is fully possessed by the body and soul of Ligeia. Rather than willfully presenting her domination over the narrator, and thus exposing herself to revolt or to a failure to live up to the role of â€Å"master,† Ligeia’s domination is represented through the narrator’s willed submission. His total submission—undemanded, uncoerced, almost unasked for—attributes to Ligeia a total form of power that the master cannot arrogate to himself but which exists exclusively in the mind of the imagined slave. The countercurrent of this is that the story is told by the slave though discourse is supposed to be the exclusive domain of the master. Yet the thrall is narrator is truly what the master class of a slave-owning society requires to receive the adulation is craves, and is in keeping with the logic of slavery. The slave class exists to labor on behalf of the master class; the final step in establishing an absolute and horrific slavery is for the labor of discourse to become the burden of the slave. Poe’s story works through a mounting intensity of the motifs of white and black, starting small and growing to a climax in which blackness appears everywhere. Through this progression, Poe’s story shows that even though a white perspective gets to tell the story of â€Å"Ligeia† and of U. S. history, it is not safe from a backlash. To the contrary, in trying to secure itself absolutely from blackness, the whiteness of the American mythology has invented a racialized other that it cannot escape. The black fear that haunts the narrator and the American reader assumes the massive proportions of the problem of racial chattel slavery itself. Beyond the scale of the actual ambivalences of the play between owner and slave is the nightmarish dimension of absolutes that the ideology of such a society demands. The model for this absolutism is, of course, the dichotomy between life and death: a clear transition that is irreversible. The horror of the American mind, which must reconcile an absolute division between master and slave with a contingent division between classes that are actually interpenetrating, is brought into the light of representation in Poe’s horrific tale of the risen dead.

Questions On Operating Systems Structure - 1684 Words

Critical Comparison NTFS ZFS COURSEWORK ONE REPORT Mohamed Mahamud | W1442717 | Operating Systems Structure Introduction File systems is a method of sorting data structure in the operating systems and means to keep track of the virtual data in the operating systems without a file system information stored would be a large body of data with no way of knowing where a piece of data is stored begins and ends. File systems is also referred to as partition or disk which is uses files or the type the file systems. A file system on a disk or partition is a way to organize, navigate, hierarchical data can be accessed, stored and retrieved in a form of folders or files. When files system is referred to as a partition it means that the hierarchy of directories also known as the directory tree. It is used to organize files on a computer system, the hierarchy of directories is locked on a single partition or disk it can also be spread over multiple disks even disks on a different computer at a different location. When a file system is referred to as type of file system it is the way the stored data are organized on computer disk for example a file or folder that is that is stored on a hard disk or a partition on the hard disk. It is generally a piece of code in the kernel module which maintenance the logical data structures located in the storage. The main functions that every file system should have are efficient organization of data quick storage and retrievalShow MoreRelatedEssay about Mrs. Fields Cookies Case Study1639 Words   |  7 PagesQuestion#1 Describe a typical day at work at Mrs. Fields’ Cookies for Store manager, District manager, Regional director of operations, Store controller and for Debbi and Randy Fields. 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