Marketing strategies, tactics, management an opportunity maximization

Assignment : individually search current events and tell what’s happened in word economy in the last 6 months, predict and state what you think will happen by yearend. List 5 things you would suggest to companies regarding marketing their products/services.

Alice Prest Tuesday 02/08/2011
Smi group

Two pints of lager and a decaf latte
07.10.2010 | The Economist

Tough times are forcing change on Britain’s beleaguered pubs
Take a morning stroll past the Jack Phillips in Godalming, a prosperous commuter town in Surrey, and you might well not realize that it is, in fact, a pub. Traditionally, pubs do not open before about 11am, and the first customers through the doors are often the local alcoholics. But the Jack Phillips has been open since 7am, serving cheap coffee and hot breakfasts to a clientele comprising young parents with pushchairs, pensioners and a sprinkling of are suited office types grabbing a quick coffee before work. The multifaceted hostelry is run by J D Wetherspoon, a biggish pub firm that owns 775 low-cost alehouses. The company posted good preliminary results on September 10th, with revenues up 4.3% on last year to £996.3m ($1.56 billion) and pre-tax profits up 34%, to £60.5m. Its success rests partly on its strategy of diversifying away from selling beer in the evening.

Since its pubs began opening early in the morning last year, sales of breakfasts and coffee have risen by about 40%. J D Wetherspoon reckons that it sells 400,000 breakfasts a week, second only to McDonalds, and 600,000 cups of coffee, behind only Starbucks and Costa Coffee. It now in effect runs two businesses from each of its premises: a family-friendly café by day and a budget boozer by night. Its method suggests that, rather than being ousted by coffee shops, the non-alcoholic rivals that have proliferated on British high streets since the 1990s, pubs can incorporate them. Other firms