Dec 5 2024
Negotiation Strategies For Getting The Best Deal

Effective negotiation can ensure significant cost savings while securing an optimal deal that provides the most value for the money spent. It can help in establishing a good rapport and building valuable, long-term relationships that can pave the way for future opportunities. It is the key tool to achieve favorable or desirable outcomes while preventing misunderstandings and disputes by making sure that terms and conditions are clearly and explicitly outlined. Proficient negotiating can offer a competitive edge by closing those deals that others may find challenging and struggle to secure.

So, let’s look over some excellent negotiation strategies for getting the best deal.

 

Conduct Research

Carry out your research to understand the market and gather thorough information about the industry standards, prevailing price range, and trends to determine if the offer is fair or if there is room for negotiation. Also, know the other party – their background, business, constraints, objectives, and negotiation style to align your approach accordingly. Investigate the existing alternatives and options to decide whether to accept or walk away from the deal.

 

Define Specific Goals And Objectives

Be clear about what exact outcome you want to achieve by carrying out the negotiation. Communicate your goals and objectives, clearly and concisely. Develop a precise strategy for attaining it such as a concessions plan and BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) to avoid agreeing to unfavorable terms.

 

Build Rapport

Fostering a friendly relationship during negotiation can establish a constructive and harmonious environment.

This can be achieved by finding common ground or shared interests that are mutually acceptable. Also, strengthen the other party’s trust by being reliable and transparent. Be professional and accountable while steering clear of conflicts of interest to build a long-term relationship.

 

Listen Actively

Minimize external distractions and pay complete attention to the speaker. Dynamically engage in the conversation and exhibit your interest by maintaining eye contact and warm and friendly nonverbal cues. Ask open-ended questions to clearly understand the other party’s perspective. Be patient and open-minded. Avoid interrupting with your own views until they have conveyed theirs.

 

Leverage Anchoring

Use anchoring which is nothing but creating a point of reference or anchor that directs the flow and results of the negotiation. To do it, first prepare your anchor by fixing a meticulously researched, well-considered, and tactically chosen starting proposal or demand. Although ambitious it must be realistic in line with market standards. Expect and be prepared for counter-proposals, objections, and resistance.

 

Pick The Best Timing

Remain patient and wait for the most advantageous moment or situation. Start negotiations when you have a solid standing or are in a favorable position. This can influence the outcome of your negotiation tactics and maximize your probability of success. Refrain from negotiating when the other party appears to be overwhelmed, stressed, or inattentive. Stay flexible and adapt your timing in case of unanticipated situations.

 

Be Willing To Find a Middle Ground Or Compromise

Exhibit your willingness to compromise and seek common ground. Sometimes, by being open to compromise you can determine solutions that are mutually beneficial. It also builds lasting, positive relationships. Identify potential trade-offs and propose alternate options that are agreeable to both parties. However, when making a concession ensure you get something in return.

 

Negotiate In Person

Prefer face-to-face interaction rather than other modes of communication. It also facilitates real-time interaction and non-verbal communication. It supports gaining instantaneous feedback. It also offers the chance to clear up confusion and misunderstandings immediately as they arise. Face-to-face negotiations are essential to demonstrate commitment, strengthen trust, build genuine connections, ensure clearer communication, and enable quicker solutions.

 

Keep An Open Mind

Maintaining flexibility while negotiating is key to being accommodating to the shifting dynamics as well as the insights that emerge during discussions. By maintaining an open mindset toward different options and solutions, you can satisfy the other party’s concerns and achieve agreements that offer mutual benefits.

 

Document Agreements

Documenting agreements can assure clarity, mitigate confusion and misinterpretations, and officialize the terms of the deal. Outline main terms incorporating obligations, deadlines, and specific stipulations. Review and verify the accuracy of the details and confirm the terms as well as finalize the agreement with the other party.

 

Maintain Your Calm And Uphold Professionalism

Keep your cool to refrain from committing to decisions driven by frustration, a sense of urgency, or a lack of patience. Exhibiting professionalism during negotiation creates a positive impression, validates competence, builds trust and credibility, leads to collaborative problem-solving, and ensures that the discussions are both productive and polite.

 

By executing these strategies, you can negotiate effectively to improve your chances of obtaining favorable terms and reduce costs. You can also proactively manage risks, discover resourceful solutions, and gain competitive advantage while ensuring mutual satisfaction and maintaining a healthy and long-term relationship with the other party.

unicorn 0 Comments
Dec 5 2024
The Future Of Work: Gig Economy, Automation And Reskilling

Certain factors like the necessity to expand the talent pool, evolving workforce, technological developments and innovations, and social-economic forces are dramatically shaping the future of work.

Let’s have a look at what the future of work has in store for the world.


Gig Economy

The gig economy incorporates those jobs that are not permanent such as freelance work and short-term contracts. These jobs are made available as tasks or projects through online platforms or apps that connect the job seekers with the hirers.

These jobs are preferred over in-office jobs because they offer greater work flexibility, relief from tiring commutes, and autonomy to the workforce. It allows individuals to pursue their interests or explore a variety of opportunities to find greater job satisfaction.

The gig economy allows businesses to find and hire experts and specialists who can independently handle the tasks or projects, as and when needed. It facilitates businesses to find the talent they need beyond geographical boundaries. It is also a boon for companies that need an extra helping hand while struggling to meet a deadline or expect a different perspective, ideas, and creativity than the existing in-house team offers.

Entrepreneurs and SMEs, who need high-quality work and varied skills but have limited budgets find the gig economy cost-saving. Outsourcing non-core tasks helps solo business owners focus on tasks that add more value to their business growth, development, and success.  

The growth projection of the global gig economy is highly promising. The market size of the global gig economy platform is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20% as it is anticipated to make it to USD 92,897.28 million in 2031 from USD 14,750 million in 2021. This shows that the gig economy is about to boom over the next decade.


Automation

Automation employs AI technology and machine learning to independently execute tasks with the least human intervention. Businesses find automation immensely valuable to carry out their repetitive and monotonous tasks and chores. Unlike humans, it can perform reliably and 24/7, non-stop. It adds to human abilities and competencies, makes things faster and consistent while cutting down the redundant and wasteful exertion, saving costs as well as mitigating the errors and mistakes of manual work.

In the manufacturing industries, automation is immensely valuable in creating products of high quality and precision. It is also used in place of workers to perform risky, physically challenging, and hazardous jobs to maintain workplace safety. Overall, automation helps to streamline business operations with high efficiency boosting overall productivity. 

However, automation raises the problems of job displacement and income inequality. It can also affect many industries, create ethical and social implications, and pose a question of accountability in case of blunders. It can also cause threats to data ethical usage, security, and privacy. Nevertheless, it can create new job opportunities and increase the demand for skills for designing, maintaining, managing, and controlling automated systems. And so, the future of work would be an integration of automation and human skills.

The industrial automation market was worth USD 205.86 billion in the year 2022 and has shown a substantial growth projection of USD 395.09 billion by 2029, indicating a CAGR of 9.8% from 2022-2029.


Reskilling

Reskilling involves learning new skills and attaining new competence and proficiency totally different from one’s career path or job description to shift into another job role.

Reskilling is specifically becoming the future of work because of the rapidly changing, and advancing technology, evolving industries, escalating trend of automation, and some jobs becoming obsolete because of it, economic downturns, and global uncertainties.

According to the World Economic Forum, over the coming five years, about 23% of jobs around the world will evolve and reshape as a result of industrial transformation, and modern technologies like artificial intelligence as well as those that process voice, image, and text, image.

For companies, reskilling is a great strategic investment to tackle their skills gap. It helps them to find the skilled people to keep up with the developing technology. It is also immensely beneficial for businesses to enhance their workforce’s loyalty, engagement, and morale which can ultimately boost their productivity, and bring down employee turnover while retaining talent. It supports the long-term stability, vitality, and competitiveness of business.

In today’s evolving job market, reskilling helps individuals to be resilient and adapt to the latest demands, increase employability, and future-proof their careers. It not only assures livelihood security but also helps to effectively compete with others in the workforce marketplace and reach higher-level positions or get jobs with better pay. It also supports personal growth and development, generates a sense of accomplishment, and builds confidence.

Businesses that intend to thrive and stay ahead of the competition in the evolving global marketplace must efficiently adapt to these aspects of the future of work.

unicorn 0 Comments
Sep 9 2024
The Creator Economy in 2024: Evolving Platforms and Monetization Tactics

The creator economy is the economy built by content creators and influencers who create content in the form of videos, pictures, blogs, and articles, about some specific niche or subject and publish or post them on digital platforms while directly promoting or marketing products and services to their audience to make revenue from it. It is also labeled as an influencer economy.

 

The creator economy is huge and has particularly grown by leaps and bounds since the pandemic. This field is so alluring that millions have given up their career to pursue as content creators. Recent data states that there are about 207 million professional content creators around the world, at present.

 

The global creator economy is valued at 156.37 billion USD, in 2024. It is expanding at a CAGR of 22.5% and is projected to reach up to 528.39 billion USD by 2030.

 

The number of content creators is growing day by day and so is the competition among them. To capture as big a chunk of the audience as possible they have to come up with high-quality, eye-catching, interesting, and engaging content as well as exceptional presentation.

 

Apart from that they have to keep up with the continuous technological advancements and constantly evolving social media platforms. These platforms often keep launching new features that generally change user preferences, making the already working strategies futile.

 

Successful content creators always tend to keep an eye on the shifts in these platforms and try to adapt accordingly. They make the most of the social media analytics to figure out what works and what does not and modify their approach suitably. They also tend to be dynamic, keeping themselves updated about the latest trends to alter their content creation strategies to sustain and grow their views as well as the engagement of their audience.

 

The digital content created by the content creators is of huge value because it has a great impact on the audience and can influence their purchasing decisions. And so, they use it to monetize effectively with diverse tactics. Let’s have a look at a few of them.

 

Affiliate marketing

This strategy employs creating valuable content that the audience finds helpful and informative while promoting other companies’ products or services. The content creators put the affiliate links of those products/services along with their content and when their audience purchases them by clicking those links the content creators earn a commission on every sale.

 

Brand Collaborations

Influencers often collaborate or partner with certain brands to promote their offerings to their followers, viewers, and subscribers as well as get paid for the same. The content creators have earned the trust of their audience with their knowledge, capability, or expertise in their niche or subject. By grabbing the interest of the audience, they make them consume their content regularly. When these content creators talk about a specific sponsored product, its specifications, and positive aspects with the demos and reviews the audience readily purchases the products, boosting the sales of that brand.

 

Ad revenue

When content creators upload or post content on platforms like Facebook and YouTube, they can get revenue through the ads displayed there. Although this generates passive money, the content creators must get more audience through their content to monetize and earn better. This can be done by enhancing the content quality and making it more stimulating and engaging.

 

Selling products

When influencers have a massive audience over which they have high influence, they can easily build their customer base and sell their products to them. Hence this is one of the best strategies to monetize for the influencers. But then again, the influencers must have the potential and money to invest in building their own product line. For example, influencers often sell custom products like print-on-demand (POD) products to monetize their target audience.

 

Membership Programs

Content creators need not always provide free content. They can also monetize by offering paid subscriptions and membership programs that allow special access to some valuable and premium content, or community for a certain fee. For example, creators who regularly upload music lessons can offer privileged classes only to their paid members to monetize more.

 

Sell courses

Influencers and content creators who are experts, experienced, highly skilled, and well-informed in a certain field are immensely valued by the audience seeking authentic information and know-how. Such creators can monetize their asset of proficiency in their field by creating educational content or courses. Apart from paid tutorials, they can also create eBooks, online classes training programs, and webinars.

 

On the whole, the creator economy will continue to boom in 2024 and beyond widely opening the door to opportunities for content creators who are both competent and strategic. And, they can utilize it to monetize lucratively while successfully and commendably growing in this career.

unicorn 0 Comments
Aug 15 2024
The Synergy of Big Data and Blockchain: Transforming Collaboration

In today’s digital landscape, the convergence of big data and blockchain technology is revolutionizing the way organizations manage and share information securely and transparently. Big data, characterized by vast volumes of structured and unstructured data, requires robust tools for storage, processing, and analysis. On the other hand, blockchain, known primarily for its role in cryptocurrencies, introduces a decentralized and immutable ledger system that ensures trust and accountability in data transactions. When these two technologies combine forces, they create a powerful framework that enhances collaboration and data integrity across industries.

 

Understanding Big Data and Blockchain

Big data encompasses large and complex data sets that traditional data processing applications struggle to handle efficiently. This data often comes from various sources like social media, sensors, IoT devices, and business transactions. The key challenges with big data include storage, processing, analysis, and ensuring its reliability and security.

Blockchain, initially designed as the underlying technology for Bitcoin, is a distributed ledger system It operates as a chain of blocks, each containing a record of transactions, secured through cryptography. Blockchain ensures data transparency, immutability, and decentralization, making it a reliable solution for secure data management.

 

Enhancing Collaboration with Combined Technologies

When big data and blockchain collaborate, they address critical issues related to data management and collaboration:

Data Security and Integrity: Blockchain’s decentralized nature and cryptographic security features ensure that data remains tamper-proof and transparent. This is crucial for industries dealing with sensitive data such as healthcare, finance, and supply chain management.

Traceability and Auditability: Blockchain’s immutable ledger enables organizations to track and audit data transactions throughout their lifecycle. This capability is invaluable in supply chains, where provenance and authenticity of goods are essential.

Smart Contracts: Smart contracts, programmable agreements executed automatically when predefined conditions are met, can be integrated with big data platforms. This automation streamlines processes and enhances efficiency in data-driven operations.

Decentralized Data Marketplaces: Blockchain facilitates the creation of decentralized data marketplaces where individuals and organizations can securely share and monetize data without intermediaries. This opens up new opportunities for data collaboration and innovation.

 

Real-World Applications

The synergy between big data and blockchain has far-reaching implications across various sectors:

Healthcare: Blockchain-enabled platforms ensure the secure sharing of patient data among healthcare providers while maintaining patient privacy.

Finance: Blockchain enhances transaction security and transparency, reducing fraud and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Supply Chain Management: Big data analytics combined with blockchain traceability improves supply chain efficiency, reduces counterfeit goods, and ensures product quality.

Government: Governments harness big data and blockchain synergy to boost transparency, streamline bureaucracy, and secure sensitive data like voting records and identity management, fostering trust and accountability in governance.

 

Challenges and Future Outlook

Despite the promise of combining big data with blockchain, challenges remain. Scalability, interoperability, and regulatory concerns are key areas that need further development. Integrating these technologies seamlessly requires robust infrastructure and standardization.

Looking ahead, the collaboration between big data and blockchain is poised to unlock new possibilities in data management, transparency, and collaboration. As innovations continue to emerge, businesses and industries that harness the power of these technologies will gain a competitive edge, driving efficiency, trust, and value creation in the digital era. The journey towards realizing the full potential of this collaboration is underway, promising transformative outcomes for organizations and society at large.

unicorn 0 Comments
Jul 14 2023
Top 10 Tech Trends That Will Positively Influence Your Marketing Strategies

With ever-changing technology, companies are on the urge to discover new tech trends to market their brands. Today’s consumers see the importance of transparency, authenticity, and privacy compared to as before. Among a pool of technologies, they (or companies) must stay abreast of new tech trends that could positively influence their marketing strategies. It is essential for every company must rely on the latest tech trends to challenge their competitors. In this article, let’s explore the top ten tech trends that will positively influence the marketing strategies of any company. Find out how you can successfully apply these top tech trends to amplify your reach and engage with your customers in various ways. 

 

  1. Big Data and Analytics

With the technical support of big data and analytics, companies can handle real-time analysis of marketing activities across all channels more efficiently. Moreover, advanced analytics advances documentation, and customer retention, content planning, pricing decisions, boost performance, greatly benefitting businesses transitioning to digital processes.

Key Benefits

    • Customer insights for personalized marketing.
    • Identify trends and predict future behaviour.
    • Optimize ad targeting and campaign performance.
    • Brand awareness
    • Cost and time savings by augmenting marketing performance

 

  1. Social Media Management Tools

Social media management tools will support you to build an interactive online relationship with your customers. The process here involves social Media Managers applying their experiences and combine them with tools and services to produce a content, work with users, and assess performances. By publishing various types of content such as videos and blogs, you empower your customers with useful information about your products or services. If the videos you publish go viral positively, your company reputation will go higher with positive comments. 

Key Benefits

    • Analyze social media data for insights.
    • Engage with customers and build relationships.
    • Monitor brand reputation and customer sentiment.
    • Save time by outsourcing time-consuming work such as making content and scheduling posts
    • Get professional advice on specific areas like social media advertising
    • Advances social media growth by gaining more followers and engagement

 

  1. Search Engine Optimisation

If you have come across a topic about digital marketing techniques, definitely you have heard the term SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a key function of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searches every day. In simple words, an excellent SEO raises your online presence and has a big effect on quantity and quality because it is not only for attracting new customers. It also enables you to have a deeper business relationship with those customers because of the trust you have built with them. When you use different social media platforms, you must know secretes of publishing content with key terms. Use key terms of your business functions and website features in the content you publish so that people can find you when they do search. If your website is good on back and front ends, you will surely get a better traffic.

Key Benefits

    • Establish trust between you and your customers
    • Improve user experience and website performance.
    • Increase website visibility and traffic.
    • Target specific keywords and optimize content.

 

  1. Streaming Service

In today’s digital era, video marketing strategy is not anymore optional but a fundamental part in businesses being said that 87% of businesses are using video as their primary marketing tool and there’s a nearly 25% increase in utilization for the past two years. More and more people are turning their eyes toward streaming services for quenching their movie-watching thirsts.  Hence, companies need to reimagine their advertising strategy if they want to align with the customers that use streaming services, companies need to find innovative approaches to market their brands on these platforms. 

Key Benefits

    • Companies can present original content to new audiences.
    • This technology leverages data to personalize recommendations.
    • With this technology, we may partner with influencers to reach followers.
    • Expands SEO as companies that have embedded media results to higher search results and are 45x more likely to rank on 1st page of Google

 

  1. Artificial Intelligence

The past year was mostly about updated and innovative trends in marketing, specifically in the tech space. Instant communication is in-demand and online consumer behavior is evolving. One trend that is having a big impact is AI in marketing. AI automates key marketing activities such as behavioral analysis, personalization, lead generation, customer relationship management (CRM), and other tasks that need automation. So marketing teams will have more time and become highly productive to create innovative strategies and analyze complex marketing models to increase their return on investment (ROI).

Key Benefits

    • AI automates repetitive tasks and improves efficiency.
    • We can personalize customer experiences and recommendations.
    • It is possible to predict customer behaviour and trends.
    • Maintains a more refined and strategic content curation process

 

  1. Extended Reality

Companies in the world are increasingly utilizing extended reality to create an immersive experience for beloved customers. These tech-based marketing solutions play a key role in measurable results for location-specific targeting with virtual events and storefronts. Businesses can also create global virtual events to reach their worldwide audience and sell their products and services around the world. Extended Reality has given companies a better way of emotionally connecting with their audiences in a post-pandemic scenario, where face-to-face communications are less common.

Key Benefits

    • It is possible to provide immersive experiences for customers.
    • With virtual product demos, we can increase sales.
    • It provides unique entertainment and brand experiences.

 

  1. Web3 Marketing

Web3 marketing is a revolutionary marketing approach that decentralizes marketing activities and provides customers with a gamified and interactive user experience. Marketers can employ blockchain technology-based tools to enable targeted audiences, ad fraud prevention, decentralized web hosting, and peer-to-peer interactions. Web3 marketing also empowers marketers to navigate brand relationships from the physical world to the virtual world while providing a better customer experience.

Key Benefits

    • We can create engaging, interactive experiences.
    • Use this platform to leverage decentralized platforms for marketing.
    • We can offer rewards and incentives for customer engagement.
    • Enhancement of real-world advertising

 

  1. Blockchain Technology

Recently blockchain technology has captured the tech world as a helpful tool for advertising and marketing. While a lot of us relates digital marketing with Analytics and AI, blockchain can be the most disruptive technology that is soon to impact marketers in all types of industry. Most of the uses for blockchain revolves around crypto-currencies and finance, but the fundamental technology might be vast for marketing. Since it is a decentralized ledger technology, companies can perform marketing and advertising with better data, gain deeper insights into audience interactions with ad campaigns and cultivate meaningful customer relationships.

Key Benefits

    • This technology enables us to create loyalty programs and reward customers.
    • It provides higher reliability to ensure transparency and authenticity of data.
    • We can improve supply chain management.
    • Creates verified chain from the ad dollar to the end user which results big savings for companies

 

  1. Voice Marketing

Voice marketing is a kind of digital strategy and tactic that companies use to promote their brands through voice-enabled devices. According to researchers, currently, above 20% of all searches are voice-led. Some common platforms for voice marketing are Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Spotify, Soundcloud, or Vocads. Marketers are focusing on this growth by advancing voice commerce, programmatic audio advertising, and remarketing. Companies are developing solutions such as quality equipment, editing and hosting platforms, and marketplaces to connect podcasters with brands.

Key Benefits

    • We can develop content suitable for voice search.
    • It supports us to create voice-activated ads and promotions.
    • You may use voice assistants to engage customers.

 

  1. Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing is a one-stop marketing approach that gives customers a cohesive, integrated shopping experience across all types of digital locations, events, mobile devices, and online stores. This is highly useful for eCommerce store owners because it is vital for them to know where their customers come from. Omnichannel enables campaign management across all types of content such as SMS, phone calls, email, and chatbots through a single platform, both offline and online. With data and analytics, it gives consistent data whenever customers buy products and services.

Key Benefits

    • It is possible to personalize messaging for each customer.
    • We may use data to track customer journeys.
    • We offer consistent experiences across all channels.
    • Engage customers in real time with customized experiences.
    • Aligns all messaging across marketing and sales channels

 

Conclusion 

Every technology continues to evolve and new innovations are being introduced all over the world.  Technologies have become an integral part of our everyday life. We use technologies in our everyday lives and our career lives. By understanding the latest tech trends that can influence your marketing strategies, make sure that your marketing paths are effective and productive to deliver successful results.

unicorn 0 Comments
Jun 7 2023
Choose the Best B2B Online Marketplace for Your Business!

Some research review that almost 60% of B2B buyers are open to purchasing products on digital marketplaces. A B2B platform enables B2B buyers to perform online transactions between global companies. With the support of the best online platform, you can create a set of special features tailored to your needs. Companies in the selling process based on a digital marketplace need higher levels of automation, advanced inventory management and order fulfillment options, and various sales and marketing tools. So here are some of the features that an effective B2B online platform should have.

Web design
Every web design is a representation of a brand’s character & personality. In a good B2B online marketplace, you will be able to build anything that can support you perform your sales process smoothly without the support of a web designer. With ready-to-go designs and layouts, it will allow you to design your profile with essential images, text, and colors to get selling faster. The followings are some of the benefits of good web design.

  • Clear and user-friendly interface
  • Clear call-to-action buttons and messaging
  • Consistent branding and visual design
  • Easy checkout process with minimal steps
  • Fast page loading speed
  • High-quality product images and descriptions
  • Intuitive navigation and search functionality
  • Flexibility to customize and build anything you would want to portray
  • Mobile-friendly and responsive design
  • Secure website with SSL encryption
  • Trust signals, such as customer reviews

Multiple payment options
B2B shoppers need to purchase large quantities of products on a regular basis. Hence, the best B2B online marketplace should have multiple payment options such as partial payment, paying one or several invoices at the same time, and a model of subscription payment. With the model of multiple payment options, your customers will have the ability to divide the costs for their orders into small sums of money. B2B ecommerce firms organize flexible payments nowadays that are advantageous and firms requires taking every advantage that they could get. With the best B2B platform, you can do the following.

  • Ability to accept PayPal payments
  • Ability to save payment information
  • Automated payment reminders and follow-ups
  • Automatic invoicing and receipts
  • Easy payment processing and checkout
  • Integration with popular payment gateways
  • Payment fraud protection and security
  • Support for alternative payment methods
  • Support for major credit cards
  • Transparent pricing and fees
  • With better data, there will be higher revenues

Marketing tools
During this digital age, a digital life-focused marketing tool is a key feature of any marketing strategy. With the best B2B marketplace platforms, companies can sell their products to global customers through the latest digital marketing tools. An effective B2B marketing can be challenging to execute. With creative demands, budget, and channel decisions, marketers have a lot of work to do in order to come up with an effective marketing strategy. The followings are some of the best marketing tools that a B2B marketplace should have.

  • A/B testing and optimization tools
  • Analytics and reporting for marketing campaigns
  • Automated email marketing campaigns
  • Content marketing and blogging capabilities
  • Integration with CRM and sales tools
  • Lead generation and customer acquisition tools
  • Personalization and segmentation capabilities
  • SEO optimization and search visibility
  • Social media integration and sharing options
  • Targeted advertising and retargeting options

Shipping
Companies that sell physical products need to adopt a good B2B platform that has good shipping facilities. The crucial factors to consider when choosing shipping facilities are reliability, speed, flexibility, transparency, cost and proximity to customers. When you deliver large amounts of products simultaneously, you need to have the following facilities. If you find a B2B marketplace that has all these features, you may choose it to sell your products without any further delivery issues.

  • Ability to print shipping labels and invoices
  • Automated order fulfilment and shipping
  • Automated shipping notifications and updates
  • Bulk shipping capabilities and order management
  • Customer self-service tracking and updates
  • Integration with international shipping and customs
  • Integration with shipping software and APIs
  • Multiple shipping options and carriers
  • Real-time shipping rates and tracking
  • Returns and refunds management tools

Analytics
The best B2B online marketplace will allow clients to monitor the way customers purchase, the biographic details of customers, and produce actionable insights. These are all important because technology has been evolving swiftly and purchasing trends changes daily. When sellers closely monitor this data, they can make adjustments to their offerings to capture the desired demographic sales. Here below are the best features of analytics, which a (or that a) B2B marketplace should have.

  • A/B testing and experimentation tools
  • Conversion tracking and optimization
  • Customer lifetime value analysis
  • Customizable reports and dashboards
  • Integration with third-party analytics tools
  • Marketing ROI and campaign analysis
  • Real-time sales and revenue tracking
  • Sales forecasting and inventory analytics
  • Visitor and user behaviour analytics
  • Website traffic and referral source analytics

Personalized experience
The B2B marketplace should allow clients to develop an online store that is mobile-optimized, SEO-friendly, and easy to navigate. If you want your B2B store to reach more customers, the designs of your store should interact with your customers. Here below are the best features of a B2B marketplace, which interact with your customers.

Or add:

If you want your B2B marketplace to win, you should follow these steps:

  • Create digital commerce teams that are capable to evaluate data through AI & advanced analytics
  • Give the buyers the information they need by providing the right mix of product data, specs, illustrations, and photographs on your marketplace listings
  • Work with a qualified e-commerce solution provider
  • Work for higher conversion rates
  • Practice purchase delegation
  • Customizable customer profiles and preferences
  • Customizable website content and messaging
  • Dynamic pricing and product bundling
  • Integration with personalized email marketing
  • Loyalty programs and rewards
  • Personalized product recommendations and upsells
  • Personalized promotions and discounts
  • Targeted messaging and communication options
  • User-generated content and reviews
  • Wish lists and saved shopping carts

Inventory management
The most effective B2B online marketplace platform should have powerful inventory data. These are software platforms built to optimize and modernize the process of managing inventory for B2B transactions online. B2B clients need to have access to order tracking, one-click reordering, shipping information, quote approvals, and other functions that help to manage their accounts smoothly. Self-service inventory management allows B2B customers to place their orders in a fast and efficient approach and supports them to avoid costly backorders. Here are the best tools that the best B2B marketplace should have.

  • Automated inventory replenishment tools
  • Automated restocking and forecasting tools
  • Customizable inventory categorization and management
  • Integration with barcode and scanning tools
  • Integration with third-party inventory management tools
  • Inventory aging and obsolescence tracking
  • Multi-location inventory tracking and management
  • Purchase order management and tracking
  • Real-time inventory tracking and alerts
  • Sales and demand forecasting and analysis

Conclusion
There are several B2B online platforms, with unique features and wonderful benefits, available on the market.  When you choose a B2B platform, it is essential to make sure that the platform has all the functionalities you need to manage the versatility of your sales processes. An online store is the face of your company and the body of all your marketing strategies. You can connect directly to products and services in your marketing emails and advertising campaigns and can monitor the success of your efforts to plan your next goals.

unicorn 0 Comments
Jun 6 2023
Set SMART Goals to Gear up your business for 2024 and beyond

Setting SMART goals for your business is an important step for getting result-oriented success. You need goals to measure growth by comparing your present performance with past ones. If you’re not getting the results you expected, you may adjust your goals or get to the bottom of why you cannot meet them.

To set goals, you need to find out key areas to focus on. What are the key areas you need to concentrate on in your business? This may depend on your business strategies and productions, but some instances to consider include:

  • Customer service improvement
  • Growing sales volume
  • Increasing profit margin
  • Reducing costs
  • Reducing the time required for product or service production
  • Enhance problem-solving skills
  • Innovation
  • Improvement of company culture
  • Profitability

Based on the above key areas, if you want your company to grow, you need to set SMART goals. Otherwise, how will you measure the success of your business growth? SMART goals mean specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based goals. These goals will contribute you a multitude of benefits.

The benefits of SMART goals

  • It will guide you to find a path where you must go.
  • It encourages focus which enhances performances and productivity.
  • It will strengthen your decision-making skills.
  • You will be aware of your past successes so that you can use them for a present project.
  • You will be aware of your strengths so that you can easily overcome obstacles with the support of your strengths.
  • It gives accountability by being able to assess if the work is effective and progressing.
  • You will be aware of your weaknesses so that you can reduce them gradually.
  • You will have more motivation and fulfilment at work.

 

Here are four major steps to set your SMART goals.

  1. Boost your brand energy

Everyone companies need brand awareness but not everyone knows should how to get started. This is where SMART goals come in handy. Successful branding gives you a clear strategy for moving forward and it helps you stand out in a saturated market. With established branding, it is easier to introduce new products or services. Whenever we boost our brand energy, our product or service goes to the next level with a unique identification. With the support of branding techniques-based SMART goals, if we connect our brand with several other brands, we can boost our brand energy with combined elements of several great brands.

Boosting brand energy is the practice of highlighting various aspects of a brand through multiple approaches. The key goal of branding is to promote the elements of the brand along with the qualities or benefits of a product or a service. Branding is not only putting your logo and business name in as many places as possible but also expressing your brand values in as many as approaches possible. It is the right approach to connecting an audience with values and voice through strategic communication.

In today’s market, branding, which can reach a customer’s overall perception of a business, should be done through various digital activities such as social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing and paid advertising, and offline activities such as business cards, tradeshows, workshops, pamphlets, canvassing, classified ads, etc.

  1. Enhance your business operations

Growth and expansion are two main long-term goals for every entrepreneur. An empowered corporate strategy will unleash business expansion opportunities if a successful entrepreneur keeps updating business expansion strategies. With SMART goals, we can expand our business operations with strategic growth initiatives such as:

  • Adding new talents for upcoming projects
  • Addition of new products or services
  • Expansion into new cities, locations, or countries
  • Exploring franchising opportunities
  • Retaining existing customers by selling more products or services
  • Selling products online across multiple platforms
  • Targeting new customer markets

By doing these, businesses can get 70-80%% more efficient in enhancing their business operations. Business expansion strategies make us effectively implement one or more of the above strategies to put our company on the fast track to expansion.

  1. Find strategic business partners

With powerful business collaboration, we can build a strong brand through strategies gained from various scholars. Smart goals should equate with smart partnerships. Business collaboration leads you to access effective marketing techniques, a productive workforce, stronger corporate development, and partnerships. A strategic partnership is an ideal approach that makes entrepreneurs work collaboratively and leverage individual strengths. It strengthens each business and achieves mutual aspirations faster by learning from one another’s experience, network, and resources.

By discovering our partner, we can have a clear picture of how both our services and products are mutually beneficial. We could:

  • Add value proposition for our existing customers
  • Build brand image and trust
  • Decrease our cost of acquisition
  • Gain access to new customers
  • Increase our expertise and resources
  • Overcome our business fears
  • Predict revenue streams of our partners
  • Reach new markets and sectors
  • Capability to develop employees’ skills and encourage staff motivation

If we have a successful partnership with combined expertise and efforts, we would have an unceasing commitment to equality, creativity, productivity, diversity, and flexibility. 

  1. Reach new markets.

In today’s corporate environment, sustaining development and growth is never a guarantee but when you have SMART goals, it will be more convenient to see what needs to get done, what setbacks take place, and have an assessment of your actions’ impact. These SMART goals should go well with SMART objectives. Advancement in science and technology shortens the life cycles of products and services. Business models are changing continuously and new competitors mushroom here and there with innovative products and services. Hence, it is necessary to seek new markets based on the characteristics of a population such as size, growth, age, income, gender, marital status, and buying habits.

When we have SMART goals for identifying new markets, we can enhance business branding, improve sales and marketing, explore new sales models, channels, and strategies, and connect the right people in the market to boost sales.

Therefore, SMART goals not only provide us with suggestions to organize and resources to invest in but also direct us to plan with goals and objectives what a company has to do to apply. Additionally, these interconnected strategies support our employees to enhance their professional skills and competencies.

Conclusion

Clear goals provide a strong direction for your business to gear up for 2024 and beyond. Every element of goals can play a role when approaching investors or potential partners. Setting goals is always the best step to staying ahead of your competitors. No matter how well your business is performing, there are always areas for development and new targets to attain, and new markets to target. Analyse the results of goals every financial year. A comprehensive analysis will provide you with the ins and outs of the goals you set. If you know how well the goals worked clearly, you can set a new goal successfully.

unicorn 0 Comments
May 27 2023
Use ChatGPT in Your Start-ups and Stay Ahead of the Game

Artifical intelligence has been dominating the game competently and ChatGPT which stands for Generative Pre-Training Transformer, a cutting-edge AI language model developed by OpenAI, has become one of the key business development tools recently.  With the support of several machine learning algorithms, it analyses vast amounts of data, learns patterns, and generates human-like responses to textual inputs. Moreover, it has the ability to provide you with context-specific data. With a diverse range of trained texts, including books, news articles, and social media posts, ChatGPT can understand natural language and respond immediately and logically. Start-ups can leverage ChatGPT to gain a competitive advantage to stay ahead of the game.

 

Customer Support
Today’s era of fast-paced customer expectations and digital world, almost all businesses are consistently improving their customer support together with e-commerce experience. The success of every start-up depends on customer satisfaction. Customers come from all walks of life and expect quick and trustworthy support whenever they face any issue related to the product or service. ChatGPT revolutionized industries by providing content for all types of corporate purposes and has been earning credits as a potential as a game-changer at an early stage. ChatGPT can learn from customer interactions and recognize common issues. So it can suggest solutions to resolve customer issues quickly, thus decreasing response times and improving customer satisfaction. You can use ChatGPT to obtain content for the following types of customer support.

  • Chat support
  • Email communication
  • Knowledge base support
  • Multilingual content
  • Q/A section
  • Self-service support
  • Social media post
  • Telephonic conversation
  • Text message
  • Video support

 

Business Operations
As start-ups have limited resources, they need to enhance their business functions to maximize productivity. With the support of ChatGPT, start-ups can streamline their operations in several ways to create clear and concise standard operating procedures, develop performance metrics for analysis and improvement, and focus on cost control and budgeting. ChatGPT has been programmed to perform human-like reactions to a selection of prompts. It has the capability to absorb conversation in a variety of languages and to come up with comprehensive writing. Here are 10 types of business functions that can be enhanced with the techniques acquired from ChatGPT.

  1. Accounting and bookkeeping
  2. Customer relationship management
  3. Financial reporting and analysis
  4. Human resources management
  5. Inventory management
  6. Marketing automation
  7. Project management
  8. Sales forecasting and analysis
  9. Supply chain management
  10. Workflow automation

 

Product Development
Product development is a major function of every business. ChatGPT can help companies by providing techniques to build a minimum viable product, conduct market research for product validation, innovate with new features and technology, and prototype and iterate for continuous improvement. ChatGPT is a useful tool to Product Managers in terms of Predictive Analysis, Outreach emails, drafting survey questions, expanding product lines, monitoring competitors, and product recommendations.

 

Types of product development

  • Agile development methodology
  • Concept testing and validation
  • Continuous improvement and iteration
  • Idea generation and ideation
  • Market research and analysis
  • Product design and prototyping
  • Quality assurance and testing
  • Release and deployment management
  • User adoption and engagement
  • User experience testing and optimization

 

Skill Development
Greater efficiency can boost the overall growth of a company, making more profits and decreasing excessive expenses. To attend training for new knowledge acquisition, observe experts for analysis and learning, practice to improve proficiency and consistency, and set specific, measurable goals for development, employee skill development is essential. Let’s see the top 10 skills that are needed for business development and use ChatGPT to obtain techniques for improving related skills.

 

Types of skills

  • Communication
  • Conflict resolution
  • Customer service
  • Diversity and inclusion
  • Leadership
  • Project management
  • Sales and marketing
  • Team building
  • Technical skills
  • Time management

AI-supported management has been relevant for companies that aim to achieve 360-degree sustainability and ChatGPT is a tool that can seed up the transition by saving time and lowering the cost of sustainability management.

 

Cost Savings
With some cost-saving techniques, start-ups can reduce their labour costs and improve their bottom line. By using GPT, companies can generate content for obtaining cost-saving techniques to conduct a cost analysis for budget optimization, implement telecommuting for office cost savings, minimize waste for cost and environmental benefits, and upgrade equipment for energy efficiency and longevity.

 

Cost-saving techniques

  • Asset management
  • Automation and robotics
  • Cloud computing and virtualization
  • Energy efficiency improvements
  • Outsourcing and offshoring
  • Process optimization
  • Procurement optimization
  • Supply chain optimization
  • Vendor contract renegotiation
  • Waste reduction and recycling

ChatGPT may not be capable of providing service as humans do but it is cost-effective considering that it can work 24/7 in the customer service department which is highly advantageous for companies especially to the ones with worldwide customer base. 

 

Market Research
If you don’t know who your customers are, your sales and marketing efforts will become worthless. You need to make a clear statistics-based picture of your customers with the support of the market research team and ChatGPT is a prevailing tool that can provide useful insights and can help companies to make good decisions. You may use ChatGPT to get the following types of techniques for performing better market research.

 

Types of market research

  • A/B testing – Comparing two versions for performance
  • Case studies – In-depth analysis for insights
  • Competitor analysis – Researching competitors for insights
  • Customer feedback – Gathering feedback about products/services
  • Industry reports – Reports on specific industries or markets
  • Interviews – One-on-one conversations for in-depth insights
  • Observation – Collecting data by watching consumers
  • Online analytics – Analyzing data from online platforms
  • Surveys – Questions to gather information from people
  • User testing – Testing product with users for insights

 

Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the key marketing approaches focused on creating and distributing content in the digital world although it has been proven that it can be time-consuming and the process is a bit redundant.  Content must be valuable, relevant, and consistent to attract and retain the target audience and to drive profitable customer action and the good news is that you can get some tasks programmed making the work more convenient and easier using ChatGPT. With this tool, you can systematize content optimization, generate leads and do keyword research.

 

Types of content that uses ChatGPT

  • Blog posts – Written articles on a topic
  • Case studies – Customer success stories
  • FAQs – Answers to commonly asked questions
  • How-to guides – Step-by-step instructional content
  • Infographics – Visual data representation
  • Interactive content – Engaging audience participation content
  • Podcasts – Audio education or entertainment
  • Social media posts – Short updates on platforms
  • Videos – Engaging educational content
  • Whitepapers – Industry insights and solutions

 

Conclusion
ChatGPT is a highly useful AI tool that will allow start-ups to go progressive with the speed of content production. However, if you don’t know the exact direction of obtaining the required data, it’ll generate useless and uninteresting data. So you still need to be able to think before you asking data from GPT. The more creative and productive questions you ask the more highly beneficial data you can get from ChatGPT.

unicorn 0 Comments
Jan 16 2023
An MMT Perspective on how Agenda 30 could be Implemented in Australia

Covid-19 has shown that governments with monetary sovereignty can turn the tap off quickly,  if they must, and just as easily turn the tap back on. This has been coupled with a new appreciation for the ability of a sovereign economy to operate effectively despite large levels of net government (and net foreign) debt as a proportion of GDP, reconfirming the experience of those governments during WWII, when debt was used as an instrument to curb consumption and to redirect productive resources and research activity into investment in new capacity and new technology to support the war effort (viz the Agenda 30 strategic policy goals). 

A similar imperative now confronts nations as they direct resources into a sustainable transformation of the economy. This paper will contribute to these policy objectives by examining the respective economic roles to be played in this transformation by the Job Guarantee, the Green New Deal, and what Mazzucato chooses to call “ mission-oriented finance”! In this context, a range of metrics for guiding policy is also evaluated.

Keywords: Modern Monetary Theory, Agenda 30, Green New Deal, Job Guarantee, Mission-oriented Finance, Short-changing Nature. 

1. Introduction

The main purpose of this paper is to clarify both the rationale for, and policy objectives underpinning, a range of interventions recently advocated by Modern Monetary Theorists (MMTs), within the context of the UN’s Agenda 30 strategic policy goals. Specifically, it will address the Job Guarantee (JG) as an anti-inflationary instrument and the Green New Deal (GND) as a means for redirection of resources and capital investment.

However, I intend to achieve this clarification within an academic context where it has become fashionable to question MMT for its on-going adherence to supposedly inadequate or erroneous theoretical principles. Much like much like Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, who guilefully claimed that he came “to bury Caesar not to praise him”, for although Brutus (along with Georg Friedrich Knapp and Abba Lerner) was purportedly an honourable man, MMT is faulted on a fundamental level for its less than honourable fidelity to the principles of (i) neo-Chartalism; and, (ii) Functional Finance.

The first theoretical allegiance is criticised on the basis of a broader Post Keynesian or Marxist interpretation of “money with no intrinsic value”, which questions the notion that stability in the value of money, when it functions as both a unit of account and a store of value, can be guaranteed solely by the legislated requirement that it be used for the payment of outstanding tax obligations (Lapavitsas & Aguila, 2020, is representative on this strand of critique). The second allegiance is questioned by so-called Structuralists, on the basis that current account deficits and cumulative net foreign indebtedness do matter, especially for emerging economies, which suffer from being situated low in the global currency hierarchy, plagued by a narrow, commodity-based admixture of exports, while subject to a rapidly destabilising pass-through of exchange rate fluctuations onto tradeable goods prices (for examples of this Structuralist critique, see Prates, 2020; Vernengo & Caldentey, 2019, for critiques, and Carnevali et al., 2020 for a discussion of strategic pass-through as a generalization of the Marshall-Lerner conditions).

With the intention of clearing the way for a more focused discussion of macroeconomic policy options, I wanted to briefly respond to the above-mentioned criticism of MMT’s theoretical foundations. To begin with, I wanted to highlight the fact that, in the 1980s, the Australian tradition of MMT developed within an environment where many mainstream and more left-wing economists adopted what were effectively Structuralist arguments to argue that a return to policies of full employment that were temporarily abandoned in the last year of the Whitlam Labour Government, was prevented by a “Balance-of-Payments Constraint”. When Hawke-Keating Labor Government was returned to power in the early 80s, Treasurer Paul Keating, largely mirrored then ex-Prime-Minister John Howard’s obsession with the rising level of foreign debt.

In Australia, back in the 80s, a series of inter-linked Structuralist arguments legitimised a sustained assault on the wages and conditions of Australian workers, and ultimately, the level of trade union influence. However, the biggest impact on the industrial working class could be sheeted home to rising labour underutilisation (a combination of rising unemployment and ‘precariousness’). With the clear intention of reducing the “real wage overhang,” workers were encouraged to trade-off increases in the ‘social wage’ for cuts to real wages as a means of restoring the international competitiveness of Australian goods and services.

In grappling with these problems, progressive economists often (incorrectly) applied Kaldor-Thirlwall multiplier models of trade to the case of floating rather than fixed exchange rates (McCombie & Thirlwall, 1994)[1]. On this view, income elasticities of demand dominate in their effects over exchange-rate related price-elasticities. A country like Australia is seen to have a high income-elasticity of demand for imports whereas the rest of the world has relatively low income-elasticities of demand for Australian exports. Accordingly, if Australia were to grow too rapidly compared with rates of growth exhibited by our major trading partners, the current account deficit would widen dramatically. “Stop-Go” policies would be the inevitable result.

Within the Commonwealth Government bureaucracy, it was commonplace for economists to refer to the “twin deficits” hypothesis, which viewed total public sector debt as the main driver of deficits on the current account. Similar views were actively promoted by supposedly ‘left wing’ economists in the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research, officials at the OECD, and members of Secretariat of the tripartite Australian Economic Planning and Advisory Commission. At around the same time, there was much-heated debate about “Dutch Disease” (i.e., the “crowding out” of other industries when the resource-sector expanded) and the “J-curve” effect in Australia (which arises when an exchange-rate depreciation initially worsens the trade deficit before contributing to a gradual increase in net exports).

Both Marxist and Post Keynesian critics of MMT have emphasised the importance of the global currency hierarchy, the determinants of effective sovereignty, and the influence of conventions and confidence in the whole monetary system as having some bearing on the value of money. And Chartalist views have been questioned on the dubious basis that spot/forward contracts were developed before effective principles of taxation were formalised. It has been claimed that many developing economies simply “will not find foreign demand for their currencies”.

Kaltenbrunner (2012) has attempted to achieve an integration of what she calls the ‘horizontalist’ or structuralist position and ‘verticalist’ interpretations of monetary policy in open economies (the work of Lavoie, 2000, 2002-03 can be seen as illustrative of the ‘verticalist’ position, especially in his interpretation of the covered interest parity condition).  To this end, she has identified three structural factors that determine the ability of a country to meet outstanding external obligations (and thus, the liquidity premium on its currency); namely: (i) a country’s total stock of net (short-term) external obligations (expressed as a proportion of GDP); (ii) the proportion of its liabilities denominated in foreign currency and the possible existence of other liabilities to foreign investors; (iii) a country’s ability to meet its outstanding liabilities through “forcing a cash flow in its favour” either through the income generation process (including income from previous rounds of lending) and/or dealing and trading in capital assets and financial instruments; and finally, if current cash flows are insufficient to meet outstanding obligations, (iv) the ability to “make positions” (i.e. to refinance existing debt and/or to liquidate assets).

The question for policy makers is whether a country exposed to external pressures in each of these three ways, can put together a cluster of policy interventions, including capital controls, to counter any likely shocks (while recognzing the fact that floating exchange rates ensure greater levels of autonomy in the pursuit of effective fiscal policy). This is where consideration must be given to a range of policy instruments that help to develop and diversify the economic and trading base.

Personally, I see a strong resonance between Marxist views on the credit system, when it fails to work as a means of payment, and Minsky’s notions of financial instability, which have long been accepted by MMT advocates. By the same token, I see little difference between Marx’s conception of money with no intrinsic value and Chartalist efforts to explain how a stable value for the national currency can be established.

In the next section of the paper, I will examine the Job Guarantee (JG). This will be followed by an interpretation of the Green New Deal (GND) as a policy for controlling inflationary pressures in the long run, while achieving dramatic changes in the resource base.  Australian MMT researchers would insist that a raft of supplementary policies (apart from, but including capital controls) can also be adopted as supplements in the pursuit of full employment, including tax policy, industry policy and a strategic commitment to industrial development on the basis of competencies.

2. The Job Guarantee in a “Nutshell”

The JG is premised on the fact that only the national government (as issuer of fiat currency) can create Net Financial Assets (NFA) through deficit spending. To avoid any under-employment of labour and productive capacity, the flow of NFA must match non-Government sector’s desire to net save. Otherwise, there would be a shortfall in effective demand. Jobs created through the issue of NFA would be paid at minimum wage and designed so that they do not directly compete with those to be subsequently created within the domestic private sector via the multiplier.

The JG labour-force thus functions as a “buffer stock” whose primary role is that of anti-inflationary instrument This is because the uneven distribution and persistence of underemployment means that traditional policies of public investment would otherwise meet inflationary bottlenecks well before full employment is reached (Mitchell & Juniper, 2007).

Mitchell (2020) explains how a JG operates as a superior means for the control of inflation when compared to the mainstream pursuit of a non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). The effectiveness of inflation policies based on NAIRU can and has been undermined by: (i) the continual movement of workers out of short term into long-term  unemployment; and, (ii) the dramatic rise in the proportion of those in precarious employment.  In the more technical literature on inflation, these combined effects are said to have contributed to the development of a “horizontal” Phillips Curve.

Fig. 1., below, suggests how the JG could operate by comparing three positions on the traditional Phillips Curve, which depicts trade-offs between realized inflation and unemployment. Governments increase effective demand in response to high unemployment in position A, moving to position B, at the cost of a rise in inflation from IA to IB. If a JG were put into place, the economy could instead move to position C, achieving full employment at the original rate of inflation.

3. The Green New Deal in a “Nutshell”

Where the JG is a short-run anti-inflationary mechanism, the Green New Deal (GND) is a log-run anti-inflationary mechanism for achieving a dramatic transformation in the economy through intervention in the process of capital accumulation. The GND adopts the methodology originally proposed by J. M. Keynes in his pamphlet on How to Pay for the War in the context of responding on a massive scale to environmental problems such as climate change (Nersisyan & Wray, 2019).

Under this modern version of the scheme, the stages to be followed are first to estimate the “costs” of the GND in terms of resource requirements; second, to assesses resource availability that can be devoted to implementing GND projects. This includes mobilisation of unutilized and underutilised resources, plus shifting of resources away from current destructive and inefficient uses into GND projects. Here, the main problem that could arise is that of inflation if sufficient resources cannot be diverted to the GND. Accordingly, the scheme also proposes a series of anti-inflationary measures, which could include well-targeted taxes, wage and price controls, rationing, and voluntary saving. During WWII, voluntary saving was accomplished, both Great Britain and the US, through issue of war bonds to all classes in society. This combination of policy interventions is summarised in Fig. 2., below.

4. Industry-Policies and Economic Development

Through an historical and political analysis of the East Asian development model, have Amsden and Wade have highlighted the difficulties faced by developing economies that are located at some distance from the frontier of best practice, yet still want to tilt the “playing field” away from existing configurations of comparative advantage. Amsden (1989) emphasises the need for a strong state to impose binding condition of reciprocity on corporations and sectors that benefit from a variety of subsidies designed to influence the path of capital accumulation. Wade (1990) attends to the complexity of “governed market” interventions that might appear to be even-handed in regard to trade versus non-traded, or import-substituting rather than export-oriented industries (conditions which he describes as those of a “simulated free-market”), yet nevertheless still provide incentives for advancement.

The work of Felipe et al., (2012) builds on the competency-based economic analysis of strategic development. This research updates work originally conducted by Hidalgo and Hausman using another set of data encompassing 5107 products and 124 countries. A minimal spanning tree is constructed for global trade based on proximity links between different products. Production of traded goods located at the centre of the network is seen to require a more diverse and non-ubiquitous but unobservable set of competencies. In countries such as India and China, policy makers seem to have been able to exploit available proximity links in their efforts to expand both the scale and scope of what is being produced and traded.

More recently, Barry Naughten (2021) has identified a shift in Chinese industry policy away from sectoral policies for strategic emerging industries towards policies that promote core digital technologies that, if successful, would enable China to leap-frog ahead of EU and US industries in a selected range of key domains (including digital fabrication and production, quantum computation, AI, and machine-learning, big data and the internet-of-things). Understandably, Naughten is reluctant to evaluate the success or failure of these initiatives, remarking that insufficient evidence has yet been amassed to make such judgements. He describes at some length the Industry Guidance Funds (IGF) that China deploys to coordinate different forms of investment at all levels of government—national, provincial, and local—in innovation, infrastructure, and commercialisation of these technologies—while identifying potential sites of failure and emerging risk.

Along similar lines, Mazzucato and Wray (2015) have emphasised the important policy role of State Investment Banks for “entrepreneurial states” wishing to engage in counter-cyclical expenditure, capital development, and new venture support. In particular, they describe an over-arching process of “mission-oriented” finance instantiated by Eisenhower’s efforts to “land a man on the moon” before the Soviet Union. The interventions of a variety of agencies—both public and private, including the newly formed NASA and DARPA—were orchestrated to achieve this set of aims, through the injection of finance at each stage in the innovation chain (i.e., from research, through concept invention, early-stage technology development, and product development, into final production and marketing).  If successful, China’s IGFs would fulfil all of these requirements. This same kind of coordinated approach could readily be harnessed to achieve ecological rather than military and geo-political goals.

5. Metrics for Short-Changing Nature

In a talk I recently gave to members of MMT-Australia I focused on the limitations of mainstream approaches to Ecological Economics focusing on the modified neoclassical framework of Pearce and Turner (1990). My major concern was to question those who saw policies for full-employment as being in contradiction with interventions designed to achieve ecological sustainability. However, I also questioned the notion of environmental capital, which featured in Pearce and Turner’s ‘4 Capitals’ model of sustainability. Accordingly, I turned to Marx’s concept of ‘fictitious capital’, which he applied both to human capital (with labour services being capitalised into a ‘stock’ using a discount rate that simply reflected the rate of exploitation) and to the capitalisation of fictitious structures of money taking the form of credit as a means of payment, that were increasingly divorced from real processes of capital accumulation. I suggested that environmental capital could be viewed as an equally fictitious concept, insofar as it attempted to ‘capitalise’ ill-defined flows of ‘environmental services.

I moved on to the need to build more rigorous bridges between Value Theory (understood in terms of Classical rather than Neoclassical Political Economy) and sustainability metrics (which adequately accounted for the ‘short-changing’ of nature). In the Classical system, prices are determined by socially necessary labour time, including the application of the labour embodied in productive capital. However, from a sustainability perspective, this should include the labour time required to recycle renewable resources, reduce other forms of waste, mitigate the impact of pollution, and discover substitutes for non-renewable resources whose stocks were being depleted (as argued by Moore, 2017).

To this end, I emphasised the proximity between this Classical theory of reproduction pricing, Leontief’s Input-Output Analysis (which has been taken up by a whole generation of Industrial Ecologists), and national accounting conventions for the measurement of GDP (on the former see Schmelev, 2012, along with Suh and Kagawa, 2005; on the latter see Flaschel, 2010). I then suggested that metrics for sustainability could be constructed by adopting techniques of linear programming that had been developed by mathematical economists and planners in the former Soviet Union, because these techniques were also grounded in the labour theory of value. At the time I was unaware that Paul Cockshott (2010) and his PhD student, Jan Dapprich (2020), had already pursued this approach to sustainability modelling, using modern software, while building on the research of Kantorovich (1939, 1965) and Novozhilov (1970) (also see Ellman, 1968 and Holubnychy, 1982).

For convenience, the various elements of what has been proposed above, are brought together in the Fig. 3., below.

6. Conclusion

By way of a recapitulation, let me suggest that policies such as the JG and the GND complement one another and, in combination, demonstrate ways that Agenda 30 can be successfully implemented both in Australia and elsewhere. I went on to argue that the Job Guarantee could serve as a short-run inflation control mechanism, while promoting full-allocation and processes of capital accumulation, to achieve sustainability objectives, while avoiding inflationary pressures over the long-run.

In arguing for this position, I also wanted to highlight the fact that MMT is and has always been cognisant of difficulties faced by ‘emerging economies. For this reason, I also considered a raft of industry policies that could assist developing nations in their efforts to progress up the technology and productivity ladder (even leaving the existing technology frontier behind them in their wake), while diversifying their trade activity. Industry policy can take a long time to come to fruition and some merging economies may be exposed to difficulty when servicing ballooning foreign debt. Under these circumstances capital controls may also fail to stem the tide of increasing financial obligation. However, as Kaltenbrunner (2019), explains, only a certain number of emerging economies would fall into this category. MMT advocates maintain that the loss of fiscal autonomy that would result from any move towards a fixed or ‘dollarised’ exchange-rate, would unfortunately be a heavy price to pay for the achievement of currency stability, even in the short-run.

Finally, I touched on ways that sustainability metrics could be developed using techniques of linear programming that deployed a modified labour theory of value approach to account for various ways in which nature was being ‘short-changed’. In this way, programmes to achieve full-employment could be designed to complement efforts to transform productive activity in ways that met ecological sustainability objectives.

Author: Professor Dr. James Juniper – Conjoint Academic, University of Newcastle; PhD in Economics, University of Adelaide

References

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Carnevali, Emilio, Giuseppe Fontana & Marco Veronese Passarella (2020). Assessing the Marshall–Lerner condition within a stock-flow consistent model, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 44: 891–918.

Cockshott, Paul (2010). Von Mises, Kantorovich and in-natura calculation.  European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies, INTERVENTION, January 7 (1): 167 – 199.

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Hagendorf, Klaus (2013). Victor Valentinovich Novozhilov: A Marxian Mathematical Economist In Honour of the 120th Anniversary of His Birth. Available from authors RepEc website: https://econpapers.repec.org/RAS/pha465.htm.

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