Factors affecting tour operator effectiveness in South Thailand

The increasing turmoil in the external organizational setting or business environment has focused attention on capabilities and resources as the primary source of competitive advantage. Obviously, this statement points to the application of the resource-based view (RBV) of organizational management. Nevertheless, what constitutes RBV remains an illusion in many quarters of organizational management, as scholars have managed to put up their personal ideas, and managed to converge on phenomenon-driven theories, in addition to RBV. This paper reviews the concepts of RBV in light of knowledge management to highlight some critical pitfalls that might have eluded the research community on the subject matter of RBV. To this end, this paper’s educational value lies in the fact that it simplifies the concept of RBV to the new researcher in a fashion that is capable of appealing to his or her level. A cross-sectional qualitative research approach was employed in an effort aimed at understanding the role of RBV in creating a sustainable competitive advantage and key competencies. A total of 20 relevant articles were searched from different databases and search engines, including Scopus, EBSCO, ABI Inform, IEEE, PubMed, Science Direct, SABINET, IEEE, Bing, Science Direct, and Google Scholar. The findings indicate that RBV plays an important role and assists organizations not only create, nurture, and maintain competitive advantage, but also understand the collective resources needed to compete favorably in a globalized and highly competitive market. With expert knowledge workers at its core to provide support for knowledge creation, sharing, and utilization, the RBV principles discussed in this paper promise to guarantee a methodological step geared towards the achievement of competitive advantage. It, therefore, makes an incremental contribution to the RBV to attain modest improvement in organizational settings.

The paper evaluates the level of competition on the vegetable market. Based on the analysis of the production development trends and resource potential, dynamics and ratio of export and import of agricultural products, including vegetables are presented; dynamics of self-sufficiency ratio of these products is studied; challenges of food security and competitive advantages of Georgian vegetables are identified.
The article concludes that the country has a significant potential for exporting vegetables both to the countries of Europe and Middle East. The paper discusses the factors that hinder export of vegetables; in addition, the ways for reducing dependency on seasonality, opportunities for the development of modern greenhouses and mechanisms for supplying goods to customers all year round are suggested.
On the basis of analyzing the level of competition on the vegetable market, vegetable business is considered as monopolistic. In addition, it is calculated that, currently, local vegetables products account for only 75% of the market.
The paper evaluates the outcomes of high market power caused by monopoly in vegetable business; the impact of market power on pricing mechanism and the welfare of population is determined. In accordance with the problems identified, conclusions are made and recommendations for solving these problems are suggested.

The research is aimed to evaluate the internet marketing strategies in of life insurance companies in Ukraine. The insurance service in the time of digitalization faces scenarios of implementation in the marketing strategy on-line component. The main challenge for Ukrainian life insurance companies comparatively with the world practice is non-obligatory status of such kind of insurance contracts. So, on the one hand, costs of operation, regulatory pressures and inflexible technology infrastructure are increasing, and, on the other hand, economic recession does not allow to increase the number of insured persons, premiums and profit growth.
Sector of financial services is characterized by an increase in the level of competition, life insurance compelled to compete with pensions funds, banks and other financial institutions in order to defend their market share. Insurance companies marketing strategy determines how an insurer can best achieve its goals and objectives, keep existing customers and attract new ones with minimal costs.
Keeping all the above problems around the study would attempt to study all the factors that contributed to the effective marketing strategies. This paper presents different marketing strategies that are taken up in life insurance services keeping in view external and internal environment of the company.