| Good Business |
| Good Business is a short story that I wrote during college. My English was not very good then, so in case you give it a try, be warned that some of the writing is... weird. That story is more than ten years old (though it's not the oldest on this site. That honor goes to The Dictator, written during my first year of high school); you'll see that it is a scan of a dot-matrix printout. I lost the original computer file, and I didn't have the heart to type it all over again. There is quite a lot of microeconomical mathematics involved in the story. The reason for this is that it was an attempt to include donations into the usual profit maximization calculations, the idea being that if a business advertised giving part of its profit to charity, it was possible that its profit actually went up because of the bigger sales such a donation could generate. If the math is too arduous for you, here's a quick synopsis of the story: marketing employees at Cocsi, a big soft drink company, come across a new publication showing that advertised donations can be used as a marketing ploy to conquer market parts from competitors. They consider using this marketing technique for their soft drinks, but the company's big boss doesn't want to hear anything about giving part of the company's profit away. A few months later, they see their sales dwindling, and soon discover that the reason for this drop is that Pepca, their main competitor, has adopted this very strategy. The story ends with Cocsi going bankrupt, and the big boss who refused that technique shooting a bullet through his head. In case you want to check the math, beware... A teacher of mine needed five hours to go through the calculations. No wonder: for reasons I cannot fathom ten years later, I took a function involving exponentials and logarithms as a guess for the percentage of profit donated / raise of sales curve. Since it was a pure guess based on no market research anyway, there was no reason to use something that complicated! Besides, there is one point in the story where Cocsi's yearly profit of 33 million is mentioned too close to their 33cl soft drink cans, so that it may look like the 33 in the following equation represents the content of a can instead of Cocsi's yearly profit in millions... When I wrote the story, I hoped I could use the calculations in it as a paper towards my bachelor's degree, and later even as a starting point for a thesis in microeconomics. Alas, it wasn't to be: the teacher who had painfully checked all my calculations consulted with another who quickly dismissed my calculations as a hoax because of my "imagined", logarithmic-and-exponential sales raise curve, not realizing that any function above zero would have fit the bill for the sake of the demonstration... I ended graduating with a paper about customer-targeting of a plane-leasing company instead. Blah. Anyway - here's the story. There are four parts; each part has four pages, except the fourth that features the last two pages. The pages are placed like this: 1 3 2 4 So here's the story: Good Business part 1 Good Business part 2 Good Business part 3 Good Business part 4 |
