First Step Marketing

There are two primary ways of promoting yourself and your product. (Remember, you and your product, should become synonymous. That not only do people know the products or the service but they know them as being yours.) Read the rest of this entry »

Warning! A business, which might seem an easy way to earn a living, is unlikely to turn out that way. It only looks easy because you do not know enough about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Many of you are purchasing or taking over an existing business. Thus the business will not be experiencing its grand opening or its first week. However, it will still be your beginning, and you’ll be encountering a lot of things for the first time. Therefore most of the following applies as much to you as it would to a start-up.

There are two kinds of grand openings. One is a special promotion called a “Grand Opening.” If you’ve established a business that depends on walk-in traffic, you’ll undoubtedly want to use your opening as an excuse to have a grand-opening promotion. Whatever you do, don’t do this on your first day. You’ll have plenty of time to do this promotion after you’ve worked the kinks out of your operation and had enough time to properly plan such an event. Read the rest of this entry »

Innovation has become so commonplace that scarcely any product survives long enough to age. New ideas and items are born obsolete. The cycle never stops. Accordingly, customers and suppliers alike grow dizzy in their futile pursuit of the next best thing.

Last year, consumers in the United States were inundated by roughly twenty-three thousand new packaged goods—about 450 per week. Revlon, Inc., alone introduced four hundred new items. Combine that with the thousands of other new consumer products that appeared, from computer advances to car models, and you get a sense of the plethora of choices, a flood that would have daunted Noah. Read the rest of this entry »

Review of recent developments

The growth of the mobile Internet now exceeds that the PC version. Mobile communications offer considerable potential to marketer because of their unrivalled combination of:

• instant response;

• personalized content (as each customer has a unique telephone number);
• scope for geographical location tracking.

The potential for mobile networks is particularly high in developing countries that do not have an established wired telephone network and hence no established PC-based Internet services. In the Philippines, for example, SMS messaging (see p. 194) has recently taken off rapidly, and mobile Internet services there- ore offer huge marketing opportunities in these emerging markets. Read the rest of this entry »