Monday, December 24, 2007

Four P’s Of Marketing

In the early 1960 Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School acknowledged a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services. Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a “Marketing Mix”. Professor E. Jerome McCarthy, also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s, suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements: product, price, place and promotion.
The four Ps are:
  • Product: The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual goods or services, and how it relates to the end-user's needs and wants. The scope of a product generally includes supporting elements such as warranties, guarantees, and support.
  • Pricing: This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts. The price need not be monetary - it can simply be what is exchanged for the product or services, e.g. time, energy, psychology or attention.
  • Promotion: This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.
  • Placement (or distribution): refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point of sale placement or retailing. This fourth P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or services is sold (e.g. online vs. retail), which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people), etc.
These four elements are often referred to as the marketing mix which a marketer can use to craft a marketing plan. The four Ps model is most useful when marketing low value consumer products. Industrial products, services, high value consumer products require adjustments to this model. Services marketing must account for the unique nature of services. Industrial or B2B marketing must account for the long term contractual agreements that are typical in supply chain transactions. Relationship marketing attempts to do this by looking at marketing from a long term relationship perspective rather than individual transactions.

Friday, December 21, 2007

History Of Cliffhanger

The term is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel "A Pair of Blue Eyes" in 1873. At the time newspapers published novels in a serial format with one chapter appearing every month. In order to ensure continued interest in the story many authors employed different authorial techniques; in the aforementioned novel Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.

Once Hardy created it, all serial writers used the cliff-hanger even though Trollope felt that the use of suspense violated "all proper confidence between the author and his reader." Basically, the reader would expect "delightful horrors" only to feel betrayed with a much less exciting ending. Despite the rhetorical distaste all serial authors used the cliffhanger and Wilkie Collins is famous for saying about the technique: "Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em wait – exactly in that order."

Collins is famous for the Sensation Novel which heavily relied upon the cliffhanger. Some examples of his endings include:

"The next witnesses called were witnesses concerned with the question that now followed--the obscure and terrible question: Who Poisoned Her? (The Law and the Lady) "Why are we to stop her, sir? What has she done?" "Done! She has escaped from my Asylum. Don't forget; a woman in white. Drive on." (The Woman in White) "You can marry me privately today," she answered. "Listen--and I will tell you how!" (Man and Wife)"


This anticipation and conversation inducing authorial technique would often be very contrived as the only purpose was to maintain interest in the monthly serial. Therefore, these were regularly removed from the plot when the serial was published as a full novel.


The cliff-hanger was converted into film and is best known from the very popular silent film series Perils of Pauline (1914), shown in weekly installments and featuring Pearl White as the title character, a perpetual damsel in distress who was menaced by assorted villains, with each installment ending with her placed in a situation that looked sure to result in her imminent death – to escape at the beginning of the next installment only to get into fresh danger at its end. Specifically, an episode filmed around the New Jersey Palisades ended with her literally left hanging over a cliff and seeming about to fall.


Although a cliffhanger can be enjoyable as a page turner at the end of a chapter in a novel, a cliffhanger at the very end of a work can be frustrating. Cliffhangers can build anticipation (and, subsequently, profit) for sequels. However, if no sequel follows, effective suspension of disbelief can leave the audience or readership wondering what happened in the work's fictional realm. Sometimes (for example at the end of Blake's 7) that goes so far that people write fan fiction (or even publish a novel) deciding what happens next.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Direct Sales Vs. Network Marketing

Do you know what the fundamental differences between Direct Sales & Network Marketing?
  • In Direct Sales, the model is based on a few people doing a lot. In Network Marketing, it’s exactly the opposite; a lot of people doing a little bit each.
  • Imagine that you have a product and you want to sell $1,000,000 worth over the course of one year. In the conventional Direct Selling model, you might hire a sales force of 100 people and impose a sales quota of $10,000 per person — 100 x $10,000 = $1,000,000
  • In Network Marketing, we simply reverse the numbers to achieve the same result. Here, we have 10,000 people, all responsible for only $100 each — 10,000 x $100 = $1,000,000
  • This is exactly what J. Paul Getty was talking about when he said, “I’d rather earn one percent off the efforts of 100, than 100 percent off the efforts of one.”

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Friday, December 14, 2007

Pros And Cons Of Online Auto Insurance

Obtaining online auto insurance today can be as simple as a click of the mouse. But some car insurance quotes you might find on the Internet are nothing more than empty promises. Car insurance online can be purchased through agents or directly from the auto insurance company, but you must know how to look for legitimate companies before you get started. Let's explore the pros and cons of buying your car insurance online.

Two of the major advantages of buying online auto insurance are convenience and low insurance premiums. It's convenient to be able to go online from the privacy of your own home and compare many auto insurance companies, their policies, and how much they charge for the premium. You can go to multiple websites owned by different insurance companies, or compare many insurance companies using one insurance quote service. This beats driving to or calling multiple insurance companies around town to find the right one. Finding online auto insurance quotes can be as easy as filling out a simple form. You can have your quote in minutes, and you can usually get as many quotes as you want free of charge. Requesting an auto insurance quote online does not affect your credit score, and there's no obligation to buy the insurance once you receive a quote.

Though the benefits can be many, there are a few disadvantages to buying online auto insurance. If working with a company you're not familiar with, you can't be absolutely sure that the company is making a legitimate offer until you actually have to make a claim. Some insurance companies appear wonderful on the surface, with very low premiums and a fantastic policy, but they offer terrible, slow claims processing services. Or, they might refuse claims for items that were originally listed in your policy. This can be frustrating and take up much of your time and energy when you need a claim to be processed right away. That's why it is always a good idea to check out any unfamiliar companies with the Better Business Bureau.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Packing Tips for Your Apartment Move

Moving to a new apartment comes with many responsibilities, not the least of which is packing up the whole of your belongings and readying them for moving to your new apartment. In the case of those, who are moving will have allowable budget to hire professionals to pack and move their belongings. In some cases, they take responsibility for packing their own things after which professionals load the packed items onto their trucks and drive them to their destination. There is also a situation that allows cutting down of professional services so that those who are moving to an apartment can save a significant amount of money and still have their belongings transferred to their apartment which has happened in my case when I am moving to one of the Orlando apartments. But that needs a lot of planning and time to make it easy and simple.

Self-Service Moving – It is a service, often referred to as self-service moving, allows those apartment moving to take responsibility for packing and loading their belongings onto a moving truck, after which the professional moving service will drive the truck to your destination. For those leaving the area who also have to drive their own car to their new apartment this service can be invaluable.

Cost Reduction – Self-service moving significantly reduce the costs of professional moving services. Because those who are moving are largely responsible for the bulk of the work, the mover simply charges for the distance that must be driven to transfer the items, as well as the amount of space that is required on the moving truck. Because of this, many self-service movers will charge only for the space used on the truck rather for the entire space available in the vehicle.