Tag: marketing

Categories
business

What Is Marketing – New Definition

Robert Kingston at SmallBusinessBranding.com shared a new definition of marketing by the American Marketing Association:

“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

What amuses me is that this is a definition done by marketers for marketers. It adds nothing to the understanding of concept or, as a matter of fact, a reasoning a small business owner should include a Marketing row in his cash flow statement.

I am not a marketing professional, only learning, but for me this definition is like saying the water is wet. I’d rather had someone explain all this in English. My own versions of definitions would look closer to the following statements.

Continue reading “What Is Marketing – New Definition”
Categories
business

Retail Online

These are the features ranked according to the number of top 500 retailers that are using them (as per Internet Retailer Magazine):

  1. keyword search
  2. daily/seasonal specials
  3. enlarged product view
  4. what’s new
  5. affiliate program
  6. advanced search
  7. online gift certificates
  8. rich media
  9. outlet center
  10. email a friend
  11. coupons/rebates
  12. top sellers
  13. site personalization
  14. alternative payments
  15. store locator
  16. wish list
  17. customer reviews
  18. catalog quick order
  19. mapping
  20. product customization

Interesting enough as well that most consumers (according to Forrester) are willing to decline paying for “flare”:

Fewer consumers are willing to pay for extras such as gift wrapping, or overnight delivery.
(26% of respondents said they would pay for expedited delivery prior to the holiday season, down from 45% who said they would do so in 2006.)

Generally, what this means is that consumers want to get their purchase faster, easier and with less extras then before. For most of the prospective clients that call us, top five requests for web site are:

  1. Large pictures/ability for visitor to enlarge product image
  2. Search engine optimization/marketing
  3. Ability to quickly add and remove inventory items
  4. Ability to post featured/for sale items
  5. Ability to use various discount codes to track promotions

It is obvious that trends for small and large businesses are almost the same. The slight difference is attributed to overall approach to ways of doing business for small business owners and large retailers.

Categories
PR

Clients who want to be clients

Subliminal message - iStudioWeb BlogInteresting note on generating leads from Patrick Schaber. I would just like to add that prospective clients, while registering, are – conciously or subconciously – suggesting a way you should contact them. For example, if someone wants you to e-mail him, he will almost inevitably mess up his phone number. If another one wants you to call her, she will garble the e-mail address.

Subliminal messaging is just like the body language. Once human species moved on to a new living environment (that is – internet) they immediately adopted their body language habits to new setting. Instead of real emotion we are using smiles. Now, instead of body language we alter the information about us that we transmit.

So while advertisers are trying to come up with ads with subliminal messages built in – we, regular human beings, are being subliminally back to them. Neat, isn’t it?

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