• Product
• Price
• Place (distribution)
• Promotion
The term “marketing mix” became popularized after Neil H. Borden published his 1964 article, The Concept of the Marketing Mix. Borden began using the term in his teaching in the late 1940’s after James Culliton had described the marketing manager as a “mixer of ingredients”. The ingredients in Borden’s marketing mix included product planning, pricing, branding, distribution channels, personal selling, advertising, promotions, packaging, display, servicing, physical handling, and fact finding and analysis. E. Jerome McCarthy later grouped these ingredients into the four categories that today are known as the 4 P’s of marketing.
These four P’s are the parameters that the marketing manager can control, subject to the internal and external constraints of the marketing environment. The goal is to make decisions that center the four P’s on the customers in the target market in order to create perceived value and generate a positive response.
Understanding the meaning of the 4P’s is just about the most important thing you can accomplish in your entire marketing program. The use of the 4P’s is a part of most marketing decisions “on the street”.
Product
• the physical features of the product, or the intangible aspects of the service
• covers things you do to make the product more attractive to buy.
Historically, the thinking was: a good product will sell itself. However there are no bad products anymore in today’s highly competitive markets. Plus there are many laws giving customers the right to return products that he perceives as bad. Therefore the question on product has become: does the organization create what its intended customers want? Define the characteristics of your product or service that meets the needs of your customers.
Place
Available at the right place, at the right time, in the right quantities? Some of the revolutions in business have come about by changing Place. Think of the internet and mobile telephones. Points to think about are:
• decisions about where to sell the product
• or concerns about where the customers are, and how to get to them
• also includes the “channel of distribution” - meaning, all the different middlemen you use to get the product out to the customer
Promotion
It refers to how are the chosen target groups informed or educated about the organization and its products? This includes all the weapons in the marketing armory - advertising, selling, sales promotions, Public Relations, etc. While the other three P’s have lost much of there meaning in today’s markets, Promotion has become the most important P to focus on. Key points are:
• telling the customer about the product
• promotion is typically sub-divided into Mass Selling (Advertising and Publicity), Sales Promotion (stuff you do in the store to get the customer to try the product and contests, coupons, free samples) and Personal Selling (direct contact person2person with a potential customer, sometimes for large industrial sales, and sometimes for high quality consumer products, like selling a car).
Price
How much are the intended customers willing to pay? Here we decide on a pricing strategy - do not let it just happen! Even if you decide not to charge for a service (a loss leader), you must realize that this is a conscious decision and forms part of the pricing strategy. Although competing on price is as old as mankind, the consumer is often still sensitive for price discounts and special offers. Price has also an irrational side: something that is expensive must be good. Permanently competing on price is for many companies not a very sensible approach. Points to think about are:
• are you going to sell at a high price and make a lot of profit in the short term
• are you going to sell at a low price to beat the competition and stay in the long term
The marketing mix framework was particularly useful in the early days of the marketing concept when physical products represented a larger portion of the economy. Today, with marketing more integrated into organizations and with a wider variety of products and markets, some authors have attempted to extend its usefulness by proposing a fifth P, such as packaging, people, process, etc. Today however, the marketing mix most commonly remains based on the 4 P’s. Despite its limitations and perhaps because of its simplicity, the use of this framework remains strong and many marketing textbooks have been organized around it.
]]>DMOZ provides a lot of search results for a good percentage of the most important search engines and directories, including Google. First, DMOZ is NOT a robot-driven crawler but rather a large, human-edited directory of the Web. For any submission to be successful, a few important points need to be taken ahead of time.
Step A
Your full contact information needs to be there. Make certain that your full contact information is easily accessible, preferably with the help of a clearly identified contact button. An e-mail address is certainly not enough. Many ODP editors will tell you if they don’t see a real physical or postal address or telephone number, then that website in its particular category is usually tossed away and probably will never make it inside the directory.
Most importantly, if you are wishing to sell anything, you need to build credibility and honesty with your clients. In such a case, giving proper and full contact information on the site is imperative.
Step B
Do not attempt to SPAM the directory. You should only submit your site once and forget it for at least two to three months. According to DMOZ rules and regulations, you are only allowed to submit to one category. However, in certain isolated cases and if your website happens to be a very large one and offers lots of information, you may be able to submit a second section of it to a different category. As a rule of thumb, it usually takes time for most submissions to be processed.
This is especially true of categories where there are many daily submissions. It is not recommended to submit a website more than once, as it could end up on the lower bottom of the large list of sites to be reviewed and approved, since they are processed according to their submissions dates.
Step C
Your website needs original and good content. During the course of your work, if you are only trying to publish an assortment of affiliate links or if your site happens to be a “mirror-site” of other websites that are plentiful on the Internet, then you are increasing your chances of your submission being rejected.
If in fact you really have to deal with affiliate products or services, we recommend that you add lots of new content, perhaps a product review category, an industry news section or any other additional information that will tell the DMOZ editors that your site has something original to offer and has lots of great content that will be of good use to their users.
Step D
Double-check your website for spelling errors or typos. As much as the DMOZ editors are looking for great content, all are only human and will probably be irritated by some typos or spelling mistakes. Our experience with the ODP tells us that professionally written and carefully built websites with great content, usually always make it into the directory eventually.
Step E
Keep good records of your submission to DMOZ. We strongly recommend in keeping a complete record of the date a website was submitted to the Open Directory Project and to which particular category it was submitted to. If the category you want to submit to has an editor, you should always make a note of who that editor is. Such information would be useful if later you need to inquire about the status of your submission.
Some of you might ask: “How long does it take to get listed?” Recently, we had one site listed within three weeks of submission and, on other less fortunate occasions, we waited over six months for other sites. It is extremely hard to predict anything.
Step F
Select the proper category for any submission. In Google or Alta-Vista, when people submit a URL to such robotic search engines, there really is not much to think about, since their crawlers or “spiders” will visit and index your site automatically, normally over a rather short period of time. However, when submitting to a directory such as DMOZ, a critical part of that submission process is choosing the right category. One good thing that is recommended is to go online and look where other websites similar to yours have been placed in the directory.
When you get to the category that you think is best, press the “add URL” button. In other categories, sometimes the DMOZ editors might put a note mentioning certain restrictions to that category. It is recommended that these notes be read carefully and that you don’t submit to these restricted categories if your site doesn’t meet the parameters mentioned.
Step G
Always contact DMOZ through the proper channels. Finally, a word of caution: if the category where you want to submit does have an editor, it will usually be written at the bottom of the page and you normally should be able to send that editor a message. There is another way to contact the DMOZ editors through their online forum.
Once there, you can ask about the status of your submission, but you must always give them the category and submission date of your last attempt. Additionally, you can always ask a few questions about general DMOZ procedures and rules.
Try your best to meet their rules and regulations and normally your site should eventually be included in their directory.
]]>
• Product
• Price
• Place (distribution)
• Promotion
The term “marketing mix” became popularized after Neil H. Borden published his 1964 article, The Concept of the Marketing Mix. Borden began using the term in his teaching in the late 1940’s after James Culliton had described the marketing manager as a “mixer of ingredients”. The ingredients in Borden’s marketing mix included product planning, pricing, branding, distribution channels, personal selling, advertising, promotions, packaging, display, servicing, physical handling, and fact finding and analysis. E. Jerome McCarthy later grouped these ingredients into the four categories that today are known as the 4 P’s of marketing.
These four P’s are the parameters that the marketing manager can control, subject to the internal and external constraints of the marketing environment. The goal is to make decisions that center the four P’s on the customers in the target market in order to create perceived value and generate a positive response.
Understanding the meaning of the 4P’s is just about the most important thing you can accomplish in your entire marketing program. The use of the 4P’s is a part of most marketing decisions “on the street”.
Product
• the physical features of the product, or the intangible aspects of the service
• covers things you do to make the product more attractive to buy.
Historically, the thinking was: a good product will sell itself. However there are no bad products anymore in today’s highly competitive markets. Plus there are many laws giving customers the right to return products that he perceives as bad. Therefore the question on product has become: does the organization create what its intended customers want? Define the characteristics of your product or service that meets the needs of your customers.
Place
Available at the right place, at the right time, in the right quantities? Some of the revolutions in business have come about by changing Place. Think of the internet and mobile telephones. Points to think about are:
• decisions about where to sell the product
• or concerns about where the customers are, and how to get to them
• also includes the “channel of distribution” - meaning, all the different middlemen you use to get the product out to the customer
Promotion
It refers to how are the chosen target groups informed or educated about the organization and its products? This includes all the weapons in the marketing armory - advertising, selling, sales promotions, Public Relations, etc. While the other three P’s have lost much of there meaning in today’s markets, Promotion has become the most important P to focus on. Key points are:
• telling the customer about the product
• promotion is typically sub-divided into Mass Selling (Advertising and Publicity), Sales Promotion (stuff you do in the store to get the customer to try the product and contests, coupons, free samples) and Personal Selling (direct contact person2person with a potential customer, sometimes for large industrial sales, and sometimes for high quality consumer products, like selling a car).
Price
How much are the intended customers willing to pay? Here we decide on a pricing strategy - do not let it just happen! Even if you decide not to charge for a service (a loss leader), you must realize that this is a conscious decision and forms part of the pricing strategy. Although competing on price is as old as mankind, the consumer is often still sensitive for price discounts and special offers. Price has also an irrational side: something that is expensive must be good. Permanently competing on price is for many companies not a very sensible approach. Points to think about are:
• are you going to sell at a high price and make a lot of profit in the short term
• are you going to sell at a low price to beat the competition and stay in the long term
The marketing mix framework was particularly useful in the early days of the marketing concept when physical products represented a larger portion of the economy. Today, with marketing more integrated into organizations and with a wider variety of products and markets, some authors have attempted to extend its usefulness by proposing a fifth P, such as packaging, people, process, etc. Today however, the marketing mix most commonly remains based on the 4 P’s. Despite its limitations and perhaps because of its simplicity, the use of this framework remains strong and many marketing textbooks have been organized around it.
]]>Once you get started, it’s like having your favorite parts of the Web come to you. No need to go out and check for updates all the time
How can I use RSS?
The best way to use RSS is with a program called a News Aggregator; which collects, updates and displays RSS feeds. This program will download/display RSS feeds for you. There are many free and commercial aggregators are available for download. Some aggregators are programs; while other services are web based.
Here are some choices when it comes to RSS Aggregators:
SharpReader is an RSS/Atom Aggregator for Windows, created by Luke Hutteman.
Main features:
• Handles all RSS versions, ATOM 0.3 and 1.0, modules like dublin core, content:encoding, xhtml:body, etc.
• Advanced threading support allowing you to view connected items together in a threaded fashion. SharpReader detects and shows connections between items if they have same link, if one item links to another, if two items both link to the same external webpage, or if an item has comments (for feeds supporting the standard).
• Group subscribed feeds into custom categories.
• Feed settings like refresh-rate and purge timeout can be set per feed or per category. Category-wide settings apply to all feeds in that category that are still set to “Default” for the setting in question.
• Dialog-less way of subscribing to new feeds - just drag a link from your browser into SharpReader, or enter the url into the address-bar at the top.
• Feedster integration to easily search weblogs and newssites for specific terms, and even subscribe to such a search to be notified of new results.
• Support for proxy-servers and proxy authentication.
• Reduces bandwidth by using HTTP Conditional GETs and gzip/deflate encoding.
• Minimizes to the system-tray.
• Systray popup when new items arrive (can be disabled on a per-feed or per-category basis through the properties pane).
• Easy keyboard navigation to go the next or previous unread item.
• Import and export your subscriptions using OPML.
• Filter items.
• International Character-set support.
• HTTP Authentication support.
This is an easy to use Mac-like aggregator. New Version 3.0 brings the power of RSS right to your Mac OS X desktop.
Main features:
• Desktop integration � Spotlight, Address Book, iCal, iPhoto, Growl, Twitterific and more.
• Great new look � improved combined view, feed �cover art�, full-screen mode, and tabs with thumbnails and animations.
• Performance enhancements � all new article storage system, memory optimization, and more.
• Synchronized clippings � read your saved articles from the web or another NewsGator reader.
• Microformat detection for contacts and calendar events.
• Automatic checking for newer versions of the software.
• Automatic download of podcasts and transfer to iTunes.
• Smart lists to aggregate news from your feeds based on criteria.
Straw is a feed reader aimed for users using the GNOME desktop. You subscribe to news, blogs, and podcast feeds and read the feeds in the comfort of your desktop, with or without online access.
The goal of Straw is to be an easy-to-use feed reader and one that is integrated with the rest of your desktop. It should support the capabilities provided by the desktop as well as not being hard to users when it comes to usability and in terms of providing functionality.
Main features:
• RSS and ATOM support
• Support for enclosures
• Export and import of feed list from OPML
• Offline reading of blog and news (and other) feed content
• Support for grouping of feeds (categories).
Yahoo’s RSS Reader.
Check all your feeds from any web browser.
]]>