Business

Business Training Courses to Help You Escape the Planet of Death
People sometimes ask me if I believe business training courses can rescue a person's career. Strange though it may sound, it's a question that invariably gets me thinking about the perils of space travel. Let me explain.
If you read enough science fiction you will eventually come across the story of a galactic adventurer who crash lands on a seemingly benign planet. It looks like the perfect place to be marooned, a world covered with lush vegetation and enjoying a warm and welcoming climate.
But all is not what it seems. Maybe the planet is home to a deadly virus, or its oceans are awash with toxic chemicals. Perhaps it is populated by a race of man-eating turnips or sadistic koala bears.

In the Garden of Eden
Whatever form the dangers might take, it's clear something on this alien world is not quite right. Our adventurer thinks he's arrived in the Garden of Eden. But it won't take long for him to realise he's landed on the Planet of Death.
In fiction we can enjoy the ups and downs of a sci fi hero as he tries to escape from a hostile environment. In real life, however, being trapped in this way is no laughing matter.
Over the years I've talked to many people who, in career terms, feel as if they have been shipwrecked on the Planet of Death. They are tied to a soul destroying job and are unsure how to break free.
But all is not lost. For them a good business training course could offer a practical and realistic escape route. Acquiring a new skill, or strengthening an existing one, could be all they need to transform their circumstances.

Choosing the right business training courses
When investing in training, it's important to choose courses that will provide you with marketable skills. Ideally, you want to place yourself in up and coming business sectors, where there is a strong demand for well trained people and you detect a clear skill shortage.

Talk to friends and family members in different industries. Take a close look at the employment ads in local and national newspapers. Identify the positions that are much in demand and command high salaries. What skills might you need to apply for these? Are there any business training courses that could provide you with the missing expertise?

Some of these jobs may require years of education and training. But not all. There are many courses lasting one or two days that could open up exciting new career possibilities for you. They could take your current skill set to a higher level or complement an existing expertise.

Improve your employment prospects
For instance, you could be a web designer who wants to broaden your value to customers by learning how to write for the web. There are plenty of excellent courses out there that could get you off to a flying start as an online writer.

Or maybe you know everything there is to know about your company's products and services but you're stuck in a boring desk job. A course in selling could be just what you need to save your career and allow you to put your knowledge to more profitable use.

Good business courses not only supply you with the expertise you need, they can give you the confidence to seek fulfilment in new fields. By widening your appeal to prospective employers you increase your chances of career success.

So, if you find yourself trapped in a dead end job with no obvious way out, ask yourself this question. Could a well chosen business training course be the interplanetary rescue ship that lifts you safely from the Planet of Death.

Ben Morgan is a business communications consultant for Strawberry Training, a training provider based in the UK. He and his colleagues run a wide range of tailored business training courses. For a full list of their courses go to: http://www.strawberrytraining.co.uk/business-training-courses.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ben_J_Morgan

Marketing

Adoption Process of New Products The growth rate and total sales level of new products rely heavily on two related consumer behavior concepts: the adoption process and the diffusion process.

The adoption process is the mental and behavioral procedure an individual consumer goes through when learning about and purchasing a new product. The process consists of these stages:

1. Knowledge: A person learns of a product's existence and gains some understanding of how it functions.

2. Persuasion: A person forms a favorable or unfavorable attitude about a product.

3. Decision: A person engages in actions that lead to a choice to adopt or reject a product.

4. Implementation: A person uses a product.

5. Confirmation: A person seeks reinforcement and may reverse a decision if exposed to conflicting messages.

The rate (speed) of adoption depends on consumer traits, the product, and the firm's marketing effort. Adoption will be faster if consumers have high discretionary income and are willing to try new offerings; the product presents little physical, social, or financial risk; the product has an advantage over other items already on the market; the product is a modification of an existing idea and not a major innovation; the product is compatible with current consumer life-styles; the attributes of the product can be easily communicated; the importance of the product is low; the product can be tried in small quantities; mass advertising and distribution are used; the product is consumed quickly; or the product is easy to use.

The diffusion process describes the manner in which different members of the target market often accept and purchase a product. It spans the time from product introduction until market saturation:

1. Innovators are the first consumers to buy a new product. They are venturesome, willing to accept risk, socially aggressive, communicative, and cosmopolitan. It is necessary to determine which innovators are opinion leaders?those who influence others to purchase. This group represents 2.5 per cent of the target market.

2. Early adopters are the next consumers to buy a new product. They enjoy the leadership, prestige, and respect that early purchases bring. These consumers tend to be opinion leaders. They adopt new ideas but use discretion. This group represents 13.5 per cent of the market.

3. The early majority is the first part of the mass market to buy a product. They have status in their social class and are outgoing, communicative, and attentive to information cues. This group represents 34 per cent of the target market.

4. The late majority is the second part of the mass market to buy a product. They are less cosmopolitan and responsive to change. The late majority includes people with lower economic and social status, those past middle age, and skeptics. This group represents 34 per cent of the market.

5. Laggards are last to purchase. They are price conscious, suspicious of change, low in income and status, tradition bound, and conservative. Laggards do not adopt a product until it reaches maturity. Some firms ignore them because it can be difficult to market a product to this small group. However, a market segmenter may do well by concentrating on products for laggards. This group represents 16 per cent of the market.

Marketing

Three Levels of Marketing Performance We need to distinguish three levels of marketing performance, which can be called responsive marketing, anticipative marketing, and need-shaping marketing.

RESPONSIVE MARKETING. Marketing has been defined as the task of "finding and filling needs." This is a commendable form of marketing when there exists a clear need and when some company has identified it and prepared an affordable solution. Recognizing that women want to spend less time cooking and cleaning led to the invention of the modern washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, and microwave oven. Today many smokers who want to stop smoking can find various treatments. Much of today's marketing is responsive marketing.

ANTICIPATIVE MARKETING. It is another feat to recognize an emerging or latent need. As the quality of water deteriorated in many places, Evian, Perrier, and a number of other companies anticipated a growing market for bottled drinking water. As pharmaceutical companies recognized the growing stress in modem urban society, several started research on antistress drugs. Anticipative marketing is more risky than responsive marketing; companies may come into the market too early or too late, or may even be totally wrong about thinking that such a market would develop.

NEED-SHAPING MARKETING. The boldest level of marketing occurs when a company introduces a product or service that nobody asked for and often could not even conceive of. No one in the 1950s asked for a Sony Walkman, a Sony Betamax, or a Sony 31/2-inch disc. Yet Sony, under its brilliant founder and chairman, Akio Morita, introduced those and many other new products that since have become everyday staples. Morita summarized his marketing philosophy in these words: "I don't serve markets. I create them."

Perhaps the difference between responsive marketers and those who anticipate or shape needs is best summarized in the difference between a market-driven company and a market'driving company. Most companies are at best market-driven, which itself is an advance over being product-driven. Market-driven companies focus on researching current customers to identify their problems, gather new ideas, and to test proposed product improvements and marketing mix changes. Their efforts typically result in incremental improvements, not radical innovations.

Source:
Phillip Kotler, Kotler on Marketing, Free Press. You can obtain this excellent book here

You can download powerpoint slide on marketing management here.

Marketing

Creating Great Marketing Plan A marketing plan, like a business plan, is unique to the company it serves. There are few hard and fast rules that guide its creation and implementation. A marketing plan needs to be as flexible as its market allows and as firm as is required to accomplish its goals. Despite all that, there are a few key components critical to the successful development and application of such a plan.

A marketing plan, like a business plan, is unique to the company it serves. There are few hard and fast rules that guide its creation and implementation. A marketing plan needs to be as flexible as its mar¬ket allows and as firm as is required to accomplish its goals. Despite all that, there are a few key components critical to the successful development and application of such a plan:

• A good marketing plan has both strategic and tactical Post Optionselements designed to help identify and accomplish its goals. Despite the fact that marketing often appears to be no more than the implementation of direction from the corner office, the best ones also contain elements of strategy that reflect and enhance those principles identified at the highest level. Too often, marketing efforts are seen only as a media placement plan or advertising schedule. The best ones are much more than that and, quite frankly, need to be if they are going to succeed at more than the most episodic and rudimentary level.

• A good marketing plan is intertwined with the corporate business plan and, in fact, may actually be that plan, or at least include the business plan's goals expressed in terms of tactics. Despite what we said in the previous paragraph, the marketing plan can't exist in and of itself without intrinsic links to the company's overall strategies. They are two sides of the same coin and must be played together in order for either to succeed. Marketers who think they can operate independently of corporate goals think incorrectly and either their goals, or those of the company, will be compromised if they try.

• A good marketing plan is an active, living document designed to accomplish tasks, not a theoretical exercise destined to sit on the shelf. Marketing is a lot like dancing in that, if you don't execute the moves, it does anyone little good that you know all the steps. The best marketing plans are dog-eared documents with pencil edits and handwritten commentary that are falling apart at the seams. That shows they've been used and used well. The worst plans are pristine volumes that sit on shelves and gather dust. There are no grades for neatness when it comes to your marketing plan.

• Good marketers know that all things commercial revolve around marketing. That will sound heretical to anyone who is not a marketer, but when you get right down to it, marketing impacts virtually every aspect of commerce. As much as any other member of a company's executive team, the marketer's influence is felt throughout the enterprise and down the ranks.

Remember the five Ps of marketing? Perhaps it's good to review them once again so you may judge for yourself the depth and breadth of marketing's impact:

• Product: the goods or services that you market and sell.
• Price: the value of those goods or services quantified in monetary terms.
• Promotion: how you communicate the benefits of those goods and services.
• Place: how you expose buyers to products and get products into their hands.
• Position: the way the product is perceived in the mind of the buyer.

In each of those instances, the marketer plays the most crucial role in determining value rather than, or at least in cooperation with, other executives who otherwise might be considered appropriate to the task. Take pricing, for instance. Isn't that a function of the chief financial officer? Doesn't the CFO have responsibility for the company's financial stability and profitability?

The CFO certainly does have those responsibilities, but he or she can't determine the price of a product without knowing the price at which the competition is selling its products and what the market will bear for such goods. Identifying the proper margin over the cost production is part of price determination, but it plays a relatively small role in the pricing equation.

Good pricing and its related profitability, instead, are based on the strategic machinations of the other four Ps, as well as market conditions, buyer preferences, current market share and a host of things about which few CFOs have the time or inclination to study. The person in charge of finances and profitability has a role to play in determining price, but that discussion needs to be led by the marketer or someone else well-versed in all the areas that affect those prices and, ultimately, corporate profitability.

• A good marketing plan is both internally and externally focused in its determination of the company's appropriate competitive direction. Knowing market conditions is not enough. The marketing plan also must consider the company's abilities to meet those conditions profitably and on a sustained basis.

Knowing the market will support the sale of two million of the widgets you produce in the next two months does little good if your firm doesn't have the capacity to produce those widgets. Of course, you can always subcontract the work. But if the cost of manufacture, coupled with the necessary markup, does not produce the level of profitability desired or required, then it may be better to walk away from the business entirely. Without the proper internal focus to your marketing plan, that's an expensive lesson you could have learned the hard way.

• Finally, realize the marketing plan also provides the tools to measure the flow of your company's developmental steps and events. In the same way it offers a reflection of your company's business plan, the marketing plan creates a series of benchmarks by which to chart its developmental progress. If all goes well and your marketing succeeds beyond your wildest dreams, then the plan can stand almost as a stairway to that success, with each step identified with a component of that plan. More often than not, the plan will reflect a mix of hits and misses, each of which can be evaluated both by its success and by its role within the plan's strategic mix.

Source :
Michael Muckian, Prentice Hall's One-Day MBA in Marketing: A Complete Education for the Busy Professional , Prentice Hall.

Marketing

All marketing strategy is built on STP : Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning. A company discovers different needs and groups in the marketplace, targets those needs and groups that it can satisfy in a superior way, and then positions its offering so that the target market recognizes the company's distinctive offering and image. If a company does a poor job of positioning, the market will be confused as to what to expect. If a company does an excellent job of positioning, then it can work out the rest of its marketing planning and differentiation from its positioning strategy

Positioning is the act of designing the company's offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market. The end result of positioning is the successful creation of a customer-focused value proposition, a cogent reason why the target market should buy the product. Hertz is thought of as the world's largest auto-rental agency, Coca-Cola as the world's largest soft-drink company, and Porsche as one of the world's best sports cars. These brands own these positions, and it would be hard for a competitor to claim them.

As companies increase the number of claimed benefits for their brand, they risk dis¬belief and a loss of clear positioning. In general, a company must avoid four major errors:

1. Underpositioning: Some companies discover that buyers have only a vague idea of the brand. The brand is seen as just another entry in a crowded marketplace. When Pepsi introduced its clear Crystal Pepsi in 1993, customers were distinctly unimpressed. They didn't see "clarity" as an important benefit in a soft drink.

2. Overpositioning: Buyers may have too narrow an image of the brand. Thus a consumer might think that diamond rings at Tiffany start at $5,000 when in fact Tiffany now offers affordable diamond rings starting at $1,000.

3. Confused positioning: Buyers might have a confused image of the brand resulting from the company's making too many claims or changing the brand's positioning too frequently. This was the case with Stephen Jobs's sleek and powerful NeXT desktop computer, which was positioned first for students, then for engineers, and then for businesspeople, all unsuccessfully.

4. Doubtful positioning: Buyers may find it hard to believe the brand claims in view of the product's features, price, or manufacturer. When GM's Cadillac division introduced the Cimarron, it positioned the car as a luxury competitor with BMW, Mercedes, and Audi. Although the car featured leather seats, a luggage rack, lots of chrome, and a Cadillac logo stamped on the chassis, customers saw it as a dolled-up version of Chevy's Cavalier and Oldsmobile's Firenza. The car was positioned as "more for more": customers saw it as "less for more."

Source of Reference:
Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, Marketing Management, Prentice Hall. You can obtain this excellent book here

You can download powerpoint slide on marketing management and business strategy and here.