What are Agentic Goals?

Agentic Goals are goals usually held by men and involves them fulfilling gender roles and mastery of all of the things that are expected of men like being the bread winner, strong, masculine, etc.

What is Actual Self?

The definition of the marketing term "Actual Self" is when a person realistically acknowledges or appraises his or her self qualities.

In other words, actual self definition is a marketing term for when people are real with themselves and what they can be, accomplish, purchase, etc.

What are the ABC model of attitudes?

The ABC model of attitudes is a multidimensional perspective which states that attitudes are defined by affect, behavior and cognition.

A - Affect - Did you have an experience to affect or change the way you think?
B - Behavior - What kind of behavior traits do you have which affects your attitude?
C - Cognition - How do you think or feel about certain things or situations?

These are all things which shape attitudes and the way people spend their money.

What is Market Segmentation?

Market segmentation is grouping together consumers who have one or more similar traits and then creating a strategy targeting those groups.

In today's world, consumers had an infinite amount of choices so it is very important to target a certain segment.

A lot of the time, a good marketing strategy will entail reaching many different customer segments by advertising or reaching out to them in different situations or scenarios.

If a company is smart, they will do their homework and find a segment which has very unique needs and then creates products or services to fulfill those needs.

The way companies think of customers is by putting them into customer segments. They do this by looking at different characteristics of potential customers:

Age - Customers who are who are at different points in their life have very different needs. Some products don't work for older age groups and some don't work for younger age groups. If you were 18 years old, do you think that a retirement planning company would be using their precious marketing dollars targeting you?

Gender - At a very early age, customer segmenting occurs. Diapers, baby clothes, baby books are all products which are targeting certain customer segments. Colors, size of products, and packaging are all  ways companies target customers by gender.

Family Structure - Single? Married? Divorced? Your marital status and family structure plays a big part in how you and your family spend money. If you are young and single, you are more likely to spend money on clothes, going out to bars, entertainment, and things of that nature. If you are married with children, you are probably going to spend money on your home, education, and other family related products.

Social Class and Income - social class is a group of people who usually do the same things, mingle with the same people, spend the same amount on the same products. The higher the social class, the more of a target they become due to their buying power.

Race and Ethnicity - As America gets more and more culturally diverse, race and ethnicity becomes more important because it create opportunities for marketers to specialize and focus on certain groups.

Geography - the location of the demographic you are trying to target plays a big role in your product offering. For example, people in the north wear and use more snow gear while people who live in warmer climates wear and purchase more beach gear.

Lifestyles - Even if people share the same demographic characteristics like gender and age, that doesn't mean they share the same lifestyle. Lifestyles usually encompass what people do with their spare time, things they value and feelings about themselves.

Is Paying for Traffic Smart?

There are so many success stories you will hear about businesses making it good in the internet. The troubling thing is, there are maybe a tenfold or even a hundredfold of stories contradictory to theirs. Many have unsuccessfully launched a business enterprise that is internet based but only a handful shall succeed.

Is this through luck? That is even more remote. It takes good business sense and a lot of help and team effort. Most importantly, it is the eagerness to succeed and the determination to learn and the willingness to invest in a lot of hard work and some money.

7 Ways to Increase Your Traffic NOW

Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successful would always include the importance of generating traffic.

So, we all know that in the core of it all, traffic is the most essential thing to a successful internet based business company. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, and you have your company’s internal organization well taken core of, it would be time to get to the nitty gritty of things, generating traffic.

If you already have a site and you want think that you're not getting the traffic that you're supposed to be getting, then its time to reconsider. If you are contending in these very competitive business, you should always be a step ahead of your competition, increasing your traffic flow should have been done starting yesterday.

Timing is essential, that’s an old adage known to everyone. But with generating traffic, you should always be on your toes and be a day ahead of everyone. Never think of today and tomorrow as a starting point for making your site traffic laden, it should always have been yesterday.

To help you out in generating more traffic for your site, here are some seven surefire ways to increase your traffic starting from yesterday.

Get More Traffic: Tell a Friend !

More and more webmasters have the recurring dilemma on how to increase the flow of traffic in the websites. During the past few years many methods that been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them would work there are those that would not make even a small impact.

One of the methods that have spawned many success stories in driving traffic into websites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.

Many companies bank on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.

This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilize. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialize this marketing scheme. Any website would greatly benefit that viral marketing.

2 Must Have's for Your E-commerce website

I know that I do most of my shopping online. Especially with all the specials that go on with online retailers now, it would be silly not to take advantage of it. Because of the rising popularity of online shopping, more and more busineses are setting up their own e-commerce stores to cash in on the growing demand of online shopping. 

Because of the increasing numbers of online shoppers, there is a need for more ecommerce websites. A lot of companies have responded by making their own online shop, or e-commerce website.

Just think about this, if you sell health and beauty products online, there are hundred more several websites like yours. They also offer the same products and services. If there is one customer looking for a health product, he or she has a hundred choices to choose from. So how can you increase your website’s chance of getting that customer?

3 Simple Steps On How To Start In Affiliate Marketing for Newbies

Here are 3 easy steps to becoming an affiliate marketer on the internet.

First, you want to chose a topic or niche that you are interested in so when you create your blog/website, you will create quality content You also want to do a lot of research when it comes to your particular niche. Here are a few places you can research on - ClickBank Marketplace, AssociatePrograms.com, LinkShare.com, CJ.com etc

You also want to make sure you pick products which will convert into sales or "conversions." Make a website or blog about your particular product that you want to promote.

What is Affiliate Marketing ?

Affiliate marketing is an exchange of commission for leads, sales or clicks to a merchants website.

In affiliate marketing, a merchant gains opportunities to advertise his products for free on a persons website or blog in hopes to increase sales. The more advertisers or affiliates  he gets, the more sales he can expect. By getting affiliates to market his products and services, he is saving himself time, effort and money in looking for possible markets and customers. When a client clicks on the link in the affiliate website and purchases the product, recommends it to others who look for the same item or buys it again, this way the merchant leverage his chances of earning. On the other hand, the affiliate marketer benefits from each customer who clicks on the link in his website and who actually purchases the product or avails of the service provided by the merchant. The affiliate or advertiser gets commission per sale, which can be fixed percentage or fixed amount.

SEO: Backlinks

What are backlinks? Why do I need backlinks? How do I make backlinks?

What: Backlinks are links which you, or someone else places on the internet, which links to your website or blog.
Why: You need backlinks to improve your page rank because google uses backlinks to decide where to place your website on their search results. If you have a lot of backlinks (links pointing to your website), Google will think, "oh this website is important because so many other sites refer to it. I will improve its pagerank."
How: You can either 1) make your own backlinks or 2) exchange links with other websites.

1) How do I make my own backlinks? You can make backlinks by posting on forums which let you use an html signature, post on yahoo answers or write articles and submit them to article sites like squidoo for example.
2) You can also exchange links with other webmasters who have relevant sites to yours. I wouldn't suggest exchanging links with competitors.

"Good Will" Marketing

How can I get more customers / patients for my company / practice?
For companies or businesses whose clients are in a specific area, try doing something that will get your name out there, create a good perception of you, have the community praise you.

For example: As a dentist, its your job (one way or another) to get clients. You can either wait for them to come to you, hire 1800 dentist or place ads in the newspaper/yellow pages, etc. OR you could do something which involves the people you want to do business with, the community around you. People are bombarded with ads every day... people will forget your ad in the newspaper, penny saver, or whatever direct mailer they get. What people remember is the good things you do for the community, for kids, for people in need. People want to do business with people like that.

Example: A dentist, who cares about kids teeth will offer a "candy buy back" program. He buys back candy from Halloween and donates/gives it to soldiers in Iraq.
Yes, the dentist is spending money buying the candy back, but the "good will" or "good deed" will stay in peoples minds way longer than any kind of advertisement.

4 Product-Quality Pricing Strategies

there are four product-quality pricing strategies:

1) market-skimming pricing sets a high price at low quality to reap maximum revenues step by step from the market segments. ex: new high tech products

2) market-penetration pricing sets a low price at high quality to attract a large number of customers and a large market share to enjoy network effect, PC operating system.

3) economy pricing is to set low price at low quality to maximize sale volume. ex: 99 cents store

4) premium pricing (prestige pricing) is to set high price at high quality. ex: cunrad cruises. Goldilocks pricing is to provide a "gold-plated" version of a product in order to make the next-lower priced option book more reasonably priced ex: comic books and sport collectible cards.

4 General Pricing Approaches

There are four general pricing approaches:
1) mark-up pricing - is to have a fixed mark-up on the cost of the product to set the price, ex: retail stores
2) value-based pricing (demand-based pricing) is setting price based on buyers' perceptions of value independent of cost, ex: louis vuitton and rolex (nobody ever questioned how much it costs to make a rolex cost, price is not in relation to cost. people base it on how many people have it, brand name)
3) value pricing: is offering the right combination of quality and good service at a fair price, ex: value meal menu
4) comepetition-based pricing: is to set price following that of the industry leader ex: breakfast cereal (ex: kellogs)

3 External Factors of Pricing

there are 3 external factors of pricing:

1) market demand: own-price demand elasticity and cross price demand elasticity (consumers point of view: if they are substitutes, you cant raise the price because the customer will go to the other brand).

2) competition: perfect competition (everyone knows everything, identical quality product, sells at market price), pure monopoly, monopolistic competition (many suppliers in industry, but you have monopoly power, set your own prices), oligopoly, and dominant firm price leadership (lowest cost firm, walmart & smaller stores competing with walmart. walmart set the market price and everyone else has to follow. walmart has the largest market share).

3) other environmental factors: economic conditions such as business cycle (growth, peak, down, trough start over), inflation (price keeps going up, dont want to change price more than inflation rate), and interest rate (durable goods, housing market, interest rate up = lower your price so people can afford it), government regulation such as antitrust policies, regulatory price hearings, patent and copyright policies (grant you the right to behave like a monopoly, make whatever price you want), and fair pricing.

4 Internal Factors of Pricing

Four Internal Factors of Pricing:
1) Marketing Objectives: The marketing department has to keep in mind the price of the product/service so the company can be profitable and survive. They also have to set the price so that it maximizes profit, without charging too much. Trying to obtain market share leadership is also another factor of pricing. Product quality leadership, limit pricing (set the price so low so nobody will enter the industry because profit is so low) and promotional pricing (pre-xmas sales, black friday) are all other key factors when it comes to figuring out the price of the product or service.
2) Marketing Mix Strategy: pricing is one of the four P's in marketing mix strategy.
Target Costing: sets an ideal price then controls cost to make it possible to make product at that price. ex: p&g's crest spinbrush electric toothbrush. An alternative will be to price according to the product quality.
3) Cost: marginal cost pricing is used in regulated industries.
4) Organizational considerations: in small companies, prices are often set by top management. In larger companies, price is set by divisional or product line managers. Salespersons usually have flexibility to negotiate within a price range.

4 Ways to Increase a Company Business

4 ways to increase a company business by increasing:

1) product mix width - number of different product lines that a company carries

2) product mix length - total number of items a company carries within its product lines

3) product line depth - number of versions offered for each product in a product line

4) product line consistency - how closely related the various product lines are in end use, production requirements, distribution channels etc.

Product Mix

product mix - consists of all the product lines and items that a seller offers for sale. avon has 5 major product lines, beauty, wellness, jewelry and accessories. each product line has sub-lines.

2 Ways to Lengthen Product Lines

There are two ways to lengthen a company's product line or offer more services:
1) Product Stretching - Lengthen a product line beyond its current range. For example, Chrysler introduced its luxury brand, Mercedes OR Toyota offers is luxury brand, Lexus.
2) Product Line Filling - add more items within the same range of a product line. For example, there are a lot of types of iPods (shuffle, nano, original, touch)

Offering a longer product line helps companies like Apple fulfill all of the markets needs when it comes to music listening. In turn, this is how Apple took over the personal audio market and still remains the leader industry leader.

3 Objectives of Product Length

there are three objectives of the choice of product line length:

1) up selling ex bmw 3,5,7 series

2) cross selling ex: hp printer and ink cartridge

3) diversifying: GAP has several clothing store chains to cover different price range. ex: gap, old navy, and banana republic