Market Segmentation
The most important reason for bringing in the marketing concept is to place the customer needs at the centre of organisations decision making. The need to adopt this approach stems from a number of factors, including increased competition, better-informed and-educated customers and, most importantly, changing patterns of demand. Basically it is this change in patterns of demand that has given rise to the need to segment markets. Market segmentation can be defined as the process of breaking down the total market for a product or service into distinct sub-groups or segments where each segment may conceivably represent a separate target market to be reached with a distinctive marketing mix. Effective segmentation is achieved when customers sharing similar patterns of demand are grouped together and where each group or segment differs in the pattern of demand from other segments in the market.Segmentation Bases:a) Geographic Segmentation consists of dividing a country into regions. If the company is bigger then, these larger regions are then broken down into areas with individual regional manager controlling salespeople in distinct areas. In international marketing, different countries may be deemed to constitute different market segments. With the hair care products geogr

Why My Adsense Ads Are In Wrong Language
It seems that there are growing concern on the language problem with the Adsense code. Most likely, people reported that all their ads have been changed to Japanese or Chinese, even if they have chosen English to be the language of the site or advertisements. Even Google has noticed this problem and have a corresponding post in its blog. First of all, if you use the HTML editor to preview the ads, the ad may change to other language. It is absolutely normal, and you do not need to worry about it. Even if you have uploaded it onto the web, the ad may initially be shown in different language. This is because Google's bot may take up to 48 hours to crawl your site. Before that, irrelevant ads or wrong-language ads may be shown. Again, Google has assured that this is normal.The paragraphs below is quoted from Adsense blogs: "Before our system can display targeted ads on your pages, our crawler first needs to access your pages. While you're building your pages within your HTML editor, your page hasn't yet been crawled, so you may sometimes see less-targeted ads or even ads in foreign languages. However, after you've published a page to the web, you should start seeing ads in the appropriate language. Please also keep in mind that it can sometimes take 1 to 2 weeks for our crawler to revisit your sit

Branding Blunder—Creative Technology's Mistakes
Recently I was interviewed by Marketing Magazine, a local magazine in Singapore that keeps close tabs on the marketing strategies companies of all sizes use to reach out to their consumers. I thought that this is an excellent case study of how important positioning, branding and marketing are for your business.For their feature story on Branding, the magazine asked for my comments on Creative Technology’s (renowned for its sound card and MP3 players, and most recently for its legal tussle with Apple) branding efforts. While I’m a fan of Creative, I have to say that their branding leaves much to be desired. In particular, comparing the arch rivals of Creative Tech’s MP3 players vs. Apple’s iPod, it is easy to see where Creative’s branding efforts had gone wrong. Below is a simple comparison of its rival’s branding moves.Apple (A marketing and branding savvy company) 1. Understands the target market—young people want to be hip and cool. So they created a hip and cool positioning for iPod. 2. Very sleek and minimalist cover design—enhancing the hip and cool image. 3. Great ultra hip and cool TV ad, using black dancing silhouettes (all the better to contrast with Apple’s corporate white) against a colorful background + hit song of the moment

A Brief History of Television Advertising
It All Began With RadioBroadcasting was originally developed as a means for companies to sell radios. But once commercial entities realized that many households were listening to their radios a significant amount of time every day, they started to explore this medium as a way to get their message across to the masses. If one has to choose a single event that began the era of radio broadcasting, it would probably be the radio program broadcast by station WEAF in New York City on August 28, 1922 This was a ten-minute advertisement for suburban apartment housing. By Christmas of that year, several major New York department stores joined the fray and were running advertisements for their stores.By the late 20's radio advertising had advanced in a dramatic way. It was now dominated by advertising agencies who took control of the schedules by buying the available air time and selling it to their customers. They also handled the creative aspects of the commercials and programs and in fact even created entire series that were designed to sell one product or another. These efforts paved the way for the genesis of television advertising that would begin in a few more decades.The Era of the Single SponsorFull time telecasting didn't really take hold until 1948 as it took

On Networking Groups ( Part Five )
Online networking web sites. Are they really networking and are they really working?They have been springing up all over. They are based on contact management. They are direct in messaging, emailing, and even in the six degrees of separation. They go by many different names and have various methods of finding people. The problem with these sites is that they are not really networking. Do you disagree?To be effective in networking requires building a relationship with another person. This is difficult to do through messages and email. If you have ever had a discussion with a person through email or instant messaging, I would like to ask if you ever found yourself in a situation where you had to actually pick up the phone to find out what a person was really talking about?In relationships conversation is extremely important. The communication is key. The thing that we may not really pay attention to is the importance of tonal inflection in the voice and the added benefits of body language in expressing ourselves. These are the things that online networking is lacking.Since the most important aspect of having a relationship with another person is based in trust, it is difficult to develop trust in someone that you have never seen nor heard. It is even more difficult to get a p

Create a Magic Connection with Clients, Leads, and Business Associates Part I
A few months ago, arriving at a client’s office to begin a group meeting, I discovered that two women, who had committed to joining us for a series of meetings, had changed their minds. In less than two minutes, I convinced them to join us. Did I use some sort of magic? You bet I did. Would you like to know that magic?Neuro-Linguistic Programing (NLP), a science that studies the language of the mind, breaks down, step-by-step, the strategies humans use to connect with others. Most people believe that we communicate primarily through language and words. Yet, many business people are aware of body language and its importance in interacting with people. Some may be aware of studies that show that language has less influence on others than physiology and tonality. If we want to connect with others, it behooves us to be consciously aware of how we use physiology and tonality as well as how we use words.Here is the brake down of how we communicate: 7% through words, 38% through tonality, 55% through physiology. It’s clear that if we focus our communication only on words and language, we are missing out on 93% of our resources for communication. NLP teaches that anyone can establish rapport with another person instantaneously. Rapport in NLP is defined differently from its usual definition. Rap