KnowThis Blog Postings
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- Published on April 07, 2011
- Posted by Paul Christ
Nonprofits Look For New Ways To Get People To Give (NPR)
Possibly the greatest challenge confronting most marketers is figuring out how to generate interest among potential customers. This is where promotion comes into play. Marketers use techniques including advertising, personal selling and public relations to build customer interest. Yet, on a daily basis markets are over-saturated with thousands of audio and visual promotions. This results in customers being exposed to more messages then they are able to understand and retain. In this environment, even if a marketer has excellent products, their message often gets lost among the “noise” generated by other marketers.
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- Published on March 29, 2011
- Posted by Paul Christ
10 Greatest Salespeople of All Time (Inc. Magazine)
As we state in our Personal Selling tutorial, sales is a highly misunderstood field. Yes, most people understand the main task of many (but not all) salespeople is to get customers to purchase products. And, because of this many have developed the perception that salespeople must be extremely aggressive and interested in only one thing – making a sale.
But, it would be shortsighted to think that making the sale is all salespeople do. In fact, they contribute to the marketing organization in many other ways. For example, the sales force is a key provider of market information since they are directly involved with customers on a daily basis. This level of contact can directly benefit those in charge of product marketing by providing important details on what is occurring in the market.
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- Published on March 18, 2011
- Posted by Paul Christ
Some Grocers Abandon Rebates for Reusable Bags (USA Today)
The highly competitive retail grocery industry is famous for operating on low margins. In populated areas within many U.S. markets, there are many supermarkets, discount stores, club stores and others selling grocery products. In fact, it is not uncommon for shoppers to have a choice between two or three different grocer retailers located at the same intersection. And many shoppers take advantage of this by carefully researching stores looking for the best prices. In such an environment, price competition can be aggressive, leading grocers to operate on margins in the low-to-mid single digits.
One important ramification of customers efforts at price comparison is that shoppers are not particularly loyal to a retailer. Because of this, increasing price to raise margins can be difficult as shoppers can easily shop elsewhere.