The 6 C's Of Marketing Unleashed

Interesting from Entireweb Newsletter * October 12, 2006 * ISSUE #274

The 6 C's Of Marketing Unleashed
Okay, so we have all learned about the 4P's of marketing in undergrad: Product, Place, Price and Promotion. If not, you can open up one of your old marketing text books, blow off the dust and read about it there. The 6 C's, however, is a not a concept that replaces the 4 P's; rather, it just expands on the promotion element and provides a more granular approach to consumer marketing.
CUSTOMER:
In this day and age, a company's marketing strategy needs to be customer focused. It's about understanding the target consumer; their wants, needs and motivations. Not as demographics, psychographics or any other graphics, but as real people. Its understanding why customers do what they do (or don't do),when they do it and why they do it. Such knowledge is critical in marketing since having a strong understanding of buyer behavior will help shed light on what is important to the customer. It's about focusing on the target customer first and then working back to the brand. It's imperative that companies have mindshare before focusing on market share.
CONSISTENCY:
Companies need to maintain consistency in their message; a practice called integrated marketing communications - from packaging and advertising to sales promotion and publicity. This will maintain and reinforce a brand's personality and image in a real life context and avoid doing something brainless like changing the distinctive color of the UPS truck to orange. I am sure it's been talked about.
CREATIVITY:
Creativity is imperative to attract attention in a world cluttered with thousands of messages. Creativity means laying aside the rules, and engages in out-of-box thinking so that marketers can reach beyond logic and structure and tap into their imaginations.
* Creativity Informs: Marketing's responsibility to inform is greatly enhanced by creativity. Creativity makes marketing more vivid, and many researchers believe vividness attracts attention, maintains interest, and stimulates consumers' thinking.
* Creativity Persuades: The ancients Greeks created legends and myths about gods and heroes -symbols for humankind's instinctive longings and fears - to influence human behavior and thought. Today's marketers are doing the same thing; they are creating new myths, heroes and symbols like Ronald McDonald, the "Can You Hear Me Now" guy from Verizon, and more recently the Gecko from Geico Insurance.
* Creativity Reminds: Imagine using the same invitation, without any creativity, to remind people to try a particular product everyday for a month. The invitation would become stale very quickly. Only creativity can transform boring reminders into interesting, entertaining marketing communications. Nike is proof. Several commercials in a Nike campaign never mention the company name or even spelled it out on the screen. Each communication told a story. And, the only on-screen cue identifying the sponsor was a single "swoosh" logo inscribed on the final scene.
CULTURE:
All marketing communications needs cross-cultural research to be able to succeed. It's simple to see things from your own perspective, assuming that everyone else in the world thinks exactly like you and should understand what's so great about your product or service. Just reading about all the mistakes made by large corporations proves that even the most sizable and experienced marketers have made errors time and again.
One of the most famous examples is Coca Cola translating the name into Chinese without back-translating it ("bite the wax tadpole"), ultimately resulting in a horrible response from an insulted society. Marketing books are full of examples like these. As David Ogilvy, known as the Father of Advertising, states, "If you are trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language in which they think".
COMMUNICATION:
This one is basic. Consumers don't want to be "marketed to". Rather, they want to be "communicated with". Good marketing communication creates value with target customers, speaks in their language and tells your story. It's about building long term, trustworthy, and profitable relationships with your customers. As Seth Godin states, it's about reinforcing the lies that consumers tell themselves everyday (i.e. I look much better in these jeans from Abercrombie; they make me look sexy).
CHANGE:
Marketing is not just a business function, but a process. There is a beginning, middle, but there is never an end. Marketers must constantly CHANGE as society changes. They should never be afraid to try something new. Marketing today is not what it was 2 - 5 - or even 20 years ago. Marketing needs to be an evolving process that considers change in the world, economy, market, consumers; as well as internal change within the organization.
Conclusion (not the 7th C)
So there it is; the 6 C's of marketing - Customer, Consistency - Creativity - Culture - Communication and Change. I am sure that these will be published in every text book in the country within the next ten years and I will be a rich, well known author. Yeah right!
To read more about new, emerging marketing strategies, please visit our internet marketing blog. Michael Brito specializes in online marketing and offers web site positioning strategy services for small businesses.

MS WORD CLEANER

Ms word Cleaner
http://tiffanybbrown.com/2006/03/21/mswordtohtml_document_cleaner/

Mysql Error s

Handling mysql errors
http://www.planetmysql.org/entries/4067

mysql_db_query deprecated

When you are not programming/scripting alot lots of things pass you by.

PHP since 4.06 has deprecated this function mysql_db_query, that actually I used a lot. Now I like this function as in one function, I pass the database name, the SQL query and the connection resource link which is optional

resource mysql_db_query ( string database, string query [, resource link_identifier] )

Instead they are now asking that we do the following. Two things that could be done in one

mysql_select_db()
bool mysql_select_db ( string database_name [, resource link_identifier] )
mysql_query()
resource mysql_query ( string query [, resource link_identifier] )

The advantage I see is that you can actually check to see if the database is present before doing the query.



if ( ! mysql_select_db (database )){
echo "database not found";
}

All three functions have been available since PHP 3.

snippet of how things change.

Config File
------------------
$dbuser="aaaa";
$dbpass="bbbb";
$dbhost="cccc:3308";
$db="dddd";

$dblink=mysql_connect($dbhost,$dbuser,$dbpass)or die("you have an error connecting your database");
mysql_select_db($db,$dblink);
/*
mysql_select_db($db);; // is ok as the resource link is optional. Function will look for last open resource
*/


Query
----------
$query ="SELECT * FROM TABLENAME";
mysql_query($query,$dblink);
/*
mysql_query($query); // is ok as the resource link is optional
*/

instead of

Config File
------------------
$dbuser="aaaa";
$dbpass="bbbb";
$dbhost="cccc:3308";
$db="dddd";

$dblink=mysql_connect($dbhost,$dbuser,$dbpass)or die("you have an error connecting your database");
/* or
mysql_connect($dbhost,$dbuser,$dbpass)or die("you have an error connecting your database");
*/

Query
----------
$query ="SELECT * FROM TABLENAME";
mysql_db_query($db,$query,$dblink);
/*
or
mysql_db_query($db,$query);
*/

Few extra lines and it is worth it. I will start doing things this way now

References
mysql-db-query.php
mysql-select-db.php
mysql-query.php

Hitwise views

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/

Centering a Div [Browsers and Quirks]

use tips on DIV model...
http://tutorials.alsacreations.com/modeles/
http://tutorials.alsacreations.com/centrer/
http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2004/02/css_crib_sheet_3_centering_a_div/index.php

.jm to be no longer free.

The Mona Information Technology Services (MITS) Department of the University of West Indies (UWI) has decided to charge for .jm domains.

I am happy for this so long as it results in better service, including quicker turnaround time. However I find this statement in the article puzzling.

"The charge for .jm would remain competitive with international rates, as low as US$35 ($2,310) per year, said Samuels."

Internationally the highest rates are US$35 per year in most jurisdictions while costs can be as low as US$2 per year, if not less.

I would like some clarification on this.

There is another statement that is also interesting, although I am not sure they can actually do it what it says. The actual statement of interest is "analysing 'hits' to a given website". The full statement is below.

"Besides registering and administering all .jm domain names, MITS also conducts website research including domain name searches and analysing 'hits' to a given website."

Again clarification on this would be good. Privacy invasion.

Minimum Character length and MySQL Full Text

Every now and then you come across some nusiance

Mysql Full Text search is lovely but it has some weaknesses. One of which is its Minimum Character length requiremnet.

Happily, the fix is fairly easy if you have access to the .cnf file

Changing the Minimum Character length

1. check what .ini/.cnf your mysql is reading
2. change your my.ini/.cnf like this:
[mysqld]
ft_min_word_len=3
ft_stopword_file="C:\\MySQL\\stop.txt"
3. restart your mysqld
4. reindex your table using REPAIR TABLE tbl_name QUICK;


Useful Resources
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/fulltext-query-expansion.html
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/fulltext-search.html
http://mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/full-text-revealed.html

OThers
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000576.html
http://mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-stopwords.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/06/26/fulltext.html