29 Dec 09 3 Marketing Tools for Small Business
A small business differs from a big business largely on the scale of operation. A small business does everything that a big business does but only on the smaller scale with a more personal touch to the activity. Still, there are tools of big business that a small business can also use. In this article, I will talk about 3 such tools. How you use these tools will determine how much you succeed in your marketing effort.
SWOT
SWOT stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and threat. Strength and weakness is internal to the product, whereas, opportunity and threats are external to the product. We use this matrix to find out strengths and weaknesses of our product, see what opportunity (matching our ability) the market is presenting, and gauge the threats presented by the market.
PLC
PLC stands for Product Life Cycle. A PLC study of your product gives you an idea about what stage your product is in, and what marketing channel and strategy to use. We divide PLC in following parts: introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline.
Introduction is the phase when the product is introduced to the market, and the organization is striving to create awareness about the product. Profit in this phase is either negative or low.
Growth is the phase in which the product gets acceptance, which results in increase in sales. Profits are high in this phase, and to cash in on the momentum the product has got, organization tends to invest some advertising dollars.
Maturity is the phase when sales start slowing down because most of the buyers have your product. Sales and profit has already passed its peak. Sales and profit may not be increasing but they are steady.
Some marketers divide this phase into early maturity and late maturity to figure out how close the product is to decline phase.
Decline is the phase when sales and profit both starts falling. It could be because the need of the market has changed and some better product is fulfilling that need, or because some other product is meeting the same need at lower cost.
From this phase either the product dies out in oblivion, or get reinvented, reintroduced and pushed on the growth track.
PESTEL
Some call it PEST while other calls it PESTEL. I have taken PESTEL because it is more complete a matrix then PEST. PESTEL is a macro-environment scanning matrix that helps a business find out how the various external factors going to affect it. PESTEL Stands for:
P: Political factors (Policy changes and how it is going to affect you)
E: Economic factors (economic growth, exchange rates, inflation, interest rates, and taxation changes are going to affect your business)
S: Social factors (How does social changes like, education, demographic, occupational, etc., going to affect you)
T: Technological factors (How advent of new technology will affect your business)
E: Environmental factors (How change in climate or rising temperature can affect your business)
L: Legal Factors (how change in legal environment going to affect your low. How much will your business suffer if the carbon emission level is set lower, and government pension plan is made mandatory for every organization, regardless of size?)
PEST matrix analyzes all the factors we discussed above except for the last two.
Tags: Big Business, Decline, Marketers, Marketing Business, Marketing Channel, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tools, Matrix, Maturity, Momentum, Opportunity, Peak Sales, Personal Touch, Product Life Cycle, Profits, Small Business, Strength And Weakness, Strengths And Weaknesses
16 Dec 09 Is Taking Break Killing Your Productivity?
You will not find too many people who talks against taking break during your work because not many people have thought about the real impact of “taking breaks” on your productivity. Taking break while working does affect your productivity, and how it will affect your productivity is directly related to the number of breaks and duration of each breaks.
Shorter and not-too-frequent breaks revive our senses and boost up our productivity, but when breaks tend to get longer and more frequent, we start losing focus.
Why does it happen?
To understand this let’s ask ourselves why we take breaks during the days. We take break to free up our mind from the task at hand so that we can relax and get more fresh idea when we return back to working. A break helps us focus our mind on seeing forest instead of focusing on trees, which helps us complete our work quickly.
But,
When the breaks get longer, we lose the momentum, and ideas that were building up while working on the project slips put of our mind, which means poor incoherent output. The longer breaks clear up information related to the problems from our mind, and when we return we need to rethink on where we were and at what point we took break. Most of the time, after loss of some quality time, things starts coming to us, but there is no guarantee that everything will return back. Longer breaks take us out of the zone.
How many and how long?
Do not take more than 2-3 breaks during the work hour, you can stretch the limit to 4, but not even a single break more than that. And the duration of the break should depend upon the time of the day. If you are taking a break in the morning, which I do not recommend, then the break should not be 2-3 minutes long, but when the break is coming towards the end of the day when you are exhausted with the day’s work, you can make the break a little longer. 8-10 minutes will be good enough for the last break.
Taking breaks during the work is important, but taking too many and too long breaks throw us out of the productivity zone.
Tags: Break Free, Duration, Focus, Frequent Breaks, Fresh Idea, Guarantee, Momentum, Point Break, Productivity, Quality Time, Senses, Taking A Break, Time Of The Day, Trees, Working On The Project
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