Christmas Season

Yet again, it is Christmas season! All I currently hear from my children is their NEED for the newest toy marketed through whatever cartoon/show they have recently seen on t.v.  As much as I hate to admit it, marketing things to children really pays off. Some of these items, I would never decide to purchase these items for my kids on my own. My 4 year old has recently realized she can not live another day without a Chocolate Pen. This is an item that lets you write in chocolate like a cake decorator. Shes 4. There is no way I will be purchasing it. If she saw it in the store, she would pass right by it, but since it has been marketed as the most amazing item ever, she wants and needs it. If I broke down and purchased it, she would love it for the first 5 minutes, the it would go in the bottom of the toy box along with the Elsa doll, and Barbie camera set from last year. 
Christmas is the season where all toy companies heavily market to children because it is universally known that parents will send $300. on a Barbie car and not blink an eye.

Entrepreneur.com

I have recently fallen in love with the website entrepreneur.com. It has a wealth of information from product placement to marketing strategies. If you haven't checked it out, I strongly suggest you do! I love going through the different articles and blogs that are published daily. It gives a lot of insight not only for entrepreneurs but anyone looking for marketing ideas or wacky business ideas. 

online shopping during the holiday season.

I recently came across an interesting news video on Wal-mart.  According to NBC News and the Today show, Walmart is predicted to be in a price war with Amazon.com, the current largest retailer. In a world where everything you want is at your finger tips, Walmart is struggling to keep up with major online retailers like Amazon.com. The hassle of fighting the crowd during Christmas Season has been virtually replaced with the ability to buy items from home. Walmart is partially blaming a plunge in stock (10% in a single day) a raise in their start rate to $9 this year and $10 next year. Along with the struggle to compete with online retailers for price and convince, Walmart is having to deal with workers group protesting for higher pay for the next 15 days.

I has become increasingly difficult to do business without change.





the link to the article and video can be found here: Wal-mart Workers Group Protest

Word-of-Mouth

With so much focus on social media marketing and web marketing, I believe word-of-mouth has been overlooked. I know as a consumer, when a friend tells me about amazing  or even horrible service received, I tend to listen to their opinion. A person reference to a business can draw in a larger customer base just as easily as a web based marketing strategy.  I recently came across an article on entrepreneur.com entitled 5 Ways to Maximize Word-of-Mouth Marketing     The article has some really good points when dealing with marketing and was informative and interesting. One of the points that has really struck home was to connect to the human emotion. Sometimes, I personally feel that although the internet has brought on a wealth of knowledge and innovative technologies at our finger tips, it has hindered personal contact.