Saturday, November 20, 2010

Today goes down in History! Marketers Land on the Brain!


No I am not exxagerating folks, If we made it such a big deal when the Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, then we should definilly put it in the history books, Marketers can now get into the consumers brain with a new form of MRI. The point of a marketers job is to understand the consumer and figure out what and how they purchase, but it's not easy to be a pshycic and you can never assure yourself that you will have what the consumer wants unless you knew what they were thinking or better yet feeling.

This new idea of Neuromarketing is great!! because let's be honest people are not Honest!!! No survey or focus group can really tell you the truth on how the consumer feels because people either feel bad telling you that they hate it, or they don't speak up when they like it because it might affect how society views them. By running all these exams on peoples brains to find out if the moved them or made them mad, the marketer can know if the product will really appeal to the general public or fail. Of course like everything in life there is a negative side to this new form of MRI's because they can be used for the wrong reasons as mentioned in an article in about.com What if such scans could be used by the government to test a soldier for homosexuality, or even unconscious homosexual impulses, and discharge them based upon the results?

Lets hope these tests are used for marketing purposes only and we can use them to move foward into the right direction for the Marketing world. We might finally predict what the consumer will want instead of wasting thousands of dollars on expensive ad campaigns that won't work.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Young people drive Iphones not Cars??

I can't beleive that the automobile business is really trying to pin the internet as the cause for there decline in sales between the Y generation. It seems that now a days as soon as someones marketing strategy doesn't work they blame the internet. As said by Karl Brauer, senior analyst and editor at large at Edmunds.com a real reason why most young people today don't have cars is becasue of the economic troubles facing there parents who would normally buy them the car, as well as the lack of jobs that there are now for them to have and earn money to buy a car.

If I can't find a job and my mom can't buy me one then the only thing I can do is look online for jobs that allow me to stay home or opt to take online classes so that I won't have to drive to my university. Another ridiculous theory is that us young people are wasting our money on electronic gadgets instead of getting cars. Sure I can talk and email my boss with my Iphone but seriously my Iphone can't drive me to work or take me to the grocery store.

Finally I beleive the biggest reason why young people today are not buying as many cars is because now a days no one under 30 with a part time job and no credit will even get approved to buy a car. The internet does not determine my credit score or the decision that the bank will make when I submit my application for financing a car, therefore if they wan't to blame anything for there decline in car sales they can blame the banks for not helping students qualify for car loans.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

No need to fire your tax man the internet already did that for you.

Now a days you can I can fill out and insert some numbers into a tax software and bam! my 2010 taxes are done and submitted without anyone validating if I am who I say I am.
Putting this aside, lets say the Internet makes filling your taxes very secure and invests money on making sure that the privacy of the users is respected and our information is not distributed to other websites. You still won't have a hard copy of your taxes and if by any chance the system fails you won;t have any record of your taxes. There are many pros and cons to opting for efilling as appose to going to an accountant to prepare them for you, but in my opinion the cons outweigh the pros. I am a very visual person and like to understand and hold in my hand what I am looking at. I don't think I would understand my results from submitting my taxes if I had to read it off of a screen. I like to have the paper in my hands saying what I turned in and what the outcome was.
If our country is going to resort to keeping it all online as our taxes are now and other government documents that can only be accessed to the Internet then people will be even less aware of there rights. Most people don't know whats going on in the government world and if you limit it to the Internet only, what will happen to the thousands of people who are not Internet users, are they not entitled to know whats going on as well.