Marketing

In Marketing 101, you'll learn how to: master the basics of great marketing to grow your business; adapt your marketing strategy to difficult economic conditions; understand customers, competitors, and markets; discover your target audiences; position your product or service against the competition; create a great brand from scratch; market residential and commercial properties effectively; and much more.

A general theory of cultural evolution is formulated using a cognitive dimension reduction scheme. Rational but cognitively limited agents iteratively invent and redefine abstract concepts in order to best represent their natural and social environment. These concepts are used for decision-making, and determine the agents’ overall behavior. The collection of concepts an agent uses constitutes his/her cultural profile.

Managing word-of-mouth has become a significant marketing activity, as marketers try to identify opinion leaders and take advantage of the influence they wield over potential consumers.

Since 1980, Michael Porter's classic Competitive Strategy has provided the methodology that most big companies use for strategic analysis. But now, distinguished Columbia Business School professor Bruce Greenwald offers a bold new theory of competition - a theory that is far simpler than Porter's and much easier for strategic planners to apply in the real world. Porter identified a complex five-force model for studying competition in any market.

The aim of strategy is to master a market environment by understanding and anticipating the actions of other economic agents, especially competitors. A firm that has some sort of competitive advantage--privileged access to customers, for instance--will have relatively few competitors to contend with, because potential competitors without an advantage, if they have their wits about them, will stay away. Thus, competitive advantages are actually barriers to entry and vice versa. In markets that are exposed, by contrast, competition is intense.

Prof. Donald E. Sexton, in an exclusive write-up for OER, focuses on how a country brand affects behaviour through perceived value and what factors influence the branding investment process.