I answered me here: http://fabiversity.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/re-pro-israeli-rallies-all-around-the-world/

And now, it is my turn!

Hi Fabian,

Thank you for your reply. I didn’t want to have a discussion about the term we can use to qualify what happens in Palestine. But after I read your post and can’t stay and not reply!

I read the source you found (http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutgenocide/whatisit.html), where there is a definition of a crime of genocide: According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. With first act as you said is “killing members of the group”.

Force a population to go away from their houses, put them on a little band of the land, build a wall and let them prisoner between the see on the left side, the wall and Israeli soldiers on the right side. It is an open-air prison! Drop hundreds of missiles of a population, which has one of the biggest density of the world. What happens? Of course, you will kill a lot of civilians. According to the United Nation, more than 40% of the 900 Palestinians killed in the Israeli offensive, and almost half of the 3,860 wounded, were women and children. (Source of the UN: http://un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29520&Cr=gaza&Cr1=unrwac) Are they soldiers in civilians clothes? It doesn’t correspond to the definition of genocide?? Destroy refugees’ camp, full of women, children and old people, is not intentional crimes? Use bomb uranium of civilians is genocide firstly for the current generation, but also for the future generation! Every day Israel block boats full of provisions (foods, medicaments and so on) for Palestinians or prevent (when it is not “kill”) medical staff to help civilians! And you are still thinking that Israeli are not “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction in whole or in part” (second form of genocide according to your source). Come on Fabian! Open your Zionist’s eyes and don’t be hypocrite! Of course there is genocide in Gaza!  No one can doubt about that!

I understand that you support the state of Israel… That´s your choice and it doesn´t bother me, you have chosen to be on the side of the criminals ok! But I can´t let you do such lies without reaction. You will find big difficulties to defend the terrorist and the criminal state of Israel, simply because whatever you do, you won´t be able to hide the truth. The truth is that Israel is massacring women and children in front of the eyes of the whole world!!! You said me that in every war there are civilians who die… But let me make something clear here: like I said, the children who died in Gaza are not just collateral damage! The Israeli army really wanted to kill these children! I know it is too horrible to believe but it is the truth! And if you don´t believe or you don´t want to believe, I can give you some videos to wake you up! Where you can see for example children directly shot by snipers!

And here I am not only speaking about what happened the last few weeks! The whole history of Israel is based on genocides! In Lebanon, in Palestine, in Egypt…! The state of Israel was founded on the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Gaza is not the first genocide in the history of Israel! What is happening in Gaza is a collective punishment of the Palestinian people… and their fault is that they want to live free and with dignity on their own land!! And I insist on “their own land”… I remind you that Gaza is an occupied territory since 1967!! There is a decision from the Security Council of the United Nations since 40 years!! But this decision (like many others by the way) was not respected by Israel!! So please, there is no need to give me the definition of a “genocide” because we are dealing with a terrorist state who doesn´t respect international decisions. This is a state who doesn´t respect human rights!

To conclude, there is clearly a genocide in Palestine. There are war crimes against Palestinians. And the human rights seem to exist only for the Isreali! Take a look at this article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/civilian-casualties-human-rights-groups-accuse-israelis-of-war-crimes-1366727.html

“In a service business, you are marketing yourself – your expertise and capabilities, your reliability, and commitment to excellent service.”

It explains one of the main differences between a product and a service: service involve heterogenic people! That is why the relation between the client for a service and the salesman is closer and more complicated than with a client for a product.

As I explained on my precedent review, we can differentiate a service from a product with his intangibility, the simultaneous production and consumption, the perishibility and the heterogeneity.

Knowing these differences, you can’t market a service and a product in the same way. For example, you can’t adopt a mass marketing strategy. In fact, clients have to be reassured that when they will pay for the service, they will get exactly what you are promise to deliver. They need a personal approach. That’s why marketing a service for too much people in the same time can reduce the quality of your efforts.

As I said, the relation is very important when you market a service. Do not hesitate to keep alive your client relations after the sale: clients could come back without or with a new client! Apart from your huge knowledge of the service and your great communication’s skills, you can use some other marketing’s tools in order to strengthen and optimize this relation, and consequently to secure your sale.

For example, you can use client-referrals. It means using recommendations from satisfied people to support your future sales. During my last internship I was charged to build a database of referrals. They can refer to a specific product or service, to a brand or to a company. It is difficult to find a lot of recommendations, but you can ask for them to your good clients. Personally, I searched in specialized magazines or newspapers the articles, where our clients speak about us or our product, and I picked out the relevant quotations.

Another example of marketing’s tools that is efficient for service’s marketing is the participation to organization. One condition: participate actively to the group’s projects or activities. Here is also a good way to meet your competitors.

To conclude, the communication is very important between you and the clients. Being courteous, paying attention, listening are some basis of the communication.  As George Rodriguez said “the Web is an avenue that should never be ignored”. So do not hesitate to use this great mean of communication: the web site!

Source: http://www.powerhomebiz.com/vol50/service.htm

A lot of studies affirm that it is more complicated to marketing (consequently to sell) a service business than a tangible product. Why is it like that? To understand this difference, I asked myself an elemental question: what makes the main difference between a service and a product?

I found the Sheila Webber’s website, which is very interesting for the explanations of basic concepts of marketing.

“The physical manifestations of the service indicate the quality of the service.”

According to her, there are four main differences between a service and a product:

-          Intangibility: You can’t touch a service contrary to a tangible product. Consequently clients are not able to have a real idea of what they are going to get when they will pay.

ð  I agree with Sheila Webber on this point, because a product calls for the 5 senses: you can see it, touch it, smell it, taste it or hear it. And it is not the case for a service.

-          Simultaneous Production and Consumption: At the same time, the service is produced and the client receives it.

ð  Please do not liken “Production” to “Payment” of the service. You can pay for something, which will be produced later or which has already been produced.

-          Perishibility: you can’t stock you service for later.

ð  I agree with Sheila Webber, if she means perishibility between the production and the consumption. Of course here, you have to consume your service now! But I think there is a perishibility between the payment (or the order) of the service and his consumption. For example, you give a hair-cutting as a gift to a person. You have already paid for it and there is a deadline of one year to use it.

-          Heterogeneity: Marketing a service involves a lot of people with different characters, knowledge, etc. The environment, the place, the time play a big role too. She says that “the physical manifestations of the service indicate the quality of the service”.

ð  And she is right! Because salesmen, producers, old clients and so on, are the only one interface between the service and the clients. Consequently, they are reflecting the quality of the business.

I think it is important to control and overcome these difficulties to marketing your service, especially the fourth because it is the most variable. That’s why the staff has to be very well trained in order to optimize the “reflection” of your business.

A simple vertical difference of positioning can have a lot of effects on the customers, therefore on the turnover. That is why it is important to know how place your products and to control merchandising effects. As student of Marketing, it leads me to give interest in it.

How to sell more?
I found this 6-minutes video on Youtube about Merchandising in the “Flower sector”. The man, who talks on this video, gives a lot of explanations and tips about the best way to position products. I find this video very well made, because it is a synthetic overview: in 6 minutes he gives the main and relevant merchandising’s rules. He takes flowers as example, but his advices can be applied by all retailers because they all have the same goal: how to sale more. That is why I would like to share them with you.

“The right product on the right place”
The man explains that there is a planning process to make the merchandising more efficient: “put the right product on the right place at the right time”. What does “the right product on the right place” mean? In fact he explains that there are 4 types of products:

• Purpose Products: It means products you buy with intention, it is a planned purchase. Those products have to be placed over the eyes level or around the hands level.
• Best-Sellers: we have to put them on a “primary selling position”. I think he means entries of a shop, displays at each end of a supermarket aisle, etc.
• Impulse Products: The contrary of “purpose products”. He says that they have to be put on “key locations”. To my mind, key locations are next to cash desks or next to a linked product, for example: scotch-tape next to gift raps.-
• Slow-Sellers: The contrary of “best-sellers”. They have to put on places where people don’t look at first sight: on the sides, on the floor, etc.

“Think like a customer”
According to this man, the main attitude to adopt in order to sale more is to “think like a customer”. Here I give you some of his tips, which I have analyzed:

• Put all products’ labels on the same way: in front of the customer. Analyze: the customer doesn’t have to move to see the label. He sees it at the first sight. All labels on the same way give impressions of cleanliness, order, novelty, etc.
• Play with color contrasts. Analyze: a simple psychological effect: it is nice for eyes.
• Make packs with several products. Analyze: customers think it is cheaper.
• Take a product away. Analyze: customers think that someone has already bought this product. Another way I know is to put an odd number of products, for the same psychological reason.
• Show all prices. Analyze: If you don’t see the price, you can’t fix psychologically how you will spend for the product. And maybe it is too expensive for your purse? Or to cheap for the gift you want to make? You know how many are you ready to pay, but you can’t imagine the price of a product in case you don’t see it.
• Place leaflets that explain how the customer can use the product. Analyze: people doesn’t know the way of using a new product. A good explanation can erase hesitations to buy.

Manipulation of customers
The purpose of all those methods of visual merchandising is to sale more through influencing unconsciously the customer to buy. But I think that some practices are more or less perverse. For example I find correct that best-sellers are places on the best position: Customers want it, they find it easily. But practices like “packs of products” or “odd number of products” are a little bit deceptive. But this manipulation of customers is everywhere because marketing is everywhere!

I am quite interested in the field “Corporate Identity” and I like to surf in the web to find some information or news about this subject. By corporate identity of a company I mean first of all the visible and distinctive characteristics, that permitted to be identify and recognize from inside (within the company) and from outside.

Logo as mean of communication
One of the most important means to communicate and to promote the Corporate Identity is the firm’s logo. I find on internet a very short slideshow made by the International Herald Tribune, which is titled “How to build a corporate identity”. They say that a logo “expresses the essence of a company by summing up how it behaves, what it stands for and what it hopes to achieve”.
This slideshow is a short explanation of how it is possible that two very different companies have the same logo and however have build two opposite corporate identities. These two companies are: Apple Inc., global technology American group and Ann Summers, British chain of sex shops.

In the slideshow I found three important points

1. From Newton to the High-Tech through the Hippies
As you can see on the picture above, logos of Apple Inc. evolved during years. Three of them are very important I will explain you why:

Everyone knows the story of Isaac Newton, this 17th-century scientist who was sitting down next to a tree and who saw an apple falling down, which was the start of his research concerning the laws of gravity. This symbolic discovery was used for the first logo of Apple Inc. It was also the start of the company, and it was judicious to represent the company with a scientific, historical and very descriptive logo as a safe bet.

Then the company developed itself and made a lot of changes in his business. In fact, they became very famous very fast. It was time to change the logo of the company. They chose a very colored and attractive logo. I have noticed that the rainbow colors of this logo correspond very well to the colors of hippies and sexual emancipation of this period (the seventies). And I find this new logo corresponds very well to this situation of development and upward trend of Apple Inc.

The last logo of Apple Inc. is this simple white apple with a little shadow on the middle. I think it corresponds to the consolidations phase of the company. It is more high-tech and serious. They know well their business and their market.

To conclude, we can recognize three steps representing the evolution of the company in these three logos: the start, the development and the consolidation.

2. One logo, two identities
As it is explained in the slideshiw, Apple Inc. and Ann Summers have the same logo: an apple with a chunk bitten out of the right side. But this same picture has two different meanings following the history of the respective apple:

Whereas the apple of Apple Inc. refers to the discovery of Isaac Newton, which represents science/research/technology, the apple of Ann Summers refers, in my opinion, to the forbidden fruit. You know also the story of Eve and Adam, who yielded to temptation eating the one and only forbidden fruit. That represents by extension temptation/pleasure/sex.

So we have here a same logo, but two different historical references and consequently two different carrying images.

3. Uniqueness makes strength
Then, we can notice that the Apple Inc.’s logo is the visual representation of the name of the company. In fact, the name and the logo represent both an apple. This uniqueness strengthens the Corporate Image of the company and makes easier the communication and the promotion of his identity.

If you notice other interesting things about this slideshow or about the Apple Inc.’s logo, do not hesitate to contact me to discuss about it!