Business Opportunities - Personal Qualities for SuccessWritten by Steven Harold
The are two sides to business success. There is business itself and there is person(s) behind business. Both of these sides need to have certain qualities if two sides are to come together to form a succesful whole. This article is about necessary qualities that person(s) behind business must have to stand a chance of success in any business opportunity.Vision You must know what you want from business and where you want business to go. You must have a great imagination and be able to visualise where you want business to be in 6 weeks, 6 months and 6 years ahead. Creativity You must have or be willing to develop a creative part in you. Just like person hundreds of years ago who took some wood and shaped it into a wheel. You must be able to take something ordinary or that exists already and create something new and different from it. Persistence Over and over again, if there is one personal attribute that makes successful business person succeed it is persistence. When others call it a day, or give up completely it is persistence that makes a difference between a winner and an also ran.
| | Importance of Branding: What's in a Name?Written by William King
Branding is perhaps most important facet of any business--beyond product, distribution, pricing, or location. A company's brand is its definition in world, name that identifies it to itself and marketplace. A model may be beautiful, but without a name, she's just "that girl in that picture." Where would Norma Jean be without Marilyn Monroe, or who would imagine Coca-Cola as just a soft-drink manufacturer? A brand provides a concrete descriptor to customers and competitors alike, a name for a product or service to distinguish it from anything else. Bob may run a hobby shop, but trying to advertise as "The hobby shop a guy named Bob runs down street a ways" is financial suicide. Each customer will have to describe shop, who Bob is, and what shop does every time someone asks about it. This makes process of recommending a good hobby shop too much work for average customer, and far too much work for a user looking for hobby shops on Internet. A customer looking up Bob's hobby shop will have an easier time of it if he or she knows to refer to it as "Bob's House of Hobbies," and customer can then refer others to Bob's hobby shop by name, increasing potential advertising exponentially. Developing a brand involves more than just picking a catchy name and placing an ad in newspaper--a brand is more than a unique string of letters denoting a particular product; a successful brand is a mnemonic trigger that makes a consumer feel a certain way when brand is thought of. For those who drink cola-flavored soft drinks, which is more appealing on a hot day: a cold cola soda, or an ice-cold Coke? Coca-Cola has spent 100 years developing their particular brand of cola-flavored soda as a refreshing beverage and a seminal representation of a market segment. Coca-Cola has used a combination of direct marketing, give-away techniques, and multi-product cross-branding to achieve maximum brand recognition and visibility in not only its immediately competitive market, but in markets as diverse as Coca-Cola branded race cars and housewares.
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