Pitching to the Home Shopping Network: An Exercise in Opportunity Assessment and Personal Selling

The purpose of this exercise is to help students of entrepreneurship understand opportunity assessment and the personal selling process. After watching a short video about the challenges and opportunities of launching a product on the Home Shopping Network (video is optional), students are asked to identify a unique product that could be successfully sold on the Home Shopping Network (HSN). Students are then required to pitch their product to the class demonstrating how their product suits HSN’s requirements, meets customer needs, and can be personally sold effectively to the network’s audience. By participating in this exercise students will experience the opportunity assessment process, aspects of marketing strategies, and the importance of personal selling

Pitching to the Home Shopping Network: An Exercise in Opportunity Assessment and Personal Selling

The purpose of this exercise is to help students of entrepreneurship understand opportunity assessment and the personal selling process. After watching a short video about the challenges and opportunities of launching a product on the Home Shopping Network (video is optional), students are asked to identify a unique product that could be successfully sold on the Home Shopping Network (HSN). Students are then required to pitch their product to the class demonstrating how their product suits HSN’s requirements, meets customer needs, and can be personally sold effectively to the network’s audience. By participating in this exercise students will experience the opportunity assessment process, aspects of marketing strategies, and the importance of personal selling

The Impact of Advancing Technology on Marketing and Academic Research

Academic research in marketing often and rightfully tends to either build on well-established past research topics or follow well-established practices in industry. However, as technology advances, it might be possible to foresee some more enduring trends and focus research on future issues rather than on past issues. One approach would be to study emerging technologies with rapidly declining costs. Each of these emerging technologies spawns myriad applications that have the potential to dramatically impact existing markets. Interesting research topics include the study of the impact of these applications on different market participants (e.g., final consumers, the seller, the seller of complementary services, intermediaries, information providers, competitors, other industries). Research topics also include the optimal structure for products and services, given these new applications, as well as which intermediary should offer particular services. Research topics also include the interactive ability to rapidly customize marketing strategy by identifying individuals at particular points in time and under particular demand conditions. Five of these technologies include enhanced search services, biometrics and smart cards, enhanced computational speed, M-commerce, and GPS tracking.research in marketing, scholarly and academic research topics, research fads