Archive for the ‘Business Principles’ Category

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I’ve been a Netflix subscriber since they went by the name Netflix.com and were boasting 7,000 titles in stock. They now claim to have over 100,000. That was many moons ago. But I haven’t necessarily been a Netflix loyalist. Over the years I’ve tried other online movie rental services only to keep finding my way back to Netflix.

But over the years Netflix has begun cutting out key customer features. They say it’s to improve their system, customer service and the traditional yada, yada, but I’m not so sure. But with each feature they eliminate, instead of differentiating themselves from the competition, they are systematically eliminating the benefits of being a Netflix customer.

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I belong to an online book exchange site that basically lets you exchange books for points and shipping fees. I can get just about any book for a mere $4.50 for shipping. I’ve even gotten a hold of some brand new hardbacks still on the new release shelves!

Recently they started doing the same with DVDs, which for an avid movie watcher like me I love. It’s my chance to offload some stuff that I no longer watch and look for some of the titles that I want but was just never willing to shell out the bigger bucks for.

For a while I’ve had the movie Highlander in my want list and it recently became available and I was lucky enough to snag it. What was funny is what I actually got in the mail:

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Registering multiple domain names is, and should be, common practice for businesses wishing to protect their brands. I discussed buying alternative domain names earlier this week, but I wanted to address it again, this time from the context of duplicate content issues which may arise if you don’t set up your new domain names properly.

Domain Name Redirects

The first thing you need to consider after you’ve purchased additional domain names is to decide what you want to do with them. Not every domain name needs to have a site on it, though it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some kind of generic company page in place for lack of anything else. But for the most part, you will probably want to redirect all your alternate domain names to your main company site. This is especially true of many of the issues covered in the article linked above.

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Success means a lot of things to a lot of people, but the bottom line, for most of us, is that success doesn’t come easy. Most people who see someone else’s “overnight success” cannot fathom the months or years of hard work, lost sleep and sacrifices made to achieve that success.

Of course success is more than money or power. I tend to subscribe to definition #1 above rather than #2. You don’t have to have any of those things to truly be successful, and you can be successful in many things that won’t ever provide them. In business, success merely means that you’ve achieved your goals and dreams.

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A two-hour live season finale of the Celebrity version of The Apprentice seems somewhat frivolous. It’s almost as if Trump is taking this seriously. Maybe this gives us a little more insight on how un-seriously Trump takes the regular seasons when someone will actually be working for him.

But the ratings must be good. On signing off Trump declared they’d be around for “many more years”. My hope is that they get back to what made the show great to begin with, that is being about the business tasks and not about the personalities.

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I loved the interviews as part of the narrowing down process in the first few seasons of The Apprentice. I think the last couple of seasons they moved away from that, but now they brought it back. Considering that none of these people will actually be working for Trump, this time it seems kind of superfluous. What’s the point? Let’s get back to the game… and the lessons!

Business Lesson One: The quality of the team can make or break your success.

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In Last Thursday’s episode the teams had to build and sell a Quiznos sandwich. I think this episode really showed where the celebrity candidates are weakest, and that is in genuine business and marketing. They could not rely on their celebrity so everything came down to how to market a new sandwich to the average person on the street. But on with the lessons…

Business Lesson One: Savor victory, but don’t gloat.

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The task for this episode of The Apprentice finally offered a true business related task that didn’t let the candidates rely on star power or the pocket books of their rich friends. This was a true marketing oriented task. I really wish they would do more of these. On with the lessons…

Business Lesson One: Your marketing must answer questions before they are asked.

The first thing someone is going to ask themselves when seeing a bottle of lotion that is made with yogurt is going to be: Why? Eating yogurt, I get. Rubbing it on my body, not so much. Developing a marketing campaign around this particular product means that you have to answer the question of why? That’s the only real way to sell the product.

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The QVC task is one that they’ve done before on The Apprentice, so this episode didn’t really offer up anything new. And since there were no real fireworks to speak of, this was a pretty bland episode. I’d love if The Apprentice would get back to tasks that require some unique business savvy, but there I go again longing for the days of Season One.

Let’s get right to the lessons…

Business Lesson One: Take the high road.

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Thursday sported an episode of The Apprentice that was absolutely fantastic while at the same time pretty depressing. It was, in essence, classic reality show material. While that makes for good TV, you know it’s just not worthy of a show like The Apprentice. The behavior of Omarosa and Piers (mostly Omarosa) was so vile that Trump really should have fired both (or at least Omarosa) on the spot, regardless of how the team performed on the task.

Omarosa stooped to new lows in an attempt to save face but really did nothing more than show how unfit she is for the corporate environment. Amazingly, she made herself look worse than when she was booted off the show several seasons ago. Don’t tell her to go while she’s ahead! She wants to come back and destroy any residue of respect that may have remained. It really is sad. But on with our lessons…

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