Guest Professors

Today, the professors from the other sections of Marketing 437, Allon and David, came in and taught our class while our professor was out of town. Both of these men have had several years of Internet Marketing experience. David, for example, built an online campaign for the Web site, Local.com; his job was to drive people to the site; while, Allon has had experience working for Gateway's Experion.

I learned several things from Allon and David today in class. Before they started their lecture, they briefly showed us a book they have their class read entitled, "Don't make me think." This book discusses the topic of Web sites and how they should do just that, not make their visitors think. We then discussed how a Web site should be intuitive, and how people should not have to think when they come to a Web site, for the Web site should be obvious and it should be easy for its visitors or consumers to navigate themselves around the site.

Although Allon and David discussed the basic concepts of marketing that we learn about in Marketin 300, they added material to these basic marketing concepts that I have never learned before. For instance, David and Allon discussed the Marketing Mix with us, otherwise known as the 4 P's: product, price, promotion, and place. However, they did not just stop there. David and Allon took the discussion one step further and informed the class that there are really 7 P's adding people, process, and physical evidence.

Another interesting part of the class discussion was when we took the product life cycle and applied it to companies on the internet. So, we looked at each stage of the product life cycle starting with introduction, then moving to growth, then maturity and finally going into decline and looked at where companies on the internet fall. We did not put any companies in the introduction stage; however, we said YouTube is in the growth stage, Amazon currently fits into the maturity stage, and sadly for AOL it is in the decline stage.
I learned a great deal from David and Allon today in class. These are just the three topics that stood out the most.