Marketing and Micro Environment Essay Example for Free

Marketing and Micro Environment Essay Effective marketing incorporates macro and micro-marketing strategies, terms that may not be very familiar to many small businesspeople. They are important concepts, though, that when applied effectively can help to boost advertising results. Even small businesses can learn howand whyto consider the impacts of macro and micro impacts in their planning and strategy. Micro Environment The micro environment, as the name suggests, is the immediate environment that impacts a business. The micro environment includes considerations related to suppliers, customers and local stakeholders, including local government agencies or regulatory bodies. The micro environment can generally be considered the local environment where the business operates and the business owner is likely to be somewhat aware of the impacts that they are faced with. Macro Environment The macro-environment includes those things that may impact small businesses but which are outside of their control. It is the larger, external environment within which businesses operate from an industry or economic standpoint. Using Strategy Effectively In considering the micro and macro impacts on a business, internal and external factors must be considered. Businesses use a variety of tools in planning to consider these impacts, including the SWOT, which is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats; analysis; the PEST, which is political, economic, social, technological, and Porters 5-Forces Analysis, which is the threat of new competitors, the level of competition, the threat of substitute products, and the bargaining power of customers and suppliers.

Shaking Baby Syndrome Essay -- essays research papers

Shaken Baby Syndrome Imagine yourself as a sweet, innocent, precious little baby. You are totally dependant upon adults to give you what you need and most importantly love. Your only means of communication is crying so you cry when you need to be fed, when you need your diaper changed, when you aren’t feeling so well, or when you just want some attention. You are crying and someone comes over to you. They pick you up, but instead of holding you and comforting you, talking affectionately to you, they shake you violently and vigorously. You are a baby, imagine the fear and pain that the shaking causes you. This is a form of child abuse and what is even harder to believe is that it actually happens. The correct term is Shaken Baby Syndrome and it is a form of abuse that is happening far and wide.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚     Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  What exactly is Shaking Baby Syndrome? Shaken Baby Syndrome is a serious brain injury that occurs when adults, frustrated and angry with children, shake then violently, and Shaken Baby Syndrome mostly occurs when a child receives numerous rapid shakes. It can also occur when a baby is slammed against a hard object; head impact is not necessary but does frequently occur. Shaken Baby Syndrome occurs frequently in infants younger than six months old, yet can occur up to the age of 5. (Showers, 1997.) In reality, shaking a baby if only for a few seconds can injure the baby for life.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Often frustrated parents or other persons responsible for a child’s care feel that shaking a baby is a harmless way to make a child stop crying. The number one reason why a baby is shaken is because of inconsolable crying. (National Exchange Club Foundation, 1998) An infant may spend two to three hours a day crying. (The Epilepsy Association of Central Florida) A caregiver momentarily gives in to the frustration of responding to a crying baby by shaking. Caregivers may be inadequately prepared for children.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Why is shaking a baby so dangerous? A baby’s head and neck are especially vulnerable to injury because the head is so large and the neck muscles are still weak. A baby’s neck is to weak to support their heavy head so when the baby is shaken the heads swings back and forth. In addition, the baby’s brain and blood vessels are very fragile and easily damaged by whiplash mo... ...n a coma, being in a vegetative state, and the worst, death. One in every four babies shaken dies. The rest have to deal with the injuries and symptoms that will affect the rest of their innocent lives. Twenty five to thirty percent of babies shaken die (National Shaken Baby Syndrome). Immediate medical attention can help reduce the impact of shaking, but many children are left with permanent damage from the shaking. The treatment of survivors falls into 3 major categories. Those categories are medical, behavioral, and educational. In addition to medical care, children may need speech and language therapy, vision therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and special education services. (Showers, 1997) Many incidents of Shaken Baby Syndrome are not reported out of fear. It is important to seek immediate and early medical attention. Serious complications and even death can be avoided. Exactly how much force is needed to cause injuries? No firm answer exists as to the exact number of shakes necessary or how long a person might typically shake a child. In most cases the period of shaking is 5-10 seconds. (National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome) To cause brain damage, severe

Alice in Wonderland Essay

You may have thought Alice in Wonderland was just a children’s tale that everyone takes too seriously but there is more philosophy, metaphors, and spirituality in this revolutionary children’s book than you can fit into one teapot! It seems everyone from my generation and up has heard the story, read the book, or watched the movie at some point in their lives. Alice in Wonderland started as a book written in 1865 by Charles Lutwidge. It is about a girl named Alice who sees a little white rabbit in the woods and follows it down the rabbit hole. When Alice goes down the hole she finds herself in a fantasy world called Wonderland, which is populated by peculiar characters. A few of these characters include the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, the caterpillar, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum and the Cheshire cat. Alice in Wonderland was a good story that caught the attention of both the young and the old but what most people did not know is that there is a bigger picture behind the story; the bigger picture being the one that famous philosophers pointed out. The first idea or character from Alice in Wonderland that I want to cover is the Cheshire cat. Cheshire Cat is depicted as an intelligent yet mischievous, villainous character that sometimes helps Alice and sometimes gets her into trouble, the cat is know for its disappearing acts where is starts to fade leaving nothing but it’s smile. Plato argued that what ‘is not’ in some sense also ‘is’, therefore he also believed that a non-being did exist. Plato believed that the incompatibility of Being and Non-Being was false. The only real antinomy is that of a single object of consciousness and all other things from which it is distinguished. Some would argue that no cat could just disappear into thin air and leave behind its smile. One would ask, can a smile be on it’s own? Apparently it can. The Cheshire cat’s grin, too, is a non-material being which would be categorized as a grin, as just a Platonic Form – a nonmaterial being which has real existence. Another aspect of Alice in  Wonderland that I want to cover is the food items that Alice eats. Her character in this story is almost entirely defined by what she eats. Once Alice has fallen down the rabbit hole she is stuck behind a small door that she cannot fit into. This talking door tells her that there are snacks on the table that will help her fit thru the door so she looks on the table and magically there are food items and drinks with tags that say â€Å"Drink me!† and â€Å"Eat me!† that appear out of nowhere, so Alice eats one without questioning it. â€Å"Food has a constant tendency to transform itself into situation,† the French sociologist Roland Barthes said. For that quote Barthes was talking about foods in the aspect of having communion without bread or Christmas withou t turkey. We can also question what would Alice be without those treats? The food made its way into this certain situation. Alice never would have been able to go thru that small door had she not eaten that one treat that made her shrink. This specific food choice set the tone for the rest of the movie, it made the story able to move on and allowed Alice to officially enter Wonderland. Another part of Alice in Wonderland that made me think of Ronald Barthes was when, in his essay The Death of the Author he states â€Å"it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach that point where language alone acts, â€Å"performs,† and not â€Å"oneself.† Lewis Carroll does just this in Alice in Wonderland. He creates his story with his knowledge of language with the puns and riddles in this story. An example would be his parody of traditional songs, which create a double meaning. Carroll does not project one meaning, he hands his language to the reader and allows them to analyze the story however they would like. Barthes quote says basically that the author is not the one that is spe aking to you but his language is. The language the author uses should speak to readers in the different ways that they hear it and Alice in Wonderland does just that, which is why there are so many different views and interpretations on it. In this book, Alice’s powers to reason are so distinct they seem unsuitable to a little girl’s character. According to Aristotle’s book Poetics, he insists that a character must be appropriate. For example, any intelligence in a woman would be considered inappropriate. Though Aristotle does not cover a child’s appropriate characteristic, we should assume that if intelligence in a female character is marked as inappropriate then it should be for a little girl as well. From this we argue that Alice’s fearless reasoning through out  the movie is uncharacteristic of a child. However, when Alice’s reasoning is used to draw attention to her, Alice’s childish nature is skillfully put into words when Alice claims that she â€Å"[doesn’t] care which happens.† This would restore her values as a character for Aristotle since he says, â€Å"too brilliant a diction conceals character and thought.† Alice in this book experiences a lot of things that the reader might think of as illusions or things that aren’t true or cannot happen. According to Nietzsche, the things in this book make perfect sense. Everyone is driven by a will to truth and knowledge on hand and a will to illusion and ignorance on the other hand. These components help make a worthy and happy existence for everyone. This book constantly makes the reader go back and forth between what is the truth and what isn’t. This book is the perfect demonstration for Nietzsche’s theory of having a middle ground between the place for realism and for fantasy in a well-ordered life. Alice’s willingness to accept the appearance of the white rabbit without question and follow it down the rabbit hole to continue her illusion fantasy is the perfect example of Nietzsche’s theory of the will of ignorance and the good use of illusions a person needs to balance their life. Opposed from Nietzsche’s theory about everything in Alice in Wonderland making sense, David Hume has another idea. Hume is another philosopher whose theories can be found within Alice in Wonderland. Hume brought forth the idea that until we know the necessary connection or cause of things, than all knowledge is uncertain. Everyone who reads or watches Alice in Wonderland is just as intrigued as she is on her new findings. This Wonderland is full of things that contradict our experience and expectations. While following Alice’s journey one does not know what comes next, as in our lives we usually do. We know that if you roll one ball and it hits another than that ball will roll too. Hume has a different idea. Hume would have thought, based on this theory, that Alice shows little evidence of being an expert on deductive logic. Alice would not have been able to make any reasonable decisions in Wonderland because she has never experienced anything like it before and therefore doesn’t know the outcome of anything she might do. Alice does use great inductive reasoning skills though when she learns how to change her size by drinking the bottle and  other foods. She uses this type of reasoning to make successful predictions. Her use of evidence about past events to predict and control the future course in Wonderland allows Hume’s theory to come alive within Alice and her choices. Time is also a big question in Alice in Wonderland and it shows up quite a bit. Though Plato may believe time to be just a mere illusion, Kant has his own point of view. Kant has three conclusions about time, one being that time is not something that exists by itself, time is actually a psychological sense by which the world is engaged in, and that time is prior to any particular engagement that one many have. Kant believes that time is an intuition of the mind and Alice would have needed that in order to have any type of adventure. One of the main points that the reader comes across time in Alice in Wonderland is when the white rabbit was running to his hole saying â€Å"Oh dear? Oh dear? I shall be too late.† Every time the white rabbit is in a scene he seems to be in a rush and saying he is going to be late. According to Kant, the white rabbit is experiencing an expectation of a time to come and understands that the present is prior to the future event, which would explain why the rabbit was always anxious. Out of all of these philosophers I believe that Alice in Wonderland connects most with Nietzsche and Barth. Nietzsche’s theory of illusions and the will of ignorance. When personally watching Alice in Wonderland, the movie, and knowing that people read the book, any one would be able to tell that it is all about illusions. I mean, at the beginning of the story she is talking to her teacher saying things like â€Å"if I had my own world the books would be pictures,† â€Å"if I had a world of my own everything would be nonsense, nothing would be what it is.† Then a few minutes later Alice falls asleep and ends up in Wonderland. This shows that Wonderland is Alice’s illusion. Nietzsche shows that one needs a good balance between what is real and what is fake. Barth also gets most of Alice in Wonderlands theory because he explains that story’s are not what the author says they are, they are what the reader sees them as and Alice in Wonderland has been interpreted in so many ways that Barthes theory is spot on. Everyone sees Alice in Wonderland differently because the author made it so it wasn’t just one meaning. Nietzsche and Barthes’s theory is exactly what the whole story of Alice in Wonderland is about.

A Magnificent Catastrophe, by Edward J. Larson - 1136 Words

In the book â€Å"A Magnificent Catastrophe† author, Edward J. Larson examines all aspects of the events that occurred during the First Presidential Campaign in the 1800s. Larson discusses the Presidential Election rivalry battle between Thomas Jefferson of the Republicans and John Adams of the Federalists. In 1776 both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were sent to Philadelphia as delegates to the second continental congress, they joined a five-member committee, which drafted a Declaration of Independence for the United States. They later then voted to adopt and sign the document their committee drafted which was the Declaration of Independence. Adams was more active when promoting independence and argued the longest and the most effective, but†¦show more content†¦Larson has some positive and negative aspects in this book that I’ve notice while reading the book. Some of the positive aspects of reading this book are learning background knowledge about the Politi cians life and family history. In history textbooks it doesn’t really go into detail about friendships and family history. Until reading this book I was unaware that Adams and Jefferson were close friends before the elections. To my knowledge from reading history textbooks Adams and Jefferson became acquaintances with each other when they were running for office and when being part of the committee when drafting the declaration of independence. That was one of the huge positive aspects of reading this book is that Larson has a lot of concrete details about the Politicians lives that are not presented in history textbooks. Texts books are straightforward and go straight into disusing what was going on in politics during a specific time period and they don’t even bother telling you about the politician’s background. I know when I take a history course I always have the question of who is this person in my head because all I know is what they’ve done to bett er or worsen our country, but I know nothing about the individual itself and Larson did a great job providing this in his book. Another positive aspect that I liked about Larson’s book was that the book was like a timeline and he would thoroughly describe in details what was going on during that time. There were noShow MoreRelatedA Magnificent Catastrophe By Edward J. Larson1780 Words   |  8 PagesThe book A Magnificent Catastrophe, by Edward J. Larson, narrates a story about how dirty and devious America’s first presidential campaign of 1800, how it became the most powerful election and how it molded America’s future in today’s society. Adams and Jefferson two great friends that shared one common goal. It is to obtain America’s freedom against the motherland Great Britain. They have remained close coworkers and friends throughout the American Revolution, but then in the 1800 each went thruRead MoreA Magnificent Catastrophe By Edward J. Larson11 45 Words   |  5 PagesA Magnificent Catastrophe is written by author Edward J. Larson. This book was paying attention to the First Presidential Campaign in the 1800s. The United States had not presidential election in prior to 1800. However, electoral politics are re-oriented United States in it are definite direction and solidified the two party system since 1800, so that is a reason why this book is meaning detect. During the critical 1800 election, the author has written regarding Founding Fathers of America who areRead MoreMagnificent Catastrophe Essay1061 Words   |  5 Pagesï » ¿ Critical Book Review #1 In the book â€Å"A Magnificent Catastrophe† the author, Edward J. Larson, writes about all of the little details that has occurred in the First Presidential Campaign in the 1800s. He begins his book with how the two parties, the Republicans (Jefferson) and Federalists (Adams), were going to compete in who will govern the United States now that it is a free country and no longer under Britain’s rule. Although they had at first been friends they soonRead MoreAnalysis Of Edward J. Larson s The Crucible 1383 Words   |  6 Pages In 2007, Edward J. Larson published a book that focused on the events from America’s electoral process in 1800. The book explores four candidates; Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. However, the author’s main focus is on Jefferson and Adams due to their salient bout. As the former supported the Republican Party and the latter supported the Federal Party, there was a prevalent rivalry between the two candidates (Larson, 2007). With the negative and positive aspectsRead MoreQuality Improvement328284 Words   |  1314 Pagesof Motorola; Dr. Richard Post, Intel Corporation; Dr. Dale Sevier, San Diego State University; Mr. John A. Butora, Mr. Leon V. Mason, Mr. Lloyd K. Collins, Mr. Dana D. Lesher, Mr. Roy E. Dent, Mr. Mark Fazey, Ms. Kathy Schuster, Mr. Dan Fritze, Dr. J. S. Gardiner, Mr. Ariel Rosentrater, Mr. Lolly Marwah, Mr. Ed Schleicher, Mr. Amiin Weiner, and Ms. Elaine Baechtle, IBM; Mr. Thomas C. Bingham, Mr. K. Dick Vaughn, Mr. Rober t LeDoux, Mr. John Black, Mr. Jack Wires, Dr. Julian Anderson, Mr. Richard AlkireRead MoreDeveloping Management Skills404131 Words   |  1617 PagesCentral Design: Jayne Conte Cover Art: Getty Images, Inc. Cover Design: Suzanne Duda Lead Media Project Manager: Denise Vaughn Full-Service Project Management: Sharon Anderson/BookMasters, Inc. Composition: Integra Software Services Printer/Binder: Edwards Brothers Cover Printer: Coral Graphics Text Font: 10/12 Weidemann-Book Credits and acknowledgments borrowed from other sources and reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on appropriate page within text. Copyright  © 2011, 2007,