2 simple questions for discussion. These are fairly easy questions to answer I just do not have time to look through things today.
Please answer. Thank you!

1. BUSN Chapter 13 introduces a number of pricing strategies such as cost-plus pricing, odd-even pricing, competitive pricing, and loss-leader pricing. As the text indicates, different pricing strategies and tactics can be used to motivate consumer purchasing behavior to help businesses achieve different goals.
As avid consumers yourselves, can you share with the class any store pricing policies that you thought were extremely clever in achieving business outcomes, or perhaps any pricing policies that didn't seem to make any sense to you at all? For an example of a pricing policy that didn't seem to make sense at first glance, you can refer to the Week 1 Question of the Week on magazine subscription pricing for The Economist.

As always, looking forward to your thoughts and postings.... In the words immortalized in the cult classic Robocop, .... "Now, I'd buy THAT for a dollar!"

2. Greetings Class, recently, a student of mine made the statement "Online Companies have no clue who I really am!" Her complaint was about the deluge of online merchants who use online data to market products to you as a consumer. Sometimes the companies get it right, she said, but more often than not they get it wrong, and in a big way! Targeted advertising on social media experts seem to be continually getting it wrong by serving up ads that don't apply to my student at all.

The interesting thing about this is that on the surface you might be saying to yourself, "wait a minute, businesses are supposed to have access to mountains of data on us." We've all heard that they track everything about us on the web, what we click on, how long we look at web pages, what we like, the list goes on and on .... What's going on here?

This, dear friends, might be an example of the difference between data and knowledge. Having access to a few pieces of data isn't necessarily a good thing, unless you can turn that data into something meaningful... My student's experiences are quite possibly the result of poor attempts by businesses that are marketing using incorrect conclusions drawn from insufficient data.

And yet, the Internet has always promised more meaningful dialogs between businesses and consumers. The Cluetrain Manifesto, a set of 95 theses organized and put forward as a call to action in 1999, described the Internet as the means to transform the business to consumer relationship, establishing a previously unavailable level of communication and understanding in the form of human to human conversations.

For those of us who saw the 2002 sci-fi thriller Minority Report, the scene where a holographic personal shopper greets Tom Cruise as he walks into the lobby of a popular clothing store to offer him personalized shopping suggestions is a marketer's dream. In the movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise is a law-enforcer on the run, and in this particular scene, he is frantically trying to escape from people hot on his trail. He ducks into the futuristic equivalent of "The Gap," attempting to blend into the crowd, when a holographic shopping assistant appears before him. In a bright and friendly voice the holographic image of vivacious twenty-something greets him. "Hi Tom! How did those brown khaki's work for you? Would you like to try a hot new polo shirt to go with it? It comes in all your favorite colors and its on sale!" I'm paraphrasing to make a point, but the promise of the Internet is as a key to greater understanding between businesses and consumers is what makes this all possible.

With this level of unprecedented communication as the goal and promise, the question I put forth to you in this discussion is one of experiences. Can you share an online marketing interaction that demonstrated either of the following:

The online interaction between you and the company exemplified an unexpected, deep UNDERSTANDING of you as a consumer
The online interaction between you and the company exemplified an unexpected, deep MISUNDERSTANDING of you as a consumer
Give specific details where appropriate. I look forward to your discussion postings!