business, Business, BUSINESS!

This is our new project:

Choose a small (local), medium, and large business. These are real-life businesses. Think of a local business you know for your small business. The medium-sized business can be local or national (chain stores may be small locally, but as a chain they’re probably a medium to large-sized business). The large business should have a very large national or even international presence.

Analyze each business according to its Marketing Mix (from Chap. 1). You know, they’re the four P’s: Product, Place, Price, Promotion. Read some of Chap. 1 if you need to remember how a companies marketing of its products rely on its Marketing Mix.

Use four paragraphs or more for each of the three businesses. Use graphics, charts or whatever you can find in a PowerPoint presentation to explain how each of these companies go about their business.

Use your own knowledge of companies to select your particular ones. Or, you can go to finance.yahoo.com to “surf” for companies to choose. You can also go there to learn about companies – ones on at least a national or international scale, not local – and their history. I’ll show you in class how to use Yahoo! Finance to research businesses.

The purpose of this exercise should be obvious: to learn how businesses are conceived, how they go about marketing, and how the size of a business might affect its marketing strategies.

Key terms from Chapter Five

After reading Chap. 5, please use your assigned term in a complete sentence in a way that demonstrates you know its meaning. Then click on “No Comments” to post a comment. Use your first name and last initial, such as “KevinS.” After I check the posts – they go to a “waiting space” first – they will appear for all of you to read. “No Comments” will then change to the “Comments” because they’ve been cleared.

Oh, and please, read all the extra sidebars and features throughout the chapter.

How Does a Free-Market Economy Work?

In order to understand what happens within an economy, especially our free-market-style economy as we have here in the U.S., let’s each work on a topic so that we can put together an in-depth PowerPoint presentation on “How Does a Free-Market Economy Work?”

Here are your topics:

Jordan – Free Enterprise System

Sara – Competition

Zayne – Risk (Why is there Risk in the Capitalist System?)

Megan – Profit

Josh – Role of Government

Jon – Role of Consumer

Hector – Resources

Dori – Employee Productivity

Nate – GDP (and GNP)

Daniel – Inflation Rate

Lindsay – Unemployment Rate

Shannon – Business Cycle

Max – Factors that Affect Business Cycles

Christina – The Global Economy

Jackie – How does the Federal Reserve Board Help Manage the Economy

Use the textbook and the Web to cover your topics as completely as possible. Good luck. Ask questions of me and your classmates if necessary.

Four Kinds of National Economies

In teams, we’ll examine different kinds of national economies:

Team One: Capitalist free-market economy

Team Two: Socialist market economy

Team Three: Communist (control by workers, citizens) economy

Team Four: Communist (totalitarian) economy

Each team will:

1. Name their country
2. Decide which principles will govern their country
3. Decide how their country will answer the three basic questions (Chap. 4, p. 60)
4. Decide how their country’s system will manage its resources
5. Examine, list, and explain the pros and cons of their country’s system
6. Predict the likelihood of success of their country

Get all the details and information you can from the Web, as well as do a lot of original ( by that I mean critical) thinking, in order to come up with an in-depth analysis, which each team will present using PowerPoint.

We begin our Economics studies with Chapter Four

We’ll start our studies of economics with Chap. 4, and we’ll focus those studies by asking the following questions:

What is an economy? — Team 4

What is a mixed economy? — Team 3

What is a command economy? — Team 2

What is a market economy? — Team 1

The answers to those questions will prepare us for understanding the economic choices people and nations make.

Let’s investigate and answer these questions. While we do, think about capitalism, socialism, and communism. Which systems are more like which kind of economy? Why? If you figure out this challenge, it’s worth five points per team.

A note: Teams are forgetting the citation page. You are not only losing points, you’re missing an opportunity to celebrate a longstading academic tradition: giving credit to your sources (and encouraging others to investigate these sources further.)