How to think like an entrepreneur

You may have thought about starting your own business several times over the years. You have ideas which you think could work, but you always stop short of actually doing it. Becoming an entrepreneur is a state of mind. Be positive and you can become one. Entrepreneurial spirit is the first step. The following may get you into the right frame of mind. To be an entrepreneur, you need to be passionate about the business you wish to build. This will drive you on during good and bad times to eventual success. You may look at the people around you at work with better and more interesting jobs which you think you could do just as well, if not better.  Examine your skills and think about where and how they could be used to better effect. Consider updating them by enrolling in training and college courses. Study the careers of business icons such as Sir Alan Sugar and Sir Richard Branson. They are both self made men who worked hard on their innovative business ideas and developed their small businesses into multi-million pound and multi-national companies. They had the instinct to anticipate and react to where there were gaps and opportunities in the market and jump in to fill them. Alan Sugar, for instance, revolutionised the early sound systems market with innovative products at affordable prices. True entrepreneurs are adept in improvisation and have the foresight to diversify to meet changes in the global business world. Another example is Richard Branson who had success...

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Merchandising Aunt Jemima

This article traces the development of Aunt Jemima, one of America's most enduring advertising icons, from her roots in Old South slave mythology and reality, through her reinterpretation in Reconstruction, minstrel shows, turn-of-the-century mass advertisements, and the Civil Rights movement, to her present incarnation as a "working grandmother." The main focus is to demonstrate how the image of Aunt Jemima, and the slave mammy, reflected contemporary realities faced by black women in slavery and as servants in northern and southern households. Particular attention is paid to the years between 1893, when Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix was first marketed, and the Great Depression. During this period, the character of Aunt Jemima--the image and biographical detail that were sustained into the 1970s--was created in a series of print advertisements and personal appearances, even as black women were moving out of the South and then out of live-in household service. Aunt Jemima products were sold and have continued to be sold to predominately white households by playing on popular ideas about race, class, and gender and using the plantation South as a reference point. In the ads, as in the real antebellum South, putting a black Aunt Jemima in the kitchen kept white women out of it, simultaneously offering solutions to the management of black labor and reinforcing ideas about white femininity. The continued marriage between the product and Aunt Jemima persona was so close that white housewives...

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Product Design in Consumer Value Creation

It is widely known that product design is important in consumers' evaluation of goods. However, managers and researchers do not fully understand the broad values that design creates for consumers and how these values create preference for a product. Based on work by Holbrook, other researchers and this work on "consumer value," it is shown that product design can create four types of broad based values: (1) Social (2) Altruistic (3) Functional and (4) Emotional (SAFE values). Here we explore how product designers can create the SAFE values and embed them into the product through the new product development process. It also empirically evaluates how well the initial design goals of the product designers are implemented in the final developed product and explores the factors that help or impede this implementation. The developed product is then evaluated by consumers from the target market of the product to assess the effectiveness with which they perceive the values the designers embedded into the product. In this context, it also evaluates the role of consumer expectations. Longitudinal multiple informant data were collected on 62 different products in the new product development process over a period of one year and were analyzed. The results indicate that product design does, indeed, create the SAFE values and that the product designer is central to this value creation. The analysis showed NPD creativity, cross functional integration and experience as important factors...

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