consumer buying behaviour

Consumer buyer behaviour is focused upon the needs of individuals, groups and organisations.

If a marketer can identify consumer buyer behaviour, he or she will be in a better position to target products and services at them. Buyer behaviour is focused upon the needs of individuals, groups and organisations.
It is important to understand the relevance of human needs to buyer behaviour (remember, marketing is about satisfying needs).

Let's look at human motivations as introduced by Abraham Maslow by his hierarchy of needs: The hierarchy is triangular. This is because as you move up it, fewer and fewer people satisfy higher level needs. We begin at the bottom level.
Physiological needs such as food, air, water, heat, and the basic necessities of survival need to be satisfied. At the level of safety, man has a place to live that protects him from the elements and predators. At the third level we meet our social and belongingness needs i.e. we marry, or join groups of friends, etc.
The final two levels are esteem and self-actualisation. Fewer people satisfy the higher level needs. Esteem means that you achieve something that makes you recognised and gives personal satisfaction, for example writing a book. Self-actualisation is achieved by few. Here a person is one of a small number to actually do something. For example, Neil Armstrong self-actualised as the first person to reach the Moon.
The model is a little simplistic but introduces the concept a differing consumer needs quite well.

To understand consumer buyer behaviour is to understand how the person interacts with the marketing mix. As described by Cohen (1991), the marketing mix inputs (or the four P's of price, place, promotion, and product) are adapted and focused upon the consumer.
The psychology of each individual considers the product or service on offer in relation to their own culture, attitude, previous learning, and personal perception. The consumer then decides whether or not to purchase, where to purchase, the brand that he or she prefers, and other choices.

source: http://www.marketingteacher.com/Lessons/lesson_consumer_buying_behaviour.htm

toyota efficiency

TEN MANAGEMENT TIPS BY TOYOTA

1. Always keep the final target in mind.
2. Clearly assign tasks to yourself and others.
3. Think and speak on verified, proven information and data.
4. Take full advantage of the wisdom and experiences of others to send, gather or discuss information.
5. Share information with others in a timely fashion.
6. Always report, inform and consult in a timely manner.
7. Analyze and understand shortcomings in your capabilities in a measurable way.
8. Relentlessly strive to conduct kaizen activities.
9. “Think out of the box” or beyond common sense and standard rules.
10. Always be mindful of protecting your safety and health.

source: wikipedia

increasing efficiency-our classroom crisis!!

guys i found this really good article on increasing efficiency. although it says "teacher" but its applicable or us, students too!!
have a look at it:

5 Ways to Increase Teacher Efficiency and Student Learning:
Teachers only have a limited amount of class time for students to learn. How can these educators help their students master the critical information? For example, in New York State instructors have 180 days x 45 minutes at maximum; however, bad weather days, special days, assemblies, and student sickness cut down the real instructional days to much less. Five techniques can help teachers to increase their efficiency in the class and, therefore, to improve student learning.
1. Educators can can prioritize the curriculum; they focus on the critical course learning and make sure their students can do that learning well.
The teachers decide on the 80% of the curriculum that is “need-to-know”. Instructors can pretend they are teaching summer school so they pick out the critical part of the course. As the teachers weed through the course for a six week summer session, they focus on the truly essential learning for the course. They take out all the “nice-to-do” non- essential activities. In addition, the classroom leaders decide for the “need-to-know” material, whether the learning is to be at the mastery level (about 60% ) or the introductory level (about 40%). These educators do not need to spend as much time on introductory materials as on mastery level materials.

2. Efficient teachers incorporate numerous learning styles into their classroom strategies.
When instructors include text, visuals, and some kinesthetic in the content presentation, they are likely to incorporate the learning styles of many students; therefore, more students can be successful in their learning the first time. For example, teachers may talk through the text and images in on a PowerPoint screen about the social studies economic concepts of “supply and demand”; the talk, text and images all convey the same information. The teacher may also incorporate a movement such as one hand going down to indicate low supply and the other going up to indicate high demand . Likewise, during the learning, teachers may have a tic-tac-toe listing of possible ways to develop more understanding about the topic; each area focuses on learning through a different learning style. By encouraging students to learn in their learning style, the teacher maximizes the students' learning opportunities within a limited time frame.

3. Classroom leaders save time when they use formative assessment since they know in-route student learning progress.
If they find out through the formative assessments that students are having trouble with a certain concept, they immediately can make minor adjustments to instruction to help the pupils overcome their learning gap. For example, as a Spanish teacher has her students look at sentence missing past tense verbs, her students use one finger for the preterite tense and two fingers for imperfect tense to indicate which tense goes in each sentence. This language instructor can ascertain difficulties and give immediate feedback. If the educators wait until the unit test, they may need to have numerous major review sessions to overcome the cumulative learning gaps from throughout the whole learning goal.

4. When teachers give feedback, they will save class time by giving feedback to the greatest learning need area that the largest number of students have.
Work their way to the learning needs of small groups of students and then to the learning need of an individual. When math teachers see a gap in most students' concept of Geometry , they give whole class feedback to overcome that gap. They will always focus on their maximizing their feedback to help as many students at once.Teachers may create feedback-giving PowerPoints or TeacherTube videos so that while some students are viewing the media presentations, the educators can work with small groups or individuals.

5. Finally, educators can have well-established procedures for the classroom to reduce class management time and therefore create more instruction time.
They will have established many procedures such how and when to hand in homework (at the beginning of class in the “Class In” folder), where to find extra copies of materials (in the blue notebook and on the class wiki), and how small groups will form (count off by four).


source:http://www.hotchalk.com/mydesk/index.php/editorial/124-practical-tips-and-tools/681-5-ways-to-increase-teacher-efficiency-and-student-learning