Author: lmehit

Don’t Buy Any Item in the Checkout Aisle | thesimpledollar.com

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Grocery store designers are smart people.

They know that when you check out with a cart load of groceries, you’re going to be standing in that spot for a while. They also know that sometimes you’re unfortunate enough to have children with you.

Thus, they stock the checkout aisle with things that are perfectly selected for you to just toss on the conveyor without a second thought.

Magazines. Beverages. Gum. Candy. Car fresheners. The list goes on and on.

All of these items have a relatively low price point. All of these items are things with very attractive packaging. All of these items are things that you can quickly enjoy without much effort at all. All of these items are also priced so that the store makes a nice profit.

All of these items are meant for you to buy them without skipping a beat. Many people do it, too. (If that wasn’t true, the checout aisle wouldn’t be designed this way in virtually every grocery store.)

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Frankfurt Turns Offices to Homes | Bloomberg.com

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Vijay Vankadari, who has renovated Frankfurt apartment buildings for more than a decade, used a cheap and plentiful resource for his latest residential project in the city: old office buildings that businesses won’t touch.

Office-to-apartment conversions like Vankadari’s Grand- Westend 24 in the city center are growing in Germany’s financial capital, providing opportunities for landlords hard pressed to find corporate tenants for outdated buildings. Such projects will account for more than a fifth of the homes coming onto the market this year, city government data shows.

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4 Tips for Pitching Your Business in 2 Minutes | Inc.com

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Doing a two-minute investor pitch can be incredibly daunting. Here are tips to hone your pitch and get the next meeting.

Two minutes. You probably wait longer for your coffee at your local shop.  Two minutes can seem like a very short time, unless you’re on in the hot seat, facing four investors and an entire audience, asking for funding. At that moment, time goes by like lightning. Last month at a local pitch contest, I saw two presenters lose precious time when they lost their train of thought in the middle of their two minute pitch.

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Two Men and a Truck’s Bumpy Road to Franchise Success | Entrepreneur.com

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All in the family: Brig Sorber and his mother, Mary Ellen Sheets.

Brig and Jon Sorber are definitely mama’s boys, at least when it comes to their moving franchise, Two Men and a Truck. During high school in the early 1980s, the brothers borrowed a 12-foot step van from their mother, Mary Ellen Sheets (she’d been using it in her spare time to buy furniture at auctions and estate sales). Once they had a set of wheels, they were able to do moves for small houses and apartments in the Lansing, Mich., area. But when they left for college, the brothers thought their days of wrestling couches were over.

Mama Sheets had other ideas. “She kept getting calls for jobs and asked if she could hire guys to keep the business going,” says Brig Sorber, now CEO of the franchise. “And she did. We’d jump back on the trucks during Christmas and summer vacations. One summer we came home and there was a brand-new truck in the driveway. We thought, Uh-oh, there goes all our beer money.”

In fact, that truck was their future. Over the next two decades, Sheets, who now serves on the board, and her boys built Two Men and a Truck into a 228-unit, nationwide franchise with more than 1,400 trucks. But unlike many successful franchises, which are created with franchising in mind from the start, the team behind Two Men and a Truck had to make the transition through trial and error.

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What Is Daylight-Saving Time? | Wired.com

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Let me start with the sun. Suppose you were to watch the sun (but not look directly at it; that is a bad thing) over the course of a day. Also suppose you were to observe the sun’s motion on different days of the year. Oh, I get it. You’re too busy and too impatient to do this. Well, there is a simple solution. Download and install some type of astronomy software. I recommend Stellarium. It’s free and it works on all the major operating systems. With Stellarium, you can enter a location and a time and it will show you the sky. This way you can play around with the views on different days without having to wait half a year. Instant sky gratification.

Let me show you the sun at different times of the day for my location on both Dec. 21 and June 21. This image might look crazy, but I tried to show all the locations at the same time.

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How to Find Core Keywords For Effective Online Marketing|searchengineguide.com

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There are many angles and avenues for researching keywords for your online marketing efforts. Some people focus on numbers such as search volume or keyword competition. Others might focus on the tools you use to dig up obscure keywords to target. While these may be good keyword metrics to consider, focusing on the keywords themselves should be the most important focus.

You can optimize difficult or easy keywords and high or low search volume phrases, and each will help you reach different levels of success. But choose the wrong keywords and you’ll see your marketing campaigns go a whopping nowhere!

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24 Brilliant Beer Branding Designs | trendhunter.com

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Beer companies have started to reconsider how they approach beer branding and what that means to their bottle designs. Should a brand’s design be witty and interactive, colorful and vibrant, minimalistic and direct or original and retro? In order to win over the average consumer, these are questions that marketers and brand executives need to consider. Fortunately, several companies have made it a point to re-brand themselves and that means changing their bottle designs.

This collection of designs showcase beer companies that have used branding strategies like summer-themed graphics, bottle labels that feature a 12-part detective story, bottles designed in an elegant sleek shape and various other companies that are changing the ways in which we view and drink from a beer bottle.

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Coke launches dance dance revolution in S. Korea with kiosk| kioskmarketplace.com

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The latest salvo in Coca-Cola’s battle for global supremacy recently launched in South Korea, not with a bang but with a pop song.

The soda behemoth’s latest viral video shows an inventive interactive digital out-of-home branding campaign using a kiosk, augmented reality and interactive digital signage.

Part of its global integrated “Open happiness'” campaign launched three years ago, the Coke dance machine grabs passersby attention with callouts from members of the South Korean boy band 2PM; shows viewers on-screen with the band members on a multiscreen video wall; and then gets them to dance along with the band, dispensing free Cokes to people who mimic the right moves.

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Air China Special Livery | airlinereporter.com

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When I was visiting Paine Field recently, I caught a glimpse of a special livery from Air China. Yesterday  the Boeing 777-300ER was delivered to the airline and Boeing shared some background information on the unique design.The aircraft displays 40 different smiling Chinese faces to represent the role that Chinese aviation has played in bringing China to the world.

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