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MANAGING PROJECTS

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Projects represent nonroutine business activities that often have long-term strategic ramifications for a firm. In this chapter, we examined how projects differ from routine business activities and discussed the major phases of projects. We noted how environmental changes have resulted in increased attention being paid to projects and project management over the past decade. In the second half of the chapter, we introduced some basic tools that businesses can use when planning for and controlling projects. Both Gantt charts and network diagrams give managers a visual picture of how a project is going. Network diagrams have the added advantage of showing the precedence between activities, as well as the critical path(s). We wrapped up the chapter by showing how these concepts are embedded in inexpensive yet powerful software packages such as Microsoft Project. If you want to learn more about project management, we encourage you to take a look at the Web site for the Proj...
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Personality, Lifestyles, and Values

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A consumer’s personality influences the way he or she responds to marketing stimuli, but efforts to use this information in marketing contexts meet with mixed results.
The concept of personality refers to a person’s unique psychological makeup and how it consistently influences the way a person responds to his or her environment. Marketing strategies based on personality differences have met with mixed success, partly because of the way researchers have measured and applied these differences in personality traits to consumption contexts. Some analysts try to understand underlying differences in small samples of consumers by employing techniques based on Freudian psychology and variations of this perspective, whereas others have tried to assess these dimensions more objectively in large samples using sophisticated, quantitative techniques.
Brands have personalities.
A brand personality is the set of traits people attribute to a product as if it were a person. Consumers assign personality qualities to all sorts of inanimate products. Like our relationships with other people, these designations can change over time; therefore, marketers need to be vigilant about maintaining the brand personality they want consumers to perceive. Forging a desirable brand personality often is key to building brand loyalty.
A lifestyle defines a pattern of consumption that reflects a person’s choices of how to spend his or her time and money, and these choices are essential to define consumer identity.
A consumer’s lifestyle refers to the ways he or she chooses to spend time and money and how his or her consumption choices reflect these values and tastes. Lifestyle research is useful for tracking societal consumption preferences and also for positioning specific products and services to different segments. Marketers segment based on lifestyle differences; they often group consumers in terms of their AIOs (activities, interests, and opinions).
It can be more useful to identify patterns of consumption than knowing about individual purchases when organizations craft a lifestyle marketing strategy.
We associate interrelated sets of products and activities with social roles to form consumption constellations. People often purchase a product or service because they associate it with a constellation that, in turn, they link to a lifestyle they find desirable. Geodemography involves a set of techniques that use geographical and demographic data to identify clusters of consumers with similar psychographic characteristics.
Psychographics go beyond simple demographics to help marketers understand and reach different consumer segments.
Psychographic techniques classify consumers in terms of psychological, subjective variables in addition to observable characteristics (demographics). Marketers have developed systems to identify consumer “types” and to differentiate them in terms of their brand or product preferences, media usage, leisure time activities, and attitudes toward broad issues such as politics and religion.
Underlying values often drive consumer motivations.
Products take on meaning because a person thinks the products will help him or her to achieve some goal that is linked to a value, such as individuality or freedom. A set of core values characterizes each culture, to which most of its members adhere.

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