The economy lost 524,000 jobs in December, raising the unemployment rate to 7.2 percent. More than 10 million Americans are now unemployed. Many more millions of Americans worry about their own job security. These anxieties are transforming the workplace. Employees may be working harder, experts say, but they may also be less productive.

In a time when customers are exposed daily to a nearly infinite amount of promotional messages, many marketers are discovering that advertising alone is not enough to move members of a target market to take action, such as getting them to try a new product. Instead, marketers have learned that to meet their goals they must use additional promotional methods in conjunction with advertising.

Of the four promotional mix options available to marketers public relations (PR) is probably the least understood and, consequently, often receives the least amount of attention. Many marketers see public relations as only handling rudimentary communication activities, such as issuing press releases and responding to questions from the news media.

But in reality, in a time when customers are inundated with thousands of promotional messages everyday, public relations offers powerful methods for cutting through the clutter.

In the past few tutorials we saw how marketers can use advertising, sales promotion and public relations to reach a large number of customers. While these methods of promotion offer many advantages, they each share one major disadvantage: they are a non-personal form of communication. And whether a company is in retailing or manufacturing, sells goods or services, is a large multi-national or a local startup, is out to make a profit or is a non-profit, in all probability at some point they will need to rely on personal contact with customers. In other words, they will need to promote using personal selling.

As we saw in the Personal Selling Tutorial, many sales positions do not include a strong emphasis on generating customer sales, rather these positions help meet promotional objectives in other ways, such as communicating with people who influence the final buyer, responding to customer-initiated inquiry (e.g., customer carrying product to a retail counter) or serving as support for the organization’s sales team.

In the Pricing Decisions Tutorial we provided the foundation marketers use to make pricing decisions. In this part of the Principles of Marketing Tutorials we look at the process marketers follow when setting product prices. This coverage includes examination of: approaches to setting an initial price; different price adjustments marketers make before settling on a final selling price; payment options; and additional issues that affect pricing.

This tutorial reviews the four functions of management.

This tutorial reviews the various theories of motivation.

New employee orientation effectively integrates the new employee into your organization and assists with retention, motivation, job satisfaction, and quickly enabling each individual to become contributing members of the work team.

Labor unions have a long and colorful history in the United States. To some people, they conjure up thoughts of organized crime and gangsters like Jimmy Hoffa. To others, labor unions represent solidarity among the working classes, bringing people together across many professions to lobby for better rights, wages and benefits. As of 2008, 16.1 million people were union members (12.4% of the workforce), and although union membership peaked in 1945 when 35 percent of the nonagricultural workforce were union members, unions are still a powerful influence in the United States (and even more powerful in many other countries). They are also an important and fundamental part of the history of United States commerce and the country’s growth into an economic powerhouse. (Logo above left: United Autoworkers)