2023-08-03
32 分钟This is Planet MONEY from NPR.
Welcome back to Planet Money Summer School MBA Edition, where the business of business is business.
I'm Robert Smith with today's lesson number four, you are halfway to your totally free, barely adequate MBA degree.
If you listen to all eight episodes and pass a short test at the end, we'll send you an electronic pseudo diploma appropriate for printing, framing, and generally just showing off.
With so far this summer, we have learned how to start a business, how to conquer competitors, and how to count our money.
Today, we get mystical.
We look into the dark arts of marketing and sales.
It is not easy to get someone to buy something they dont know that they need.
I mean, Arthur Miller didnt call his famous play Happiness of a salesman.
Perhaps thats why so much attention at business school is focused on this problem.
There are the basics of sales.
How does someone find your product?
How do you convince them to buy?
But sales is just one small part of the bigger world of marketing.
Creating brands, creating desires.
It's easy to sell one pair of shoes to a barefoot man, but selling someone their 23rd pair of sneakers, well, that takes marketing teaching.
Our class today is a professor of marketing at the legendary Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Barbara Kahn.
Thank you for being with us.
Yeah, it's my pleasure.
So I feel like marketing is one of these things that the word is always around.