A Day in College

As America and other countries in the world become more technologically adept, retail shopping has expanded itself into new stores. These stores are open twenty four hours a day, don't require any employees, and come right to the customer's home; they're e-stores, and they're shopping's new best friend. Whenever new technology comes out, people find a way to sell their product using it. With radio there were jingles, with television came infomercials, and now with the internet there is an entire warehouse of products anyone can buy as long as they have a credit card.

Unfortunately, buying things online may be too easy. There are many online privacy concerns, which are fears that consumers have about the information collected online and the ways it may be used, or abused (Hawkins). Identity theft has become more common in the internet age when a person knowledgeable and tricky enough can get someone's credit card number and buy whatever they like. Online stores have no way of checking a person's ID. There are even bots, software robots that do shopping for users (Hawkins), that gather personal information and store it. Those bots can be used for good, to make shopping easier for users, or bad, to store information and release it to people who take advantage of it. The typical online store tries to assure people of its safety measures.

The memory a consumer has of a series of events they participated in is called the schema (Hawkins). The schema may be something as simple as eating when they are hungry, or getting toothpaste when they run out. A product's brand image is the schema as it relates to a particular brand (Hawkins). When the consumer goes to get toothpaste they have a wide selection, and the brand image of one kind may appeal more to the consumer than others because they have gotten it before and enjoyed it. With online stores it's very important that the brand image of their store is positive. While every store wants to have a good brand image, it's particularly simple for a consumer to dislike a web page when it first loads and choose someone else in a single click. Online stores have to be very user friendly and assure consumers of the safety of buying from them.

The store's target market, the section of consumers that sellers focus their efforts on, is chosen by demographics and psychographics. Demographics include a consumer's physical details; their age, gender, income, education, occupation, and geographic location (Hawkins). Online stores may only want to target younger people who are on computers often, which would require them to look at demographics of young adult ages in geographic locations with internet who make enough money to shop at their store. Psychographics look at consumer's lifestyles; their interests, attitudes, values, activities, and usage rates. While the demographics selected a group of people to advertise to, the psychographics could be used to determine what type of advertisement would appeal to their target market. Their target group of consumers may be very active in outdoor sports and not on the internet often. Using the psychographics and demographics, the online store knows it needs to make an ad that is active and sporty and place it on e-mail and news websites, the places that someone not online much goes to check.

Online advertisements, usually banner ads horizontally placed at the top of a web page, have to be very specific to catch a consumer's attention. Many ads try to be flashy and include games and sound. Unfortunately ads that are too over the top tend to annoy people who were just trying to quietly check their email. There may be many ads on one web page, all competing for the consumer's attention at the same time. Ads too plain may get lost in the crowd; specific demographics and psychographics are very important for online ads for this reason. Advertisers may want to use emotional ads, ads designed to produce a positive response rather than to provide information (Hawkins). While these ads may not tell much about the product they are more likely to catch a consumer's attention. The beauty of the internet is that consumers can actually click on the advertisement and be taken to the product's website. The website can provide all the information they need and the advertisement needs only to be used as a way to get consumer's there.

Reviews of products and stores can be found all over the internet. There are many journals on the internet that are called blogs where people can keep a "running dialogue" about anything (Hawkins) and are often used to review products and give opinions. These opinions are held in high regard by frequent internet users, and their rapid pass along of information is called viral marketing (Hawkins). Online retailers can focus their efforts on blogs recommending their store. As users hear about a good store with nice features the word spreads quickly and consumers flock to see what the store has to offer them. The online store itself can also have a blog that can be used to update consumers about products and special promotions, such as a customer loyalty program (Hawkins), which provides incentive for consumers to come back to their store by offering discounts and rewards. The blog helps relate consumers to the company and make the use of the store personal, which is hard to achieve when there is no physical store or real people.

Consumers generally start to shop when they way they feel is not the way they want to feel, and they look to new products or services as an answer. This is called their desired state, the way they want to feel at the present time (Hawkins). People often identify themselves based on what they have. This is called the extended self, "the self plus possessions," (Hawkins). Online stores offer a quick fix for consumers to achieve their desired state and expand their extended self. A busy mother with a sleeping baby is running low on diapers. She can't go to the store and when the baby wakes she'll have other things to do. Her desired state is to get all her errands done and relax. Online retailers are perfect for her because she can go to a website, purchase diapers, and with fast delivery they will be delivered to her doorstep, allowing her to achieve her desired state and relax. Mothers also tend to feel less beautiful after their pregnancy, and she may want to feel pretty again with a new dress. She doesn't have time to shop at the mall, and she has no nice dresses at home. She desires to feel beautiful again and she defines that by owning a beautiful dress. She can achieve her desired state and her extended self's need for a new dress by going to an online department store. As long as she knows her measurements and has a credit card she can easily get the dress of her choice tailor made for her and delivered in a week.

To review, there are many concerns consumers have about buying things online. An online retailer needs to assure consumers of the safety of their store. There is a lot of competition for consumer's attention and ads need to be specific to the target market. They don't need to be particularly informative because they link directly to the store's website, but they store they link to does need to be attractive because online consumer's attention is easily shifted. Blogs have much power over consumer's opinions and can be used for the benefit of the company if they create their own and offer consumer promotions. Online stores are the easiest way for consumers to achieve their desired state. A great online store can function independently from a physical store as long as the online retailer can use the various opportunities the internet presents.
Works Cited

Hawkins, Mothersbaugh, Best. “Consumer Behavior: Building Market Strategy, 10th Edition.” McGraw-Hill Irwin, New York, New York. Copyright, 2007.


Review of definitions used:

Chapter 1, 18. Target market - that segment of the larger market on which we will focus our marketing effort.

Chapter 2, 66. Demographics - they describe a population in terms of its size, structure, and distribution. Size is number of individuals in the society; structure is age, income, education, and occupation; distribution is physical location of individuals in terms of geographic location in rural, suburban, and urban.

Chapter 7, 249. Blogs - personalized journals where people or organizations can keep a running dialogue. Viral marketing - an online "pass it along" strategy.

Chapter 9, 346. Brand image - schematic memory of a brand. Schema, page 325, the memory of a sequence of events in which a person participated.

Chapter 11, 419. Emotional ads - designed primarily to elicit a positive effective response rather than provide information or arguments.

Chapter 12, 442 and 436. Psychographics - quantitative measures of lifestyle; attitudes, values, activities and interests, demographics, media patterns, and usage rates. Extended self - the self plus possessions.

Chapter 14, 514. Desired state - the way an individual wants to feel or be at the present time.

Chapter 15, 542. Bots - software robots that do the shopping/searching for users.

Chapter 17, 603. Online privacy concerns - consumer fears regarding how personal information about them that is gathered online might be used.

Chapter 18, 661. Customer Loyalty Programs - focuses on repeat purchases by providing incentives.

Final Project for Ancient World History class. A Greek woman looking upon a list of fallen soldiers.

I believe that humans have authority over animals to do as we please, but that animals deserve humane treatment. Humane treatment is here defined as showing compassion and, in terms of killing animals for food or other goods, a method of killing that inflicts the minimum amount of pain. The case society ponders today is whether animals have the same moral rights as humans or not. Gary Francione argues that the answer is simple, animals should not be treated as human property. How then, are we supposed to treat animals? As equals, as friends, as just another presence on the earth? It is my believe that animals are our responsibility and humans should take that responsibility as seriously and carefully as all others. Before providing a personally held solution to the issue of animal morality I would like to examine two possible arguments to the treatment of animals; animals have the same rights as humans, and animals have no moral rights.

Francione marks a parallel between the treatment of animals today to the treatment of American slaves in the past. He states "Like these inanimate forms of property, animals have only the value that we choose to give them." Slavery in American history focused on the belief that black men and women were not fully human, therefore they were only worth a little bit and could be bought and sold. Francione stating that animals are treated as property is very true, however I believe it's an unfair comparison. Slaves were humans, saying that they were not was simply a way to excuse bad behavior and treatment. Animals, however, are not biologically human and that will not change. Lori Gruen quotes the Kant idea that "The fact that the human being can have the representation "I" raises him infinitely above all the other beings on earth." Animals cannot express a representation of themselves because of, amongst the most basic reasons, a language barrier. Humans experience language barriers every day in our own species, but we are able to overcome this barrier by learning other languages. To this day there is still no definite way to communicate between an animal and a human. As far as intelligence is concerned, animals have not made any advancements in technology or made efforts to overcome cross-species language barriers themselves. Animals have a great intelligence in their survival efforts, but humans have gone beyond survival efforts into creating an entire culture of leisure activities. How are we to say animals have the same rights as humans if animals cannot match or surpass the accomplishments of humans? Is it simply that animals live and breathe that entitles them to the same rights? I speak here about basic human rights Americans uphold: life, liberty, and in this case, the right to refuse to be owned, used, and eaten. If animals are given these rights we are faced with it being morally unacceptable to have zoos, reserves, animal control groups, pets, and steak. Hunting would be outlawed and the overpopulation of deer in the Michigan forests would have to be our responsibility. If those deer run out of food and eat the flowers planted on private property wouldn't it be acceptable then for the owner to demand punishment of them? If we give the animals these rights, it then becomes the animals responsibility to act only within their rights and respect the rights of humans to have private land. If humans have to give up eating animals and then spend time making a vegetable garden and an animal comes and eats the garden then the animal is stealing. The animal did not work to make that food and did not ask permission to eat it or pay the owner. To give animals the same rights as humans assumes the animals can understand and uphold the rights and the responsibility that comes with them. Dr. Tom Regan explains that "The philosophy of animal rights demands only that logic be respected." So if we can dismiss the idea that a deer should be punished for entering private domain, logically we should expect giving animals all the same rights as humans would be unenforceable and unreasonable.

Perhaps one of the greatest arguments against animal rights is that animals do not think and feel as humans do and do not express any human-like characteristics, so they are below humans and not worth giving rights to, especially since they do no understand what rights are. Gruen researched animal characteristics versus human characteristics and found extreme similarities. "For example, many species of non-humans develop long lasting kinship ties—orangutan mothers stay with their young for eight to ten years and while they eventually part company, they continue to maintain their relationships. ... Animals that develop life-long bonds are known to suffer terribly from the death of their partners." (Gruen, 2003). Regan responded to a statement about animal rights extending to vegetables with the statement "Many animals are like us: they have a psychological welfare of their own." That is, they have a psychological presence (Regan). Animals can feel pain and that is why current treatment of animals requires killing to be humane and pets to be treated with respect. Regan argues that humans are compassionate, sympathetic creatures and that the idea of animal rights is to show sensitivity to animals that cannot otherwise take care of themselves or refuse to be experimented on. If we are already required to treat animals humanely the argument then focuses on animal experimentation for scientific purposes. Animals, as seen above, do have ties to family and experience pain. A group at Santa Clara University wrote about experimentation on monkeys, "Their paralyzed limbs dangling at their sides have been useless appendages since researchers eight years ago cut their nerves in experiments. ... Experimenters plan next to surgically remove the tops of the monkey's skulls, insert electrodes to take brain measurements, and finally kill them, all as part of a research project on spinal cord injuries financed by the National Institutes of Health." How can we consider it acceptable to inflict pain on animals for the sake of research? Gruen also mentions that "The psychological complexity of the non-humans may also be significant in determining whether the experiment is morally justified." If the experiments provide breakthroughs in helping humans recover from spinal injuries does that justify the execution of otherwise healthy, intelligent animals? Animals are psychologically present and can object to the experimentation but it is up to humans to cease their activities.

If we agree that humans cannot be expected to give animals all the same rights as humans but that animals do have thoughts and feelings that require respect, what solution can assuage both arguments? Francione believes that "Recognising animal rights really means accepting that we have a duty not to treat sentient non-humans as resources." That is, breeding animals for food and killing for fur would be unethical. One possibly solution to appeal to followers of Francione's viewpoint would be to hunt for food and gather fur only from those animals. Instead of confining cows to a farm to be slaughtered, let them roam free and have hunters gather meat when it is needed. This solution would bring society back to the hunting and gathering days of the nomads who were at the mercy of the herd and had to follow their food. There would also likely be an overrunning of cows in private land and having free cows attracts the cow's predators into the private land as well. Another possible solution would be to keep everything as it is, but discontinue experimenting on animals. This seems viable, but it also means that so many good things found from research on animals would be lost and that finding a cure for cancer and diabetes and other illnesses that threaten human lives would be set back decades. Somewhere in the middle is a solution that I agree with, and that's not all rights or not rights, but some rights. Animals have the right to be treated humanely in captivity, but humans have the right to kill to eat them. Humans have the right to do experimentation using animal subjects for medicinal purposes for the treatment of life-threatening illnesses, but do not have the right to use animals to test cosmetic products or psychological situations for which there is no immediate need and a human could be used just as easily. Human have the right to keep pets, those have the right to wander the streets freely if the owner takes full responsibility for what the animal may do while out of the owner's watch.

There are many definitions for a "some rights" solution. I refer back to my statement in the beginning that "animals are our responsibility and humans should take that responsibility as seriously and carefully as all others." If we give animals some rights we are responsible for enforcing that those rights are abided. We must monitor experiments for their treatment and check farms for humane conditions. We must punish pet owners who do not feed their dog or let him walk outside. We must kill for food, not for fun. An animal may not be as intelligent as a human or be able to speak the same language, but they are able to feel emotions and interact with humans as friends and companions, and we should not take advantage of that.


Works Cited

Francione, Gary. "One right for all: we treat animals how we used to treat human slaves. What possible justification is there for that." New Scientist 188.2520 (Oct 8, 2005): 24(1). Academic OneFile. Thomson Gale. Library of Michigan. 12 Feb. 2007.

Gruen, Lori. "The Moral Status of Animals." Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University 2003. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/ Retrieved Feb 12, 2007.

Regan, Dr. Tom. "The Philosophy of Animal Rights." http://www.cultureandanimals.org/animalrights.htm Retrieved Feb 12, 2007.

Velasquez, Manuel; Andre, Claire; Shanks, Thomas, S.J.; Meyer, Michael J. Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University. "Who Counts?" Issues in Ethics, 1991. http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/whocounts.html Retrieved Feb 12, 2007.