Marketing Communications

Marketing Communications 

By: Patrick De Pelsmacker, Maggie Geuens and  Joeri Van den Bergh

The integration of the various instruments of the marketing mix is one of the major principles of sound marketing strategy. Obviously, this integration principle also applies to the various instruments of the communications mix. In fact, integrated communications have been practised by good marketing communicators for decades. Why, then, has the concept of ‘integrated marketing communications’ (IMC) in recent years developed into one of the basic new trends or buzz words in marketing communications? Is IMC really fundamentally new? Or is it an old idea which has rarely, if ever, been realised? In other words, is it something everybody agrees on which should have been activated years ago, but for all kinds of practical reasons was not? [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Investing in Microfinance

Investing in Microfinance 

By: Phillip M. Bekker

In recent decades in finance and particularly in asset allocation quantitative methods gained considerably in importance. This trend is fostered by the rising processing power of computers. The impact of those quantitative approaches on investment decisions is controversial. Irrespective of numerous exceptionally successful applications for example in portfolio theory, misleading quantitative models also inspired the securitization of debt obligations and the underestimation of risks. The blind reliance on quantitative models has turned out to be inadequate. Quantitative tools can only be as smart as the input. Even a perfect quantitative model depends on the input variables. Furthermore, the models are often also calibrated with these data. As a result, the expression “garbage in, garbage out” is common in finance. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Hot City Nights

Hot City Nights 

By: Sandra Maarton, Sarah Mayberry and Emilie Rose

CARNAVAL had ended almost two months ago, but Rio didn‟t seem to know it.  Lincoln Aldridge wasn‟t surprised. He‟d been to Rio before. The city could be an endless party, especially for a man with money, rugged good looks and connections. Linc had all three but he wasn‟t in a partying mood. He had been on the go for almost two weeks, first flying to Argentina, then Colombia, then Brazil. His business meetings had gone well, but he had a more important matter on his mind. Too much time had gone by since he‟d heard from his sister. Kathryn and her husband, married five months, were on what she‟d called a belated honeymoon, seeing the world.  New York City was part of the world, Linc had said wryly, and he damned well expected that Kath and the husband he‟d never met intended to make it part of their trip. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

George and The Virgin

George and The Virgin

By: Lisa Cach

“Hurry up, Osbert! It will be morning soon.” “Don’t rush me, Alizon. I cannot do it if you rush me.” She held his pizzle in her hand and jerked on it as he had shown her. “Why aren’t you getting hard?” “You’re not doing it right,” he whined. “I am not a cow to be milked.” “You certainly feel spongy as a cow’s teat. You’ll never get it in me if it stays like this.” “Devil take you! If I don’t, it won’t be my fault. You’re the one who doesn’t know what you’re doing. You’re the virgin.” He said it with a taunt in his voice, and she was glad of the dark of the shed, which saved her from seeing his face and being tempted to slap it. “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t a virgin and well you know it. Sheep would speak Latin before I would let you touch me.” “Be nice to me. It’s a favor I’m doing you.” She bit off the retort that came to her tongue,… [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

Freakonomics

Freakonomics 

By: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dabner

Anyone living in theUnited Statesin the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin. The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace. So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All the experts were saying so. The cause was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick government reports. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf

International Economics

International Economics 

By: Paul R. Krugman

You could say that the study of international trade and finance is where the discipline of economics as we know it began. Historians of economic thought often describe the essay “Of the balance of trade” by the Scottish philosopher David Hume as the first real exposition of an economic model. Hume published his essay in 1758, almost 20 years before his friend Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. And the debates over British trade policy in the early nineteenth century did much to convert economics from a discursive, informal field to the model-oriented subject it has been ever since. Yet the study of international economics has never been as important as it is now. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, nations are more closely linked through trade in goods and services, through flows of money, through investment in each other’s economies than ever before. [download]

Format : Ebook.Pdf