How To Decide On A College Major

You will find plenty of articles published all over the internet that talk about how to decide on a college major.  Most of those articles will tell you to ask questions about yourself and your skills.  They will tell you to ask questions about what you really hate to do so that you make sure you don’t accidentally end up doing something like that.  Those are all good tips that you should consider.  I have one more for you though.

I recommend you choose whatever comes naturally and easy to you once you have studied for about a year in college.  If you can get away with it, I suggest that you put off declaring your major until you absolutely have to.    Some schools will let you choose general studies for the first two years.  That is your chance to enroll in a bunch of different classes that catch your interest.  There is a really good chance that after taking some of these classes, you may change your mind about what you  really want to pursue.

The unfortunate thing about college is that when you attend right out of high school like you should, you are a little wet behind the ears yet in terms of knowing what you want to do with your life.  You have so many things you need to experience in life that will shape who you are and who you want to become.  If you enroll in that engineering program just because you are good in math and science, you might discover after year three that you aren’t into this material as much as you thought you would be.  You then realize that you decided to study this because the jobs pay well and not because it is something you really want to do.

Usually by your second year in college, you will start having very strong feelings toward a particular subject.  I was one of those engineering kids who changed over to computer science.  After I had changed to computer science, I was thinking that maybe I should have chosen economics instead.  I find the concepts in both basic and advanced economics very interesting and very easy to comprehend.  I never would have thought that I would be so interested in such a thing had I not taken my first economics 101 class as an elective.

College is an exceptionally eye opening experience.  You will meet so many new friends and see things from so many different perspectives it is almost impossible not to have some impact on you.  During this part of your life, you are sorting out who you are and who you really want to become.   Don’t rush into spending tens of thousands of borrowed dollars by enrolling in a curriculum that you end up hating.  Take general studies until your path becomes obvious or until the university forces you to make a final decision.

 

Do You Really Know What Your Customers Want?

Marketing your business can either be really challenging or really easy.  The deciding factor is how much you truly understand about your customer.  Do you really truly understand him or her?  You probably think you do, but I bet you don’t.  Even if you think you understand him right now, I bet after a little while spent thinking about it, you will agree that there is more to know.

We spend so much time telling stories about our company’s products and services.  Yet, we don’t spend nearly enough time figuring out exactly who we should be selling them to.  If we knew every last detail about the customer, it would become completely obvious how to sell to them.

We need to know the following things:

1)      Why is that person really buying our product or service now?  Are they buying the car because they need transportation or are they buying it because it gives them status?  Do they want a brand new car because it is reliable or because they want their coworkers to envy them?  What really makes them tick?

2)      What keeps your customer up at night?  What do they worry about?  What are their greatest fears?  What makes them angry?

3)      How can you position your product or service to address those fears?

4)      What pictures has your customer conjured up in his own head already about things going wrong for him?  What words or phrases can you use to remind him of those awful pictures he has already imagined in his head?  What keywords will trigger those pictures?

5)      What keywords will cause him to conjure a picture in his mind’s eye of you completely satisfying this situation?

6)      What doubts will enter his thought process at every stage of the imaginary movie in his head?  How can you pain the picture for him so that he sees everything happening smoothly without a hitch?

Figure these things out about your product or service and it will sell itself.  You will have customers beating your doors down to get a hold of that product.  Great products sell themselves because the company has properly identified the benefit it provides.  Then that company has made people aware of that benefit.  This is marketing in a nutshell.

When you truly figure out your customer, the rest will take care of itself.  The approach you should take with your marketing and advertising will become quite obvious.  If there is any lack of clarity as to what you should do, then you have not spent enough time or resources really getting to know what is motivating your customers to buy.

 
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