Marketing Strategy Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Marketing Strategy. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.
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Germany Kent
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Incorrect results of the market research when fed to the marketing strategy and action plans produce disastrous results.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Let’s not trust those who write in small letters, using cabalistic figures or enigmatic codes, as it frequently comes down to a manipulative strategy, orchestrated by disorientating marketers or cryptic felons, who, for that reason, often deserve to be sued for failing to provide assistance to persons in danger. (β€œThe devil is in the small letters”)
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Erik Pevernagie
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No one else knows exactly what the future holds for you, no one else knows what obstacles you've overcome to be where you are, so don't expect others to feel as passionate about your dreams as you do.
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Germany Kent
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Demand is one of those factors which decide the fate of your business.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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The purpose of data is to learn on time what is working and what is not and take any corrective actions according to that.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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A good ad is worth so much more than just a little ad spend.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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The reason that online ads are 80% of the time ignored lies in the fact that we have started forgetting creativity when creativity is as important as data.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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If you want business growth, you are going to offer the right product to the right customer
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Oscar Wilde once said, β€œWhatever is popular is wrong.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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A good marketing plan can’t be formed in just four hours. Plans are formed on extensive research.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Marketing is an investment that generally generates long term results.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Without a strategy, your social media channels just become a source of entertainment rather than lead-generation tools.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Launching a similar product still needs some kind of differentiation.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Even though marketing is one of the building blocks of a successful business, we should make sure that our marketing is effective and productive.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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An effective ad brings long-term positive residual effects for your business.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Advertising is like a stock market for your business investment.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Just like selective listening, now we have selective ad viewing.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Digital trends have made it easy to run ads for each and every business type irrespective of the business size.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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If you want to have an effective ad, you need to work on communicating your message in the most effective way. Keep it clear, concise and non-confusing.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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An advertising strategy is based on proper research which guides you in this entire process of customer acquisition with the help of ads.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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You need to be a risk-taker, but you have to also make sure that you are a calculated risk-taker.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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The moment you will stop innovating, somebody else will make your product outdated and will become the market leader.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Everything around your customers is shaping those needs and wants. We can’t stop this change from happening, but we can listen.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Do you know that most of the B2B companies are actively using social media marketing to reach more and more clients?
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Investing in things that will give you long term growth is always a good idea.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Unrealistic profit projections are not going to win you the trust of your investors.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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There is no perfect product in the world and there will never be.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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A perfect website with perfect marketing but bad financial management can fail, similarly a perfect product with a perfect website but a bad customer management strategy can fail.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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When employees are able to feel what you feel and see what you see in your idea, you won’t need anything else to motivate them, and success will become inevitable.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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A good marketing can’t overcome your poor customer strategy, but a good customer service can compensate for your poor marketing.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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What we should never forget is that customers are our businesses. Customers and businesses are not two separate entities.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Market research is not an add-on feature, it’s a necessity for business survival and business success.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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In other words, market research is the swiss knife for the survival of any business.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Market research is the process by which a business gathers and studies information related to the product or service it is providing or the market it is operating in.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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There is no alternative to market research.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Proper market research keeps you informed on what your competitors are doing, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Market research helps you understand the need of your product in the existing market and the current competition.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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The future of your business depends on what kind of decisions you are going to make.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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The process of decision-making can become efficient and effective, if the right information is handy on time.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Incorporate market research as an integral part of your business, and you’ll not just become competitive, but also profitable.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Remember market research is like warming up. It will keep you safe from unnecessary injuries.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Perfecting a product which is not selling is a waste of time and energy.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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The fear of the unknown is deadly for our personal growth as well as for the growth of our business.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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If you want to understand your customers, you have to go to them. There is nobody else who can tell you what they want
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Inaccurate market research always leads to a business wipe-out.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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The moment you will start considering market research as an ongoing process of your business, you will start uncovering so many hidden insights.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Market research not only helps you in gaining competitive advantage, but also helps you in being prepared to handle any testing business times.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Ethical marketing is the only way of marketing. By doing that, you don’t disguise the faults of your products, but instead you try to fix them. When you do that, the results are long-lasting.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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While Uber was more a business-like limo car sharing, Lyft was more casual. Though with time, that distinction has become less prominent, but this definitely helped them in the starting stage.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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If you are trying to open a restaurant in a place where the majority of people are the practitioners of Judaism faith, then you cannot make a non-Kosher restaurant and still hope to gain popularity.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself
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Germany Kent
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Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.
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Germany Kent (You Are What You Tweet: Harness the Power of Twitter to Create a Happier, Healthier Life)
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If you want to retain your customers, attract more customers, and don’t want to unnecessarily spend your budget in marketing campaigns which will fail because of your increasing number of dissatisfied customers, start working on your customer service strategy right now.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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The internet and online communication is the window into your world - but real life, in person communication / connection is the door.
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Rasheed Ogunlaru
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Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.
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Don DeLillo (Underworld)
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Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.
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Germany Kent
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Internet articles can be used to give direction to your research, but the real research will start after that. You can read The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, Economic Times, or Entrepreneur as much as you want but these still can’t replace market research.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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What you post online speaks VOLUME about who you really are. POST with intention. REPOST with caution.
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Germany Kent
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SeaWorld’s corporate marketing strategy turned the orcas into the pandas of the sea, commercial and cuddly, with little hint of the complexities of killer whales and the effects of confinement on them.
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John Hargrove (Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish)
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Surround yourself with like-minded people who support you on the road to success.
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Shirley George Frazier (Marketing Strategies for the Home-Based Business: Solutions You Can Use Today)
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Your market research objectives need to fit into your marketing strategy. If your objectives are not supporting your marketing strategy, then it’s going to be a waste of your resources.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
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The worship to which we are called in our renewed state is far too important to be left to personal preferences, to whims, or to marketing strategies. It is the pleasing of God that is at the heart of worship. Therefore, our worship must be informed at every point by the Word of God as we seek God’s own instructions for worship that is pleasing to Him.
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R.C. Sproul (A Taste of Heaven: Worship in the Light of Eternity)
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The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or β€œincentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Don't promote negativity online and expect people to treat you with positivity in person.
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Germany Kent
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I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles. This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God. ...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.
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Shane Claiborne (The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical)
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Great ideas don’t die in the market, they die in the shower. People are too scared to pursue them because they appear crazy.
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Kaihan Krippendorff
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Be creative while inventing ideas, but be disciplined while implementing them.
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Amit Kalantri
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If you're promoting anything, say something.
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Rob Liano
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It's funny how after all those years attending youth events with light shows and bands, after all the contemporary Christian music and contemporary Christian books, after all the updated technology and dynamic speakers and missional enterprises and relevant marketing strategies designed to make Christianity cool, all I wanted from the church when I was ready to give it up was a quiet sanctuary and some candles. All I wanted was a safe place to be. Like so many, I was in search of sanctuary.
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Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church)
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Lo pitched Superheroes & Scones to his father as a marketing strategy for Halway Comics. But I know the idea has nothing to do with his company. What he did was buy me something of my own, something I could look forward to after college. He found me happiness…
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Krista Ritchie (Addicted for Now (Addicted #3))
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Location matters when it comes to business. Whether its physically or virtually or both, its important to have a presence where your clientele are present. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business figure this out, and to provide holistic solutions.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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Something foreign is always living itself through you. Your whole life is the vehicle for something to come to earth An evil spirit. A theory. A marketing campaign. A political strategy. A religious doctrine.
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Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)
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Focus on innovating at value, not positioning against competitors
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W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
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stop looking to the competition. Value-innovate and let the competition worry about you.
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W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
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In business, its very important to do consistent market research. It's very important to understand your customers and potential customers. The more you understand them, the better you'll be able to add value to their lives, and the more they'll pay for that value. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business thrive in this way.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
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In today's consumer-driven economy, a strong marketing strategy is essential for success. Board members with marketing expertise can provide valuable insights into consumer behavior, brand positioning, and digital marketing strategies. This is especially crucial for companies in consumer goods, retail, and technology sectors.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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If we all work together there is no telling how we can change the world through the impact of promoting positivity online.
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Germany Kent
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The strategy of putting all your eggs in one basket and watching that basket is less risky than you might think.
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Joel Greenblatt (You Can Be a Stock Market Genius: Uncover the Secret Hiding Places of Stock Market Profits)
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The modern job market is like a game of musical chairs. You need to be the one with a chair when the music stops, or you're out of luck.
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Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
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A market research project starts when you have the answers to the following questions: 1. Why are you researching? 2. What are you going to do with the results?
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
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Having an objective for any project is highly important as we are living in a world full of dataβ€”some useful but mostly useless.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
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For identifying the objective of your market research project, it is highly advisable that you should zero in on the exact information you want to collect and from who.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
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If you are going to use the results of market research to make a big business decision, then it’s a good idea to do quantitative research rather than qualitative.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
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The more numbers you know through market research, the more you will be able to cut down your business risk.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
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The biggest advice I can give for setting up your market research objectives is to be very clear and concise.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
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One market research project should have only one objective. More than one objective can affect the effectiveness of your research.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
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To save ourselves from getting lost in this sea of data and ending up directionless, it becomes vital for every business owner to not just set up their market research objectives but also to stick to those.
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Pooja Agnihotri (Market Research Like a Pro)
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Why I am Passionate and Dedicated 1000% to producing and bringing my books Loving Summer, Bitter Frost, and other book series to the Screen is because these are the very books that I was cyber-bullied on. When confronted by bullies, you don't shy away, but you Fight Back. Many people have not read the books, but believe fake news and damaging slanders against them and me as a person because it was a marketing strategy used to sell my books' rival books. By bringing these very books to the screen, people can see how different my books are to theirs. Also, most of all, it is pretty darn fun and fierce for me, as a female Asian writer, director, and producer to bring these fan favorite books to screen.
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Kailin Gow (Loving Summer (Loving Summer, #1))
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While good strategy content is based on a compelling value proposition for buyers with a robust profit proposition for the organization, sustainable strategy execution is based largely on a motivating-people proposition.
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W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
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So I disagree with the followers of Marx and and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space. Value innovation places equal emphasis on value.
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W. Chan Kim
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Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.
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Ursula K. Le Guin
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Ultimately, incentive structures and systems drive ESG investing, which can be disingenuous. Structurally, public market investors continue to focus on the incentives which maximize their financial returns, even while taking certain ESG inputs into account in their portfolio allocations. Only by regulating and incentivizing the actual outcomes might investors alter their investment strategies towards new rewards based on ESG outputs.
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Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
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Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketingβ€”marketing for power. It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making onesβ€”so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayersβ€”so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumersβ€”so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panickingβ€”so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).
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Toni Morrison (The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations)
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Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction. In reaction to a war that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism, and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lost the courts and wait for a White House scandal. And increasingly we feel the need to match the Republican right in stridency and hardball tactics. The accepted wisdom that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists these days goes like this: The Republican Party has been able to consistently win elections not by expanding its base but by vilifying Democrats, driving wedges into the electorate, energizing its right wing, and disciplining those who stray from the party line. If the Democrats ever want to get back into power, then they will have to take up the same approach. ...Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we're in. I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country. It's what keeps us locked in "either/or" thinking: the notion that we can have only big government or no government; the assumption that we must either tolerate forty-six million without health insurance or embrace "socialized medicine". It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off of politics.
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Barack Obama (The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream)
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People hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: β€œI will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to β€œjust happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will. People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategiesβ€”despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life. We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually. Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate).Β 
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Malcolm Collins
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Six Telltale Signs of a Winning Strategy 1) An activity system that looks different from any competitor's system. It means you are tempting to deliver value in a distinctive way. 2) Customers who absolutely adore you, and noncustomers who can't see why anybody would buy from you. This means you have been choiceful. 3) Competitors who make a good profit doing what they are doing. It means your strategy has left where-to-play and how-to-win choices for competitors, who don't need to attack the heart of your market to survive. 4) More resources to spend on an ongoing basis than competitors have. This means you are winning the value equation and have the biggest margin between price and costs and best capacity to add spending to take advantage of an opportunity to defend your turf. 5) Competitors who attack one another, not you. It means that you look like the hardest target in the (broadly defined) industry to attack. 6) Customers who look first to you for innovations, new products, and service enhancement to make their lives better. This means that your customers believe that you are uniquely positioned to create value for them.
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A.G. Lafley (Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works)
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But humans have a built-in weakness for fats and sugar. We evolved in lean environments where it was a big plus for survival to gorge on calorie-dense foods whenever we found them. Whether or not they understand the biology, food marketers know the weakness and have exploited it without mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgement of the genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed nor wished to consume them. Children have been targeted especially; food companies spend over $10 billion a year selling food brands to kids, and it isn't broccoli they're pushing. Overweight children are a demographic in many ways similar to minors addicted to cigarettes, with one notable exception: their parents are usually their suppliers. We all subsidize the cheap calories with our tax dollars, the strategists make fortunes, and the overweight consumers get blamed for the violation. The perfect crime.
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Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)
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Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or the government. Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators. Hope does not mean that the nation’s ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope. Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope does not believe in force. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all. Hope sees in our enemy our own face. Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what our corporate overlords are determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think. No. Above all do not think. Obey. The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. Those addicted to power, blinded by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. I cannot promise you fine weather or an easy time. I cannot pretend that being handcuffed is pleasant. If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.
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Chris Hedges