Sales Pitch Research Articles

Repurposing FDA-approved drugs to treat chemical weapon toxicities: Interactive case studies for trainees.

The risk of a terrorist attack in the United States has created challenges on how to effectively treat toxicities that result from exposure to chemical weapons. To address this concern, the United States has organized a trans-agency initiative across academia, government, and industry to identify drugs to treat tissue injury resulting from exposure to chemical threat agents. We sought to develop and evaluate an interactive educational session that provides hands-on instruction on how to repurpose FDA-approved drugs as therapeutics to treat toxicity from exposure to chemical weapons. As part of the Rutgers Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program, 23 undergraduate students participated in a 2-h session that included: (1) an overview of chemical weapon toxicities, (2) a primer on pharmacology principles, and (3) an interactive session where groups of students were provided lists of FDA-approved drugs to evaluate potential mechanisms of action and suitability as countermeasures for four chemical weapon case scenarios. The interactive session culminated in a competition for the best grant "sales pitch." From this interactive training, students improved their understanding of (1) the ability of chemical weapons to cause long-term toxicities, (2) impact of route of administration and exposure scenario on drug efficacy, and (3) re-purposing FDA-approved drugs to treat disease from chemical weapon exposure. These findings demonstrated that an interactive training exercise can provide students with new insights into drug development for chemical threat agent toxicities.

Toward a multimodal pragmatics analysis of ambulant vending on a Buenos Aires trainline

This article examines the occupational practices of four ambulant vendors (AVs) over a 20-day period, as they board, occupy, and alight trains to make a living in the popular economy. It captures for the first time some of the multimodal communicative practices they deploy to present an engaging sales pitch, attempt to convert passengers into prospects and sustain their livelihoods on the move. A multimodal pragmatics analysis of their sales pitch as video-recorded by the AVs reveals three clear stages marked by body motion in alignment with other bodily and verbal activities to capture the audience as they zero in on the product attributes. The article highlights the dexterity and professionalism of these workers in combining different modalities to augment their presence and chances of securing sales as they navigate the challenges of the unequal working conditions they inhabit as captured from a novel first-person perspective.

The Credit Suisse CoCo wipeout: Facts, misperceptions, and lessons for financial regulation

The Credit Suisse CoCo wipeout: Facts, misperceptions, and lessons for financial regulation

VISHIEN-MAAT: Scrollytelling visualization design for explaining Siamese Neural Network concept to non-technical users

The past decade has witnessed rapid progress in AI research since the breakthrough in deep learning. AI technology has been applied in almost every field; therefore, technical and non-technical end-users must understand these technologies to exploit them. However existing materials are designed for experts, but non-technical users need appealing materials that deliver complex ideas in easy-to-follow steps. One notable tool that fits such a profile is scrollytelling, an approach to storytelling that provides readers with a natural and rich experience at the reader’s pace, along with in-depth interactive explanations of complex concepts. Hence, this work proposes a novel visualization design for creating a scrollytelling that can effectively explain an AI concept to non-technical users. As a demonstration of our design, we created a scrollytelling to explain the Siamese Neural Network for the visual similarity matching problem. Our approach helps create a visualization valuable for a short-timeline situation like a sales pitch. The results show that the visualization based on our novel design helps improve non-technical users’ perception and machine learning concept knowledge acquisition compared to traditional materials like online articles.

The Cruel Optimism of Anthropocene Technologies: Suspicion and Fascination of Technology in Okja, What Happened to Monday, and Geostorm

The Cruel Optimism of Anthropocene Technologies: Suspicion and Fascination of Technology in <i>Okja</i>, <i>What Happened to Monday</i>, and <i>Geostorm</i>

The United States of Medievalism

The United States of Medievalism

Research on Rhetorical Devices in German: The Use of Rhetorical Questions in Sales Presentations

Previous literature recommends using stylistic (or rhetorical) devices in presentations such as rhetorical questions (RQs: Does anyone want bad teeth?) to make them more professional, to appear more charismatic, and to convince an audience. However, in oral presentations, it is not only the what that matters in using stylistic devices like RQs, but also the how, i.e., the RQs’ prosodic realization. To date, however, virtually no handbook on the way of giving a good presentation scrutinizes this prosodic how. Therefore, our investigation focuses on the prosodic realization of German RQs in sales pitches. Specifically, we carry out a perception experiment in which 72 listeners rated both the sales pitch and its speaker based on presentations that contained questions that were lexically biased towards a rhetorical interpretation. They were realized with either the prosody of RQs or information-seeking questions (ISQs: What time is it?). An additional baseline condition was constituted by regular declarative statements with the corresponding prosody. More precisely, we investigate whether particular identified prosodic realizations—previously found for German RQs and ISQs—meet the listeners’ expectation in the context of a presentation situation. We found that listeners prefer lexically marked RQs that are produced with a prosody that is characteristic of German ISQs. We therefore suggest that handbooks should provide their readers not only with clear definitions of RQs as a stylistic device in presentations (i.e., the what), but also with the respective prosodic realization (i.e., the how) to make them a properly implemented stylistic device.

Legal Ridicule in the Age of Advertisement: Puffery, Quackery, and the Mass Market

Abstract This article examines the origins of the doctrine of puffery in Britain, in the first decades of its development during the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. The doctrine is a curious legal construct. Usually invoked as a defence, it identifies futile speech, typically of a seller, which does not give rise to liability. It operated, as it still does, in several fields of law. The analysis is not a traditional doctrinal one but rather a cultural legal study, which places the doctrine within the history of mass advertising, with two interrelated goals. First, following a review of developments based on primary sources, required given the scant literature on puffery, this article proposes a new interpretation of the doctrine as a legal mode of ridicule. While traditionally viewed as an instance of caveat emptor that supported commerce, the doctrine also involved a legal inferiorization of advertisements - taken as the paradigmatic instance of the sales pitch. Second, this article explores the interrelations between the history of law and the history of advertising, and demonstrates its productive potential for legal analysis with cases concerned with quack medicines. In the process, it offers a new reading of Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball and other cases. In conclusion, this article suggests that ridicule was a refusal to acknowledge the power of advertising and particularly its appeals to consumers’ imagination rather than reason, even as advertising was given legal licence.

The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most

The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most

How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America by Heather Cox Richardson

Reviewed by: How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America by Heather Cox Richardson Deborah M. Liles How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. By Heather Cox Richardson. ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 272. Illustrations, notes, index.) Heather Cox Richardson's skill with connecting events into a cohesive narrative is on full display in this brilliant study. Beginning with English devotion to hierarchies and the reasons for English migration to North America, she dismantles the concept of equality guaranteed in the Constitution, connects western ideology with that of the Old South, and demonstrates how oligarchs and those who supported them established restrictions within society to retain their power. Opening with a quotation from Senator Barry Goldwater's speech to the Republican National Convention in 1964, that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue" (xiii), Richardson untwines the fabric of the American promise. She stresses the paradox of maintaining inequality at all costs so that a minority can retain its power while the majority, namely women and people of color who are deemed less worthy, are denied the benefits of social welfare programs, which are often considered a redistribution of wealth. The brilliance of this book lies in the clarity with which Richardson connects the founders, Confederates, and modern movement conservatives to the underlying strife that has always been the largest threat to the American experiment. Examining the inherent contradiction of slaveholders touting the equality of men and continuing perceptions of Reconstruction, the New Deal, and Eisenhower's Middle Way, for example, as socialism, she convincingly demonstrates how the invocation of "rugged individualism," associated with success for hard-working Americans, is nothing but a sales pitch used by the powerful to justify the redistribution of wealth to themselves while decrying social welfare for the poor. Richardson cites primary and secondary sources pertaining to all regions and phases of American development, including a vast array of official records, journal and newspaper articles, and her own extensive publications to create How the South Won the Civil War. This book speaks to the heart of life in the United States and should be in every private, public, and school library. Deborah M. Liles Tarleton State University Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Herding Among Retail Shoppers: the Case of Television Shopping Network

Herding behavior refers to the behavior of individuals behaving similarly as a group without directions to coordinate. Herding can demonstrate rational characteristics. When consumers believe that others may have private information about a product, they infer unobserved information through other people’s behaviors, thereby engaging in similar actions themselves. While rational herding behavior has been found mostly in high involvement environments such as the financial markets, this paper provides evidence that such behavior may also occur in a comparatively lower involvement environment such as retailing. To demonstrate herding behavior and test shoppers’ rationality in such, the authors employ a unique dataset from a major TV shopping channel. In this setting, information about other buyers’ purchase decisions is only sometimes observed by shoppers. Evidence suggests that herding happens among shoppers and the herding behavior appears to exhibit rationality. The authors find that herding effects (1) are stronger when relative price discount is smaller, (2) are more prominent for a product category with less digitalizable attributes, and (3) appear to happen mainly in the earlier part of a sales pitch when shoppers have less information about a product and are more uncertain about their product valuation.

Need-Based Sales Pitch: Insights from an Experiment

In brick-and-mortar retailing, sales personnel play the most important and complex rolewhereby they are the ones who are connected to consumers directly on a real-time basis. It isobserved that the majority of brick-and-mortar retailers in India assume; consumers who walkinto their stores have a clear understanding about their needs and based on their needs theyenquire sales personnel in the store about a specific product/category/brand. Such a significantassumption has created a predisposition and mindset in sales personnel, and they believe thatthey are left with very little room for adding any more products into consumers basket by theway of either cross-selling or up-selling. In this research, we have attempted to design a newneed-based sales pitch technique and applied the same through an experiment to evaluate thechange in (a) sales person’s attitude towards consumer orientation, (b) types ofproducts/categories/brands being sold, and (c) overall store profitability.

Need-Based Sales Pitch: Insights from an Experiment

In brick-and-mortar retailing, sales personnel play the most important and complex rolewhereby they are the ones who are connected to consumers directly on a real-time basis. It isobserved that the majority of brick-and-mortar retailers in India assume; consumers who walkinto their stores have a clear understanding about their needs and based on their needs theyenquire sales personnel in the store about a specific product/category/brand. Such a significantassumption has created a predisposition and mindset in sales personnel, and they believe thatthey are left with very little room for adding any more products into consumers basket by theway of either cross-selling or up-selling. In this research, we have attempted to design a newneed-based sales pitch technique and applied the same through an experiment to evaluate thechange in (a) sales person’s attitude towards consumer orientation, (b) types ofproducts/categories/brands being sold, and (c) overall store profitability

Mastering Your Sales Pitch: Selling Mastery Grading to Your Students and Yourself

When contemplating the introduction of mastery grading into the classroom, a fear of student resistance can prevent the implementation entirely. However, by taking a proactive stance against student resistance, instructors can give mastery grading the best chance of being successful. This paper focuses on the ways in which the instructor can properly motivate students and themselves in the mastery grading process. By motivating mastery grading, student resistance to the technique will hopefully be lessened and the result will be a positive mastery grading experience for both the instructor and students.

Sales Personnel Training – An Integrated Framework for Indian Brick-and-Mortar Retailers ?

In brick-and-mortar retailing, sales personnel play the most important and complex role whereby they are the ones who are connected to consumers directly on a real-time basis. Besides, to this complexity retailers in India find it difficult to recruit well-trained sales personnel who is an all-rounder. It is observed that majority of bricks-and-mortar retailers in India assume: a) sales personnel in the store are required to assist consumers in finding the right product at the earliest; b) consumers who walk into their stores have a clear understanding of their needs and based on their needs they enquire sales personnel in the store about a specific product/category/brand; c) sales personnel attrition rate in stores is generally higher owing to lower pay scale; d) product-specific training has to be given the highest priority; e) designing a common training program relevant to all types of sales personnel is difficult, and most importantly f) existing training efforts have not yielded in any significant positive impact on the store profitability. Such assumptions and misconceptions have created a predisposition and mindset in sales personnel and sales organization, and they believe that they are delivering the best results. In this exhaustive study, we have attempted to design a new sales personnel training framework that attempts to integrate a majority of the elements such as training content, trainee, trainer, training time frame in addition to firm-level and consumer-level evaluation techniques. In this twelve months-long research work we have analyzed a select brick-and-mortar retailer’s existing training framework, designed a new integrated sales personnel training framework, applied it to a select group of experimental stores to derive insights from the experimentation and check validity and reliability of the proposed framework. Results have demonstrated that more than 35 percent of the consumers repeat store visit rate could be determined by a) store profitability that is a positive motivator to sales personnel to perform better; b) walk-in conversion rate that is directly affected by the sales pitch of sales personnel which is directly affected by the continuous training efforts; c) sales personnel monetary incentive earnings that are directly affected by their performance through improved learning, and d) sales personnel attrition rate that is a result of overall satisfaction of sales personnel.

Introduction to the Specific Aims Page of a Grant Proposal.

Grant writing starts with crafting an effective specific aims page. This page should be a succinct combination of sales pitch and science. The specific aims page demonstrates a problem and a gap in current knowledge and suggests a solution. It proposes aims that work toward a defended solution and reveal the impact of the proposal on the problem, the field, and future research. The language must be efficient and persuasive; the presentation must drive a reviewer to support the proposal. Here we present a recipe for an effective specific aims page.

My Struggle: Book Six by Karl Ove Knausgaard

MISCELLANEOUS Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle: Book Six Trans. Don Bartlett & Martin Aitken. New York. Archipelago. 2018. 1,264 pages. Karl Ove Knausgaard has been crowned “the ideal writer of the present moment.” His six-part novel, My Struggle, sold half a million copies in Norway, about one for every ten citizens. Some workplaces had to designate “Knausgaard-free days” because their employees wouldn’t stop talking about him. But more than the Proustian quality of his writing, it was the media coverage surrounding the books that fueled Knausgaard mania. Newspapers asked ethical questions about the novel’s impact on others. His uncle Gunnar sued for libel and defamation. The very title of the novel Lilia M. Schwarcz & Heloisa M. Starling Brazil: A Biography Farrar, Straus and Giroux Translated from Portuguese, this biography of a nation spans five hundred years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics. Covering economics, popular culture, and anthropological and historical scholarship, Brazil follows the political and cultural developments that have left a legacy still tangible today. A thorough and engaging read, this work is packed full of insightful accounts. Lutz Seiler Kruso Trans. Tess Lewis Scribe Lutz Seiler, winner of the English PEN Award and German Book Prize, brings a tumultuous debut novel to an English-speaking audience. Set on a bohemian Baltic coastal island, this novel of a cult of personality during the last days of the Soviet occupation of the GDR grips readers just as Kruso ’s charisma grips our protagonist. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 89 is a provocation: My Struggle, or Min Kamp in Norwegian, elicits Mein Kampf. But to Knausgaard, the more pain his books caused, the truer they became: for one to be free, one must be unsparing of others’ feelings and privacy. His “experiment” was to put that dynamic on display, and it’s his own private life that he exposes most of all. He reveals how much he gets paid; how much his house cost; how many copies his books sold; and how long they took to write. Not long enough in the case of Book Three and Book Four, which he says were not as good. Book Six reveals the novel’s taboo link to Hitler and to the Utøya mass shooting , giving readers the frisson of breaking the rules of propriety. As a literary “bad boy” and admirer of Thomas Bernhard, Knausgaard says he identifies with parts of Hitler’s personality and understands the motivations behind the Utøya massacre that left dozens of children dead. The book’s confrontation with taboo subjects exerts an extraordinary pull on the reader, who is unable to look away and must see how far he will go. Nevertheless, what is perhaps most radical about reading the novel is the feeling of intimacy it creates. Through repetition, everyday domestic banalities become familiar and comforting . All is well with the world when the children come home from kindergarten and watch Bolibompa on TV while their father makes dinner and smokes cigarettes on the balcony. We are sad to say goodbye to the Knausgaards. What helps give the unwieldy 1,264page tome some pacing and lightness is the narrator’s charisma and self-deprecating sense of humor. Knausgaard’s virtuoso exposition of awkward everyday social interactions is unmatched in contemporary literature. In Book Six, he falls for a time-share sales pitch. He also botches an attempt to dispose of buckets of human waste. But what’s most affecting is his love for his family, especially his wife, Linda. It was love at first sight when he met her: “Wham. She was the one. An arrow to the heart.” She struggles with bouts of manic depression, though, which he describes as her not being her true self. Knowing the power of language, he finds the right words to use with his wife when he tells her it’s okay, “You were on your travels.” Ben Streeter George Washington University World Literature in Review 90 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 ...

Presentation skills: making the most of a sales pitch

Experienced engineer and marketer, David Brett, shares his top tips on how to succeed when presenting to a client.

Bellwood Quarry: A New Water Project with an Old Sales Pitch

Bellwood Quarry: A New Water Project with an Old Sales Pitch

The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism, and Representation by Heike Mißler

Reviewed by: The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism, and Representation by Heike Mißler Stephanie Harzewski The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism, and Representation, by Heike Mißler. New York: Routledge, 2017. 221pp. $140.00 cloth; $54.95 ebook. Despite proclamations since the first decade of the twenty-first century that chick lit and correlative media phenomenon like Sex and the City are “dead,” this market niche is going over a quarter of a century strong. Heike Mißler’s study marks a new and substantial contribution in scholarly analyses of the multimedia and cross-genre body of literary and cultural production grouped commercially under the umbrella known as “chick lit.” The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism, and Representation extends earlier investigations of chick lit formulas with a focus on “recessionista lit,” new regional subsets such as Southern chick lit, and the genre’s increase in Asian, African-American, Hispanic, and lesbian protagonists. To be sure, pre-recession era chick lit occasionally offered variation from its Bridget Jones-esque white, straight, middle-class, urban protagonist, and some texts such as Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s The Dirty Girls Social Club (2003) were international bestsellers, but such novels were standouts from the generic template. Besides thorough close readings of less canonical novels and their media reception, Mißler offers the first in-depth qualitative analysis of chick lit blogs, author websites, and online fan communities. Paying tribute to and building on the legacy of Janice A. Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984), Mißler surveys chick lit reading communities to pinpoint the appeal of the genre as well as its mixed messages: challenging the status quo more often than not to contain it or offering frustrating if not bleak disillusionment as in Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’s Citizen Girl (2004). Mißler breaks new ground in her analysis of the marketing of chick lit, especially online, as she convincingly shows that marketers invite readers to participate in a brand community, where the brands “are not so much the texts themselves or the publishing house as in the case of Harlequin/Mills&Boon, but their authors and what they and their novels represent,” with an author’s name synonymous [End Page 514] for a certain type of product (p. 58). Mißler’s reading of chick lit as well as its thriving online culture is by no means an uncritical sales pitch of new, more culturally diverse variants. The strength of her study lies in its detailed fascination with this popular fiction and in its reader-response hermeneutics, which gives its most avid readers a framework to make sense of their genre. Mißler diplomatically reveals chick lit’s limitations; it often problematizes the idea of romantic love, especially in newer texts that choose a career-focused trajectory, only to substitute it with a “notion of neoliberal love, a love at least partly chosen for its capitalist benefits,” as the “constraints of the genre usually coerce the novels back into complicity” (pp. 200, 161). While chick lit is a Bildungsroman of self-realization, the almost certain happily-ever-after ending that occurs after the protagonist accepts and integrates the source of conflict is, at the level of gender politics, a bait-and-switch. Simultaneously, this heterogeneous genre demonstrates the elasticity of the romance, offers a variant of the quest tradition, and especially more recently, presents a sociological treatment of unsettled agenda items of the feminist project, in particular the work-life balance and the negotiations of career with motherhood. Mißler’s well-researched study thoroughly acquaints those unfamiliar with the old-school chick lit formula and brings readers up to date on the genre’s development, its platform for comedic writing of distinction by women, and its intrinsic mixed messages. Her take on Plum Sykes’s Bergdorf Blondes (2004), “vintage” chick lit, is first rate in its measured assessment of the class privilege of its narrator and how it ironically circumscribes her psychologically and socially. Mißler’s study is not only “on trend” in terms of chronicling new permutations in chick lit, but I wager it...