Financing Furniture With Bad Credit
If you are suffering from a low credit rating and are hoping to get furniture financing, you may find it difficult to receive approval from traditional financial institutions such as banks. Even if you are not aware of your credit score, you may be turned away for a loan because said score was lowered without your even being aware of it. Thankfully, there are a number of alternative options for entering into a furniture finance agreement. Some of those options will be discussed below.One way of obtaining bad credit furniture, without going through the hassle of dealing with a bank, is through online furniture financing. Many types of financing are increasingly being offered online, due to the fact that Internet access is one of the easiest and most convenient ways of accomplishing tasks from the comfort of one’s home. Online furniture financing may be obtained from furniture sellers, lending agencies, or by way of a personal online loan. They are easy to apply for, and because of the popularity of this method, there are multiple lending agencies to choose from.Going about choosing a financing plan on the Internet may indeed be the most challenging part of obtaining bad credit furniture. It is extremely important to review the terms and conditions of the loan in question before entering into an agreement, and to compare several different services before settling on one.For assistance with unscrambling all of the financial jargon that you are almost guaranteed to encounter in such a search, you may wish to consult with a credit counselor. A credit counselor is an individual that helps to provide guidance for individuals that have experienced, and are suffering, due to a bad credit score. This counselor can help to advise you on the proper steps to take when looking for online financing, or may have additional helpful suggestions for how to proceed.If online financing is not the way you wish to proceed, there are additional options for finding bad credit furniture. Some simple ideas include selecting items and putting them on layaway, choosing a rent-to-own option, or going to a local payday advance agency. Of these three suggestions, by far the least costly, and perhaps most responsible option is the layaway option. By choosing to place items on layaway, you are not going beyond your available budget to obtain your desired furniture pieces, but you are still giving yourself reasonable goals for saving and reaping its rewards.
Top Business Internet Marketing Tips on Succeeding in Online Financing
Online financing had been the source of many full time workers if their income falls short in comparison to their month’s expenses. Effective as a part time job, they find it easier to stretch the limits of their income with the help of these business Internet marketing options. If you have been looking for an extra source of income, you may do well to consider the Internets helping hand.Since communication is the primary reason why many log in, you can harness this fact to gain some bucks. For example, in doing an affiliate job, you can extend your percentages for each deal by recommending the products into a wider variety of market members. You may advertise the current list of available products in your Facebook accounts, or in any other site that has prospective clients. In doing this, you can easily close a deal and eventually, receive your fair share in the money.Have you noticed that in gaining a profit in this field, you didn’t have to use some cash as capital? This is the beautiful thing on affiliate working: there is zero chances of losing money. The two probable conclusions of your efforts are just gaining profits or gaining nothing (which is obviously more acceptable than gaining a negative profit).Of course, if you want to have a more creative way of generating income, other options are available for grabs. Research on some of them and compare it to the capabilities and skills you are willing to share. In this way, you can take full advantage of your extra talents in creating cold cash.
The Evolution of Branding and Its Future As a Driver of Change Towards Sustainability
This article examines the way that brands have evolved from well constructed and manicured facades to fluid and independent values spaces, what I call ambient brands, where consumers gather to transact. It addresses the demise of traditional branding and the opportunity that new branding represents in driving transformational change towards sustainability and socially responsible business practices.Branding has been in rapidly evolving state for the last few years. For a long time, since the emergence of consumerism in the 1950′s, branding was an exercise in fantasy and fiction for the purpose of creating the greatest possible product appeal. Several iterations of change have occurred since the advent of the Internet and the emergence of a savvy, super informed and newly conscientious consumer.The fantasy factor was first to fall prey to technology in the mid 90′s. Google came along in September of 1998 and search engines and the persistent enquiries of the newly tooled consumer forced corporations to be, at least, wary of making untrue claims. To be fair, it wasn’t so much that marketers were innately dishonest but more a case of consumers not asking a lot of questions. That changed as technology fed growing consumer awareness and then this awareness pushed the use of technology in checking up on corporate behavior. This interdependent cycle of information and awareness caused the huge explosion in the debate about corporate responsibility and drove a rapid innovation in technologies that map and measure impact and create transparency and accountability around consumption. Consumers quickly got accustomed to asking questions and getting answers and their interest in and response to brands went beyond product and into process. The brand narrative changed to incorporate powerful new themes including sustainability, environmentalism, free trade and so on but corporations were still able to manage, to a large extent, the way in which they represented themselves relative to these themes.What happened next happened incredibly quickly and put a decisive end to traditional corporate brand management and the very notion of the brand itself. Social networking and viral media eclipsed the corporation’s ability to fully own and represent their identities and brands moved out of the corporate and into the consumer realm. Tools like Wikipedia skipped nimbly past ads and PR and modified the search return definitions of companies and products to what customers, and not corporations, were saying about them. People used peer reviews, blogs and amalgamated shopping sites like Amazon to get around even the most honest brand promises. Quality, design and emerging consumer values rose to replace traditional name-brand equity and status symbolism (flash) as evidenced nationwide by trendy hipsters lining up to trade in BMW’s for a Prius. An “economy” car and a famously ugly one at that.Viral social media marketing was like “word of mouth” on steroids and opened up opportunities for gutsy start-ups like Tom’s Shoes and Ethos Water, allowing them to succeed with big ideas, a social conscience and virtually no paid advertizing whatsoever. People purchasing those products were not just picking up another pair of shoes, as it were. They were buying into an idea and a set of values. The idea was social responsibility and conscientious consumption and that ultimately became a brand in itself. This was pretty revolutionary. A fluid and contextual brand not associated with any one company and with a huge community of loyal consumers and a strict code of entry. Now, instead of companies creating brands and hanging them up like so much window dressing, they had to apply for membership of newly independent, consumer defined brands with names like Green, Fair Trade and Organic. They did this by aligning themselves, or pretending to, with the values that those brands represent.So, to bring us present, brands started as highly stylized representations of things but have ultimately floated away from things all together to become shifting collections of values and expectation. Sort of virtual spaces where consumers gather to discuss, compare and transact based on their own personal values rather than loyalty to any particular company. Of course brands still represent the offerings of independent companies but they are judged in the context of larger, social and values brands. A new generation of businesses exists to gather together goods and services in the same “values family” and make it easy for consumers to find them. Concierge sites like Greenhome.com and informational tools like The Good Guide help consumers navigate the maze of green goods. Cooperatives like CSA; Community Supported Agriculture, thrive by gathering the values based offerings of multiple different small businesses and representing them as a single product that operates much like a traditional brand with a simple interface for consumers.It’s easy to see why the brand and marketing community has spent the last couple of years collectively flapping its hands and trying to get its head around these changes. Posting discussions with titles like “Is branding dead?” and “The end of the brand as we know it.” The drama kicked off around the central question; “How do we say nice things about nasty business practices when consumers keep asking pesky questions and finding better ways to get answers?” Well the answer is “You can’t but Hyper growth in awareness and technology changed that question to “What is a brand these days and who owns it?” How could companies protect their identities, influence consumers and engender loyalty in the era of user generated content and social networking.Actually the consumer products industry has been relatively quick to adapt in terms of cleaning up their act and dealing with the most immediate horrors of things like child labor and unfettered pollution. Scandals like Nike’s 2001 child labor debacle and the Exxon Valdez oil spill got everybody’s attention. Business as a whole however remains much better at cleaning brands than it is at cleaning business practices and green washing abounds. In a way though, this negative is part of the much larger positive of ever rising consumer expectations and the growing recognition that corporations and not governments are probably going to carry through the most meaningful changes in the way we consume. Frogs like Walmart and HP are turning into modern day princes of sustainability by using their incredible buying power to push change down through their supply chains to the source. Companies like BBMG and Green Order have emerged to evolve and articulate the new language that these companies need to communicate and actually commune with consumers in the shared values space I define as brand. Technology and independent monitoring continue to enhance transparency while transformation has made the leap from being defined as an expense to being framed as opportunity and even survivability for many companies.This is a complex evolution with a multitude of faces and many moving parts but I see within it, an opportunity for the marketing and branding industry to play a huge role in driving change towards sustainability. By consistently and rigorously reinforcing higher consumer expectations of reform through clear and effective messaging, the powerful, early adopters will make change an imperative for all other businesses wishing to remain competitive. The skilled wordsmiths who have excelled at making bad choices seem like good ones should be more than adept at making good choices seem like… good choices. Also, speaking from my own perspective, there is something much more exciting and rewarding about creating strategies for values based change rather than profit motive alone even if they end up being the same thing. If it sounds like I am getting carried away, and it feels a little like I am, we can go to emerging data that demonstrates that workers are more productive and less likely to leave jobs in which they experience a sense of personal satisfaction. Through a larger lens this means our economy will function better if we do a better job of communicating value through values where it exists. Communications are a key part of that equation.There is an important “get real” factor here with a clear need to shift the narrative around sustainability to make it accessible and appealing to the mainstream business community. This is another place where branding and marketing can drive change. Effective messaging can combat the perception that sustainability is expensive, impractical or political. A great deal of work is being done to prove out the business case for many types of reform. The benefits of energy savings, reduced legal liability, higher worker productivity and reduced attrition are real motivations for adoption in small and medium sized businesses that still think this is somebody else’s revolution.Reality has a way of following in the pathway of possibility. Scientific and technological development pushes towards what we believe we are capable of. The challenge for new branding is to define and articulate those possibilities and broadcast them to society as a whole. Changing expectations will change behavior and economics, it is often forgotten, is behavioral science. If branding does its work well in support of sustainability and social responsibility, some part of the rest will surely follow. In practical terms this means that every project is an opportunity for branders to communicate the benefits of membership to broader social brand to their clients. They can then demonstrate why those clients should and must authentically meet the criteria for that membership by making real, incremental yet meaningful change. Sustainability as a clearly defined part of branding methodology could do a huge amount to effect the mission and subsequent development of all companies. It’s an exciting time to be in brands.