Marketing Essentials 2012Chapter 3:
Political and Economic AnalysiseMarketing FeatureOnline Government
Online government refers to all the websites available in federal, state, and local governments. All prominent agencies in the federal government have Web sites. If you do a search you can recognize a government Web site by its address, which ends in .gov. You can access an enormous amount of useful information regarding laws, rulings, and the economy from government sources. As a case in point, a new CARD Act legislation has had an impact on stores that sell gift cards. There are new regulations regarding fees and expiration dates. Businesses that offer general purpose reloadable prepaid cards (i.e. from Visa® or MasterCard®) are not included in that legislation, so they are targeting gift card customers; especially parents of teens. Parents also like the idea of a prepaid card for use in an emergency and as a replacement for carrying money. Innovate and Create
Have students select a government web site that has information of interest to a business owner. Have students work in groups to select pertinent information to target customers with a new ad message that would be beneficial to a specific business.  | 
