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Marketing: Boomer Women offer opportunities
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For targeted and creative PR
By Grant Common(Sydney) Published 2007
Public relations is a key marketing tool that performs best when it is targeted at a group with a clear demographic or psychographic profile. Boomer women - especially those in their 50's - is one such market segment.
Boomer women today are different to previous generations of middle aged women. They have often worked, many are still working, and they have generally been more independent than previous generations. They have: money to spend, make most of the buying decisions, and they live longer than their husbands.
So who are the boomers? Officially the Boomer by definition was born between 1946 - 1964 (ages 43 - 61). But most marketers tend to concentrate on Boomers between the ages of 50 and 60 because their values and behaviour are much more uniform.
For women in their mid 50s, it can be a time of reawakening. With more time to spare, women in this age group are starting for focus on themselves again. Increasingly today’s 50 year old thinks of herself as being like the 35 year old of yesteryear. (1015 п.зн.)
So what are some of the characteristics that make Boomer women receptive to public relations activities?
They tend to be suspicious of advertising and 'hard sell' and very skeptical of the traditional marketing tactics employed when they were growing up in the 60's and 70's.
They often seek, and soak up, information. They often want to feel that they are doing the research and applying their life experience and knowledge in deciding what’s right for them.
Healthcare, wellbeing and personal presentation are BIG on their agenda.
They tend to want engagement with brands. 'Trend-watcher' Faith Popcorn is reported as saying that Boomer women do not buy brands so much as join them.
A survey in the US in 2005 sponsored by Merrill Lynch found that Boomers were three times more worried about developing a major illness than dying.
PR tactics that resonate well with Boomer women include:
Media placements across the whole spectrum of traditional media - especially print and television.
Use of third party endorsers and 'experts' - but ideally people with scientific qualifications or role models that they can relate to as being genuine rather than 'personalities' that so influence younger age groups.
Educational seminars, events and other activities that provide the opportunity for them to feel they are learning and making their own evaluation
Provision of information-rich sources, which again allow Boomers to make their own evaluation. Traditionally this was in print, but increasingly content-rich websites (but with?real? information not advertising and imagery) are becoming influential.
Creating on-line communities that give Boomers the chance to engage with others and share experiences.
Boomer women see themselves as 'market savvy' and 'experienced' in the ways of the marketing world. They often feel they have 'seen everything' and that gives them a feeling that they can spot something false from a long way off.
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Marketers need to be extremely careful in how they target and approach Boomer women as they are among the most suspicious of market segments - and they are easily offended. In fact they are very conscious of how they are seen by others in society as illustrated by research done by Unilever, well known for its "get Real'" campaigns.
In their research report 'Beyond Stereotypes: Rebuilding the Foundation of Beauty Beliefs' Unilever found that: 94 per cent of mature women believe society should change its attitude to ageing.
Nearly 90 per cent of mature women think the media needs to provide a more accurate representation of their age group.
Pharmaceutical marketers, and especially those who produce and sell complementary medicines (where there are fewer regulatory restrictions), have a huge potential market with Boomer women.
But equally, marketers of products as diverse as travel, home improvements and motor vehicles also need to think outside the square and begin engaging with, rather than simply selling to, boomer women. One of the prime ways to do this is through using public relations strategies, techniques and tools.
OPTICAL FIBRE GAS SENSORS
(REVIEW PAPER)
Dr J P Dakin, Optoelectronics Research Centre,
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ UK
Abstract
This review describes the evolution of optical fibre gas sensors, which are intended for the remote and passive detection of gases and vapours. Emphasis is placed on the detection of flammable gases, in general, and of methane in particular. This emphasis is to reflect the importance of explosion hazards in many industrial environments, particularly those that can arise from naturally occurring methane gas. Clearly, many of the techniques described are also relevant to detection of a wide range of other gases. This paper is an update of an earlier conference review by the same author, (ref 1), which was first published several years ago.
Introduction
The spectroscopic sensing of chemical species is not a new technique. Most analytical chemistry laboratories possess several spectrophotometers. These are used for the recognition of a wide range of chemical species from their characteristic absorption, fluorescence or Raman-scattering spectra. Optical gas sensing methods are essentially similar, but usually are more dedicated versions of such spectrometers.
The most common method is detection is that of spectral transmission analysis. This can be employed in two principal regions of the optical spectrum. The shorter region, from 250 ---> 500 nm (ie the UV ---> visible blue region) is generally used to detect absorption or emission lines which arise from electronic transitions within the atoms and molecules concerned. (The process of absorption,involves an increase in the energy of the electron, and emission a decrease.) This is a very useful region of the spectrum for sensing energetic changes that can occur within atoms or molecules of a large number of gaseous species. Unfortunately, it is far less useful for gas sensing over long lengths of optical fibres, because of the much higher attenuation of silica fibres in this spectral region.
The longer wavelength region covers the near and mid-infra-red bands of the spectrum, a region where the vibrational and rotational absorptions of materials are more significant, yet the higher absorption region of silica (that occurs in the mid-I.R) is avoided.
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In both vibrational and rotational absorption processes, the loss in photon energy contributes to the kinetic energy of the absorbing molecules, with either individual atoms being caused to vibrate relative to other atoms in the molecule (vibrational absorption) or whole molecules to rotate (rotational absorption). Typically, a vibrational absorption "line" will generally have a degree of fine structure superimposed on it, corresponding to the usually-lower-energy transitions associated with the rotational energy steps. (All these levels are of course quantised, into discrete allowed steps, according to the usual laws of quantum mechanics.)
The other forms of spectrophotometric processes briefly referred to above, viz. Raman and fluorescent types, represent forms of inelastic-scattering of light, i.e. re-emission of light at a different wavelength to that incident on the material. The Raman process represents a form of scattering in which an incident photon may gain energy from (the Anti-Stokes Raman process), or donate energy to (the Stokes Raman process) a vibrational or rotational energy level. Such processes re-emit a photon of different energy, and hence one having a different frequency or optical wavelength. The process of fluorescence involves the absorption of a photon by the electronic transition and re-emission at a later time (from a few nanoseconds to a few milliseconds later. If it takes any longer time it is then usually termed phosphorescence, rather than fluorescence). This process generally occurs via a different transition of lower energy. Thus, unless another excitation mechanism (i.e. thermal, or the co-incident arrival of another incident photon) is involved, the fluorescent energy is re-emitted, almost invariably at a longer wavelength than that of the incident photon.
Most methods used for gas sensing have been based on simple absorption, although occasionally the use of Raman mechanisms has been suggested. Also, in some cases, fluorescence has been involved, albeit somewhat indirectly, in the detection method.
The main limitation imposed by the use of optical fibres is associated with, firstly, the restrictions imposed by the fibre transmission windows, and, secondly, by the very small acceptance aperture offered by an optical fibre when compared to a conventional optical measuring instrument. The low-loss fibre transmission windows are in three main areas, for the commonly used, low-cost silica-based fibres. The first window covers the region 700nm to 900nm (typical losses between 3 and 5 dB/km), the second 1050 to 1350nm (typical losses between 0.5 and 2dB/km) and the third 1450 to 1750nm (typical losses between 0.2 and 3dB/km). In low O-H fibres, the first two windows effectively merge into one broader window, as in such types the O-H absorption peak at 950nm is extremely low.
If the O-H content could be kept even lower than at present, all these windows would merge to give a very broad low loss window extending from 700nm to 1750nm. Fortunately, however, losses over the entire range from 400nm to 2100nm remain very moderate for short distance transmission (ie. over a few tens of metres of fibre). Unfortunately, none of these windows corresponds to any region of the spectrum where gas absorption is particularly high, as electronic absorptions usually occur in the UV and violet/blue regions of the spectrum, whereas most of the strong fundamental vibrational absorptions occur in the mid infra-red, ie. at 2700 nm or longer. Thus, if it is desired to use conventional silica-based fibre, then the weaker NIR absorption lines must be used. Then the use of long-path or multi-pass absorption cells is desirable, to achieve even a moderate contrast in the measurement, and a high quality opto-electronic system is necessary to reliably detect low levels of gases.
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The other problem mentioned was the small acceptance aperture of the fibre. Although the small size of the fibre can be effectively enlarged, using a focussing lens, this results, of course, in an effective narrowing of the acceptance angle. The effective "throughput", T-P, of a step-index fibre, as defined by the approximate relation below, is unchanged:-
T-P.» A. (N.A.)2
where A is the area of the fibre core and N.A. is the numerical aperture. At the launch end of the system, the throughput, T-P, represents the ratio of the power launched (from a source of emitting area greater than the fibre core area) into fully-guided modes of the fibre, when the latter is butted against the launch end of the fibre, to the on-axis radiance of the source. The value shown above is for step-index fibres, and the throughput has only half the above value for graded index fibres. This parameter is also a useful measure of the light collected by the fibre from diffusely-scattering systems such as Raman scatterers, a large-core, high N.A., step-index fibre being generally more efficient at collecting light.
The power launched into the fibres from high-radiance LEDs is rarely above a few hundred microwatts, and the spectral radiance of incandescent filament lamps is usually at least an order of magnitude less. Thus well-designed, high-sensitivity, light-detection systems are required to produce practical sensors.
With laser sources there is no problem in achieving launch efficiencies of over 80% into multimode fibres, and the detection system constraints are eased substantially. However, laser sources can introduce so-called “modal noise”, an intensity noise arising from modal mixing. This is essentially similar to the well-known laser “speckle” effects. It occurs whenever a “speckled” intensity pattern from a fibre is incompletely captured by a subsequent fibre, coupler or detector system, giving the intensity variations whenever the fibre is gently deformed or perturbed. As gas sensing systems often operate with very low levels of absorption, even mild intensity changes of this nature can give serious noise, drift or systematic errors.
http://www.cimtecautomation.com/engineering-services/industrial-automation-engineering.htm Industrial automation engineering
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