Mihir Desai on Demystifying Finance
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We see finance everywhere, from our retirement assets to our investments in housing and education. Yet, many smart people still find finance intimidating. Key ideas like insurance, leverage, risk, value creation, mergers and bankruptcies remain shrouded in mystery for the majority of people who spend their days on Main Street instead of Wall Street.
The 2008 financial crisis revealed that we could all benefit from a clearer understanding of how markets work. Yet, too often finance is taught in ways that are dry, technical, or jargon-filled.
Enter Mihir Desai. A professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, he is on a mission to restore the connection between the humanities and finance. In his book, The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return, Professor Desai explores the ideas of finance from a humanities perspective. In this course, he’ll teach you the most important financial concepts using stories from books like Pride and Prejudice, the Maltese Falcon and the Bible.
This is not a personal finance course.
Instead, it will be a vivid, story-based tour of the key ideas in finance. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to converse fluently about key financial concepts, unpack financial stories in the news, and recognize financial ideas as they show up in everyday life. You’ll start to realize that, rather than being intimidating, the core practices of finance are all around us and have been ingrained in our stories for centuries.
Please go to instructor’s bio and website to find the direct link to Mihir’s Harvard course.
Your Instructor
Mihir A. Desai
Mihir A. Desai is the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He received his Ph.D. in political economy from Harvard University; his MBA as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School; and a bachelor’s degree in history and economics from Brown University. In 1994, he was a Fulbright Scholar to India.
Professor Desai’s areas of expertise include tax policy, international finance, and corporate finance. His work has emphasized the appropriate design of tax policy in a globalized setting, the links between corporate governance and taxation, and the internal capital markets of multinational firms. He is a Research Associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Public Economics and Corporate Finance Programs and served as the co-director of the NBER’s India program. He has testified several times to Congressional bodies on various tax policy questions.
Professor Desai has taught extensively as an award-winning teacher at HBS and at Harvard University. He has taught public economics and entrepreneurship to undergraduates, finance and international finance to MBA students and executives, and tax law and policy to law students. Recently, Professor Desai created an online finance course through the HBX platform titled Leading with Finance. His most recent book is The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return, published in May 2017.
His professional experiences include working at CS First Boston, McKinsey & Co., and advising a number of firms and governmental organizations.
What is Internet Marketing ?
Defining Internet Marketing
Also called online marketing, internet marketing is the process of promoting a business or brand and its products or services over the internet using tools that help drive traffic, leads, and sales.
Internet marketing a pretty broad term that encompasses a range of marketing tactics and strategies – including content, email, search, paid media, and more.
These days, though, internet marketing is often used interchangeably with “content marketing.”
Why?
Because content marketing is the internet marketing of the present and future.
Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:
“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Think of it like this: content marketing (or inbound marketing) is in direct opposition to traditional advertising (outbound marketing), and in direct integration with the patterns and habits of today’s generation.
We don’t like to be sold to, we have our ad-blockers on, and we barely watch cable anymore.
Content marketing serves up content that addresses our pain points, and is there when we want it.
Here’s a great illustration of that from Voltier Digital:
Content Marketing vs. Traditional Advertising
Here’s the evolutional pathway behind the modernized form of marketing that is most successful today.
Selling no longer works (a.k.a., traditional advertising).
Why?
Traditional advertising focuses on pushing messages at the consumer to get them to buy.
It’s interruptive, obstructive, and intrusive.
It shouts, “Hey, look at me!” while waving its arms.
You may try to avoid eye contact, but traditional ads are persistent.
You know what traditional ads look like because you’re bombarded with them every single day.
Think TV commercials, billboards, magazine ads, radio ads, and web banner ads.
Ads have been around for a long time, as evidenced by this traditional ad for “honest-to-goodness” coffee from the 1950s.
Every business needs a helping hand…or 10.
Hand your unique tasks over to expert freelancers with every kind of skill who can put the finishing touch you need on any kind of project.
Ads may still work in some strategic places.
But Internet users can just click away from ads if they don’t want to see them.
Which is exactly what happens.
According to a PageFair report, 615 million devices in use today employ ad blockers. Additionally, ad blocker use increased by 30 percent in 2016 alone.
You know it, I know it, everybody knows it.
Ads are annoying.
And, they aren’t the way consumers prefer to learn about new products anymore.
Instead of businesses shoving themselves in consumers’ faces, they need to take a different, gentler approach.
Content marketing is exactly that.
Brands and marketers who use it publish content that teaches, inspires, guides, or solves a problem for their target audience.
With some handy tricks, the targets can find that content on the web without it being pushed at them.
If the prospects gain something useful from the content, they’ll keep coming back for more.
Finally, consumers can interact with the brand organically and share their content on social media.
Trust is forged.
Authority is established.
Connections happen.
These loyal followers can then be converted into leads and sales – naturally.
All of the above happens with a focus on giving value to the user.
Help users – offer them value and they’ll reward you in return.
That is what internet marketing/content marketing is all about at its core.
Why Internet Marketing?
Now that you know what internet marketing is, you still may be wondering why there’s so much hype around it.
Well, the hype is totally founded.
Internet marketing has shown proven success over and over again.
Here are some stats gathered from around the web to help give you an idea of why internet/content marketing stands tall:
- By 2019, content marketing is set to be an industry worth $313 billion.
- 91 percent of businesses already are convinced of its power and have already adopted it as an essential marketing tactic.
- Content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional, outbound marketing, but pulls in 3x as many leads.
- If you’re a small business with a blog, you’ll rake in 126 percent more lead growth than your competitors without a blog
- If you have a blog and publish content, you’re likely to get 434 percent more indexed pages on Google, on average
And there’s more.
From my own content marketing endeavors, I have seen my small business take off.
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