Principle of marketing

Principle of Marketing Marketing involves a range of processes concerned with finding out what consumers want, and then providing it for them. This involves four key elements, which are referred to as the 4Ps. A useful starting point therefore is to carry out market research to find out about customer requirements in relation to the 4Ps. There are two main types of market research – quantitative research involving collecting a lot of information by using techniques such as questionnaires and other forms of survey. Qualitative research involves working with smaller samples of consumers, often asking them to discuss products and services while researchers take notes about what they have to say. The marketing department will usually combine both forms of research. The marketing department will seek to make sure that the company has a marketing focus in everything that it does. It will work very closely with production to make sure that new and existing product development is tied in closely with the needs and expectations of customers. Modern market focused organisations will seek to find out what their customers want. For example, financial service organisations, will want to find out about what sort of accounts customers want to open and the standard of service they expect to get. Retailers like Argos and Homebase will seek to find out about customer preferences for store layouts and the range of goods on offer. Airlines will find out about the levels of comfort that customers desire and the special treatment that they prefer to receive. A useful definition of marketing is the anticipation and identification of customer needs and requirements so as to be able to meet them, make a profit or other key organisational objectives. The Strategic Planning Process In today’s highly competitive business environment, budget-oriented planning or forecast-based planning methods are insufficient for a large corporation to survive and prosper. The firm must engage in strategic planning that clearly defines objectives and assesses both the internal and external situation to formulate strategy, implement the strategy, evaluate the progress, and make adjustments as necessary to stay on track. A simplified view of the strategic planning process is shown by the following diagram: The Strategic Planning Process Mission &       Objectives      | | |   Environmental  Scanning | | | Strategy     Formulation     | | | Strategy  Implementation  | | |       Evaluation      & Control | | Mission and Objectives The mission statement describes the company’s business vision, including the unchanging values and purpose of the firm and forward-looking visionary goals that guide the pursuit of future opportunities. Guided by the business vision, the firm’s leaders can define measurable financial and strategic objectives. Financial objectives involve measures such as sales targets and earnings growth. Strategic objectives are related to the firm’s business position, and may include measures such as market share and reputation. Environmental Scan The environmental scan includes the following components: * Internal analysis of the firm * Analysis of the firm’s industry (task environment) * External macroenvironment (PEST analysis) The internal analysis can identify the firm’s strengths and weaknesses and the external analysis reveals opportunities and threats. A profile of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is generated by means of a SWOT analysis An industry analysis can be performed using a framework developed by Michael Porter known as Porter’s five forces. This framework evaluates entry barriers, suppliers, customers, substitute products, and industry rivalry. Strategy Formulation Given the information from the environmental scan, the firm should match its strengths to the opportunities that it has identified, while addressing its weaknesses and external threats. To attain superior profitability, the firm seeks to develop a competitive advantage over its rivals. A competitive advantage can be based on cost or differentiation. Michael Porter identified three industry-independent generic strategies from which the firm can choose. Strategy Implementation The selected strategy is implemented by means of programs, budgets, and procedures. Implementation involves organization of the firm’s resources and motivation of the staff to achieve objectives. The way in which the strategy is implemented can have a significant impact on whether it will be successful. In a large company, those who implement the strategy likely will be different people from those who formulated it. For this reason, care must be taken to communicate the strategy and the reasoning behind it. Otherwise, the implementation might not succeed if the strategy is misunderstood or if lower-level managers resist its implementation because they do not understand why the particular strategy was selected. Evaluation & Control The implementation of the strategy must be monitored and adjustments made as needed. Evaluation and control consists of the following steps: 1. Define parameters to be measured 2. Define target values for those parameters 3. Perform measurements 4. Compare measured results to the pre-defined standard 5. Make necessary changes What is Consumer Buying Behavior? Definition of Buying Behavior: Buying Behavior is the decision processes and acts of people involved in buying and using products. Need to understand: * why consumers make the purchases that they make? * what factors influence consumer purchases? * the changing factors in our society. Consumer Buying Behavior refers to the buying behavior of the ultimate consumer. A firm needs to analyze buying behavior for: * Buyers reactions to a firms marketing strategy has a great impact on the firms success. * The marketing concept stresses that a firm should create a Marketing Mix (MM) that satisfies (gives utility to) customers, therefore need to analyze the what, where, when and how consumers buy. * Marketers can better predict how consumers will respond to marketing strategies. Return to Contents List Stages of the Consumer Buying Process Six Stages to the Consumer Buying Decision Process (For complex decisions). Actual purchasing is only one stage of the process. Not all decision processes lead to a purchase. All consumer decisions do not always include all 6 stages, determined by the degree of complexity… discussed next. The 6 stages are: 1. Problem Recognition(awareness of need)–difference between the desired state and the actual condition. Deficit in assortment of products. Hunger–Food. Hunger stimulates your need to eat. Can be stimulated by the marketer through product information–did not know you were deficient? I. E., see a commercial for a new pair of shoes, stimulates your recognition that you need a new pair of shoes. 2. Information search– * Internal search, memory. * External search if you need more information. Friends and relatives (word of mouth). Marketer dominated sources; comparison shopping; public sources etc. A successful information search leaves a buyer with possible alternatives, the evoked set. Hungry, want to go out and eat, evoked set is * chinese food * indian food * burger king * klondike kates etc 3. Evaluation of Alternatives–need to establish criteria for evaluation, features the buyer wants or does not want. Rank/weight alternatives or resume search. May decide that you want to eat something spicy, indian gets highest rank etc. If not satisfied with your choice then return to the search phase. Can you think of another restaurant? Look in the yellow pages etc. Information from different sources may be treated differently. Marketers try to influence by ” framing” alternatives. 4. Purchase decision–Choose buying alternative, includes product, package, store, method of purchase etc. 5. Purchase–May differ from decision, time lapse between 4 & 5, product availability. 6. Post-Purchase Evaluation–outcome: Satisfaction or Dissatisfaction. Cognitive Dissonance, have you made the right decision. This can be reduced by warranties, after sales communication etc. After eating an indian meal, may think that really you wanted a chinese meal instead. Business buying behavior The business market is comprised of organizations that, in some form, are involved in the manufacture, distribution or support of products or services sold or otherwise provided to other organizations.   The amount of purchasing undertaken in the business market easily dwarfs the total spending by consumers.   Because the business market is so large it draws the interest of millions of companies worldwide that market exclusively to business customers.   For these marketers understanding how businesses make purchase decisions is critical to their organizations’ marketing efforts. In some ways understanding the business market is not as complicated as understanding the consumer market.   For example, in certain business markets purchase decisions hinge on the outcome of a bidding process between competitors offering similar products and services.   In these cases the decision to buy is often whittled down to one concern — who has the lowest price.   Thus, unlike consumer markets, where building a recognizable brand is very important, for many purchase situations in the business market this is not the case. However, in many other ways business buying is much more complicated.   For instance, the demand by businesses for products and services is affected by consumer purchases (called derived demand) and because so many organizations may have a part in creating consumer purchases, a small swing in consumer demand can create big changes in business purchasing.   Automobile purchases are a good example.   If consumer demand for cars increases many companies connected with the automobile industry will also see demand for their products and services increase (we will later refer to these companies as supply chain members).   Under these conditions companies will ratchet up their operations to ensure demand is met, which invariably will lead to new purchases by a large number of companies.   In fact, it is conceivable that an increase of just one or two percent for consumer demand can increase business demand for products and services by five or more percent.   Unfortunately, the opposite is true if demand declines.   Trying to predict these swings requires businesses to not only understand their immediate customers but also the end user, which as we will discuss, may be well down the supply chain from where the business operates. This section of our highly detailed Principles of Marketing Tutorials discusses the unique characteristics of the business market.   We will see that marketers must appeal to business customers in ways that are distinct from how they would approach consumers.   While marketers selling to other businesses operate with most of the same marketing tools used by marketers of consumer products, how they employ these tools to reach their marketing objectives may be quite different. Market Segmentation Market segmentation is the identification of portions of the market that are different from one another. Segmentation allows the firm to better satisfy the needs of its potential customers. The Need for Market Segmentation The marketing concept calls for understanding customers and satisfying their needs better than the competition. But different customers have different needs, and it rarely is possible to satisfy all customers by treating them alike. Mass marketing refers to treatment of the market as a homogenous group and offering the same marketing mix to all customers. Mass marketing allows economies of scale to be realized through mass production, mass distribution, and mass communication. The drawback of mass marketing is that customer needs and preferences differ and the same offering is unlikely to be viewed as optimal by all customers. If firms ignored the differing customer needs, another firm likely would enter the market with a product that serves a specific group, and the incumbant firms would lose those customers. Target marketing on the other hand recognizes the diversity of customers and does not try to please all of them with the same offering. The first step in target marketing is to identify different market segments and their needs. Requirements of Market Segments In addition to having different needs, for segments to be practical they should be evaluated against the following criteria: * Identifiable: the differentiating attributes of the segments must be measurable so that they can be identified. * Accessible: the segments must be reachable through communication and distribution channels. * Substantial: the segments should be sufficiently large to justify the resources required to target them. * Unique needs: to justify separate offerings, the segments must respond differently to the different marketing mixes. * Durable: the segments should be relatively stable to minimize the cost of frequent changes. A good market segmentation will result in segment members that are internally homogenous and externally heterogeneous; that is, as similar as possible within the segment, and as different as possible between segments. Bases for Segmentation in Consumer Markets Consumer markets can be segmented on the following customer characteristics. * Geographic * Demographic * Psychographic * Behavioralistic Geographic Segmentation The following are some examples of geographic variables often used in segmentation. * Region: by continent, country, state, or even neighborhood * Size of metropolitan area: segmented according to size of population * Population density: often classified as urban, suburban, or rural * Climate: according to weather patterns common to certain geographic regions Demographic Segmentation Some demographic segmentation variables include: * Age * Gender * Family size * Family lifecycle * Generation: baby-boomers, Generation X, etc. * Income * Occupation * Education * Ethnicity * Nationality * Religion * Social class Many of these variables have standard categories for their values. For example, family lifecycle often is expressed as bachelor, married with no children (DINKS: Double Income, No Kids), full-nest, empty-nest, or solitary survivor. Some of these categories have several stages, for example, full-nest I, II, or III depending on the age of the children. Psychographic Segmentation Psychographic segmentation groups customers according to their lifestyle. Activities, interests, and opinions (AIO) surveys are one tool for measuring lifestyle. Some psychographic variables include: * Activities * Interests * Opinions * Attitudes * Values Behavioralistic Segmentation Behavioral segmentation is based on actual customer behavior toward products. Some behavioralistic variables include: * Benefits sought * Usage rate * Brand loyalty * User status: potential, first-time, regular, etc. * Readiness to buy * Occasions: holidays and events that stimulate purchases Behavioral segmentation has the advantage of using variables that are closely related to the product itself. It is a fairly direct starting point for market segmentation. Bases for Segmentation in Industrial Markets In contrast to consumers, industrial customers tend to be fewer in number and purchase larger quantities. They evaluate offerings in more detail, and the decision process usually involves more than one person. These characteristics apply to organizations such as manufacturers and service providers, as well as resellers, governments, and institutions. Many of the consumer market segmentation variables can be applied to industrial markets. Industrial markets might be segmented on characteristics such as: * Location * Company type * Behavioral characteristics Location In industrial markets, customer location may be important in some cases. Shipping costs may be a purchase factor for vendor selection for products having a high bulk to value ratio, so distance from the vendor may be critical. In some industries firms tend to cluster together geographically and therefore may have similar needs within a region. Company Type Business customers can be classified according to type as follows: * Company size * Industry * Decision making unit * Purchase Criteria Behavioral Characteristics In industrial markets, patterns of purchase behavior can be a basis for segmentation. Such behavioral characteristics may include: * Usage rate * Buying status: potential, first-time, regular, etc. * Purchase procedure: sealed bids, negotiations, etc. Jose rizal The life of Dr. Jose P. Rizal From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia RA No. 1425 prescribes the teaching of the life, works and writings of Jose Rizal for all school, colleges and universities. Students and teachers, in the past years, have relied on books and periodicals from the library to do their studies on Rizal. The advent of Information Technology, however, facilitated the acquisition and sharing of ideas among peoples of varied persuasions throughout the globe. Survey results show that more and more students are using the Internet to do research work. This Jose Rizal website is, therefore, designed, and created to assist students in the appreciation of the role of Rizal in the development of the Filipino nation. The web contains very comprehensive materials on and by Rizal in both the English and Filipino languages. Further more, it is offered for free to everyone. The endorsement of the web by the Commission on Higher Education helped increase the number of visitors. This web continues to acquire and update information about Rizal in order to be of better service to the users. This website is self-sustaining, non-profit, and non-partisan, and everyone is invited to visit and link with our website. José Rizal From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia José Rizal (full name: José Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda) (June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896), was a Filipino polymath, nationalist and the most prominent advocate for reforms in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era and its eventual independence from Spain. He is considered a national hero and the anniversary of Rizal’s death is commemorated as a Philippine holiday called Rizal Day. Rizal’s 1896 military trial and execution made him a martyr of the Philippine Revolution. The seventh of eleven children born to a middle class family in the town of Calamba, Laguna, Rizal attended the Ateneo Municipal de Manila and then traveled alone to Madrid, Spain where he studied medicine at the Universidad Central de Madrid, earning the degree of Licentiate in Medicine. He attended the University of Paris and earned a second doctorate at the the University of Heidelberg. Rizal was a polyglot conversant in at least ten languages.[1][2][3][4] He was a prolific poet, essayist, diarist, correspondent, and novelist whose most famous works were his two novels, Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.[5] These are social commentaries on the Philippines that formed the nucleus of literature that inspired dissent among peaceful reformists and spurred the militancy of armed revolutionaries against 333 years of Spanish rule. As a political figure, Rizal was the founder of La Liga Filipina, a civic organization that subsequently gave birth to the Katipunan[6] led by Bonifacio and Aguinaldo. He was a proponent of institutional reforms by peaceful means rather than by violent revolution. The general consensus among Rizal scholars, however, attributed his martyred death as the catalyst that precipitated the Philippine Revolution. Family José Rizal’s parents were Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonzo, prosperous farmers who were granted lease of a hacienda and an accompanying rice farm by the Dominicans. He was the seventh child of their eleven children (namely, Saturnina, Paciano, Narcisa, Olympia, Lucia, Maria, Jose, Concepcion, Josephina, Trinidad and Soledad.) Rizal was a 5th-generation patrilineal descendant of Domingo Lam-co (Chinese: æŸ¯ä» ªå�—; Pinyin: Ke Yinan), a Chinese immigrant entrepreneur who sailed to the Philippines from Jinjiang, Quanzhou in the mid-17th century.[7] Lam-co married Inez de la Rosa, a Sangley native of Luzon. To free his descendants from the anti-Chinese animosity of the Spanish authorities, Lam-co changed the family surname to the Spanish surname ” Mercado” (market) to indicate their Chinese merchant roots. Their original application was for the name ” Ricial”, apropos their main occupation of farming, which was arbitrarily denied. The name ” Rizal” (originally Ricial, the green of young growth or green fields), was adopted by Jose to enable him to travel freely as the Mercados had gained notoriety by their son’s intellectual prominence. From early childhood Rizal was already advancing unheard-of political ideas of freedom and individual rights which infuriated the authorities.[8] Rizal, 11 years old Aside from indigenous Filipino and Chinese ancestry, recent genealogical research has found that José had traces of Spanish, and Japanese ancestry. His maternal great-great-grandfather (Teodora’s great-grandfather) was Eugenio Ursua, a descendant of Japanese settlers, who married a Filipina named Benigna (surname unknown). These two gave birth to Regina Ursua who married a Sangley mestizo from Pangasinán named Atty. Manuel de Quintos, Teodora’s grandfather. Their daughter Brígida de Quintos married a Spanish mestizo named Lorenzo Alberto Alonzo, the father of Teodora. Austin Craig mentions Lacandula, Rajah of Tondo at the time of the Spanish incursion, also as an ancestor. Education Rizal first studied under the tutelage of Justiniano Aquino Cruz in Biñan, Laguna. He was sent to Manila and upon enrolling at the Ateneo Municipal, changed his name to ” Rizal” to escape the opprobrium of the name ” Mercado”. His brother Paciano had been linked to the Filipino priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora who had been tried as subversives and sentenced to death by garrote. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1877 and graduated as one of the nine students declared sobresaliente or outstanding. He continued his education at the Ateneo Municipal to obtain a land surveyor and assessor’s degree, and at the same time at the University of Santo Tomas where he studied Philosophy and Letters. Upon learning that his mother was going blind, he decided to study medicine specializing in ophthalmology at the University of Santo Tomas but did not complete it because he felt that Filipinos were being discriminated against by the Dominicans who were operating the school.[9] Without his parents’ knowledge and consent, but secretly supported by his brother Paciano, he traveled alone to Madrid in May 1882 and studied medicine at the Universidad Central de Madrid where he earned the degree, Licentiate in Medicine. His education continued at the University of Paris and the University of Heidelberg where he earned a second doctorate. In Berlin, he was inducted as a member of the Berlin Ethnological Society and the Berlin Anthropological Society under the patronage of the famous pathologist Rudolf Virchow. Following custom, he delivered an address in German in April 1887 before the anthropological society on the orthography and structure of the Tagalog language. He left Heidelberg a poem, ” A las flores del Heidelberg,” which was both an evocation and a prayer for the welfare of his native land and the unification of common values between East and West. Rizal’s multifacetedness was described by his German friend, Dr. Adolf Meyer, as ” stupendous.”[10][11] Documented studies show him to be a polymath with the ability to master various skills and subjects.[1][2][12] He was an ophthalmologist, sculptor, painter, educator, farmer, historian, inventor, playwright and journalist. Besides poetry and creative writing, he dabbled, with varying degrees of expertise, in architecture, cartography, economics, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, dramatics, martial arts, fencing and pistol shooting. He was a Freemason.[13] Travels He who knows the surface of the earth and the topography of a country only through the examination of maps.. is like a man who learns the opera of Meyerbeer or Rossini by reading only reviews in the newspapers. The brush of landscape artists Lorrain, Ruysdael, or Calame can reproduce on canvas the sun’s ray, the coolness of the heavens, the green of the fields, the majesty of the mountains… but what can never be stolen from Nature is that vivid impression that she alone can and knows how to impart–the music of the birds, the movement of the trees, the aroma peculiar to the place–the inexplicable something the traveller feels that cannot be defined and which seems to awaken in him distant memories of happy days, sorrows and joys gone by, never to return.–Rizal, ” Los Viajes” [14] Rizal’s life is one of the most documented of the 19th century due to the vast and extensive records written by and about him.[15] Most everything in his short life is recorded somewhere, being himself a regular diarist and prolific letter writer, much of these materials having survived. His biographers, however, have faced the difficulty of translating his writings because of Rizal’s habit of switching from one language to another. They drew largely from his travel diaries with their insights of a young Asian encountering the west for the first time. They included his later trips, home and back again to Europe through Japan and the United States, and, finally, through his self-imposed exile in Hong Kong. This period of his education and his frenetic pursuit of life included his recorded affections. Among them were Gertrude Becket of Chalcot Crescent (London), wealthy and high-minded Nelly Boustead of the English and Iberian merchant family, last descendant of a noble Japanese family Usui Seiko, his earlier friendship with Segunda Katigbak and eight-year romantic relationship with his cousin, Leonor Rivera. His European friends kept almost everything he gave them, including doodlings on pieces of paper. In the home of a Spanish liberal, Pedro Ortiga y Perez, he left an impression that was to be remembered by his daughter, Consuelo. In her diary, she wrote of a day Rizal spent there and regaled them with his wit, social graces, and sleight-of-hand tricks. In London, during his research on Morga’s writings, he became a regular guest in the home of Dr. Reinhold Rost of the British Museum who referred to him as ” a gem of a man.”[16][15] The family of Karl Ullmer, pastor of Wilhelmsfeld, and the Blumentritts saved even buttonholes and napkins with sketches and notes. They were ultimately bequeathed to the Rizal family to form a treasure-trove of memorabilia. Writings José Rizal’s most famous works were his two novels, Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. These writings angered both the Spaniards and the hispanicized Filipinos due to their insulting symbolism. They are highly critical of Spanish friars and the atrocities committed in the name of the Church. Rizal’s first critic was Ferdinand Blumentritt, a Sudetan-German professor and historian whose first reaction was of misgiving. Blumentritt was the grandson of the Imperial Treasurer at Vienna and a staunch defender of the Catholic faith. This did not dissuade him however from writing the preface of El Filibusterismo after he had translated Noli me Tangere into German. Noli was published in Berlin (1887) and Fili in Ghent (1891) with funds borrowed largely from Rizal’s friends. As Blumentritt had warned, these led to Rizal’s prosecution as the inciter of revolution and eventually, to a military trial and execution. The intended consequence of teaching the natives where they stood brought about an adverse reaction, as the Philippine Revolution of 1896 took off virulently thereafter. As a leader of the reform movement of Filipino students in Spain, he contributed essays, allegories, poems, and editorials to the Spanish newspaper La Solidaridad in Barcelona. The core of his writings centers on liberal and progressive ideas of individual rights and freedom; specifically, rights for the Filipino people. He shared the same sentiments with members of the movement: that the Philippines is battling, in Rizal’s own words, ” a double-faced Goliath”–corrupt friars and bad government. His commentaries reiterate the following agenda:[17] * That the Philippines be a province of Spain * Representation in the Cortes * Filipino priests instead of Spanish friars–Augustinians, Dominicans, and Franciscans–in parishes and remote sitios * Freedom of assembly and speech * Equal rights before the law (for both Filipino and Spanish plaintiffs) The colonial authorities in the Philippines did not favor these reforms even if they were more openly endorsed by Spanish intellectuals like Morayta, Unamuno, Margall and others. Upon his return to Manila in 1892, he formed a civic movement called La Liga Filipina. The league advocated these moderate social reforms through legal means, but was disbanded by the governor. At that time, he had already been declared an enemy of the state by the Spanish authorities because of the publication of his novels. Persecutions Wenceslao Retana, a political commentator in Spain, had slighted Rizal by a reference to his parents and promptly apologized after being challenged to a duel. Aware that Rizal was a better swordsman, he issued an apology, became an admirer, and wrote Rizal’s first European biography.[18] Memory as a ten-year old of his mother’s treatment at the hands of the civil authorities, with the approval of the church authorities, hurt so much as to explain his reaction to Retana. The incident stemmed from an accusation that Rizal’s mother, Teodora, tried to poison the wife of a cousin when she claimed she only intervened to help. Without a hearing she was ordered to prison in Santa Cruz in 1871, and made to walk the ten miles from Calamba. She was released after two and a half years of appeals to the highest court.[1] After writing Noli me Tangere, among the numerous other poems, plays and tracts he had already written, he gained further notoriety with the Spaniards. Against the advice of relatives and friends, he came back to the Philippines to aid his family which was in dispute with the Dominican landlords. In 1887, he wrote a petition on behalf of the tenants of Calamba and later that year led them to speak out against friar attempts to raise rent. They initiated a litigation which resulted in the Dominicans evicting them from their homes, including the Rizal family. Eventually, General Valeriano Weyler had the buildings on the farm torn down. In 1896 while Rizal was in prison in Fort Santiago, his brother Paciano was tortured by Spaniards trying to extract evidence of Jose’s complicity in the revolution. Two officers took turns applying pins under Paciano’s fingernails; with his hands bound behind him and raised several feet, he was dropped repeatedly until he lost consciousness.[1] Exile in Dapitan Rizal was implicated in the activities of the nascent rebellion and in July 1892, was deported to Dapitan in the province of Zamboanga. There he built a school, a hospital and a water supply system, and taught and engaged in farming and horticulture. Abaca, then the vital raw material for cordage and which Rizal and his students planted in the thousands, was a memorial. The boys’ school, in which they learned English, considered a prescient if weird option then, was conceived by Rizal and antedated Gordonstoun with its aims of inculcating resourcefulness and self sufficiency in young men. They would later enjoy successful lives as farmers and honest government officials. One, a Muslim, became a datu, and another, Jose Aseniero, who was with Rizal throughout the life of the school, became Governor of Zamboanga. In Dapitan, the Jesuits mounted a great effort to secure his return to the fold led by Father Sanchez, his former professor, who failed in his mission. The task was resumed by Father Pastells, a prominent member of the Order. In his letter to Pastells, Rizal sails close to the ecumenism familiar to us today.[19] ” We are entirely in accord in admitting the existence of God. How can I doubt his when I am convinced of mine. Whoso recognizes the effect recognizes the cause. To doubt God is to doubt one’s own conscience, and in consequence, it would be to doubt everything; and then what is life for? Now then, my faith in God, if the result of a ratiocination may be called faith, is blind, blind in the sense of knowing nothing. I neither believe nor disbelieve the qualities which many attribute to him; before theologians’ and philosophers’ definitions and lucubrations of this ineffable and inscrutable being I find myself smiling. Faced with the conviction of seing myself confronting the supreme Problem, which confused voices seek to explain to me, I cannot but reply: ‘It could be; but the God that I foreknow is far more grand, far more good: Plus Supra!… I believe in (revelation); but not in revelation or revelations which each religion or religions claim to possess. Examining them impartially, comparing them and scrutinizing them, one cannot avoid discerning the human ‘fingernail’ and the stamp of the time in which they were written… No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However, brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light. I believe in revelation, but in that living revelation which surrounds us on every side, in that voice, mighty, eternal, unceasing, incorruptible, clear, distinct, universal as is the being from whom it proceeds, in that revelation which speaks to us and penetrates us from the moment we are born until we die. What books can better reveal to us the goodness of God, his love, his providence, his eternity, his glory, his wisdom? ‘The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork’.”[15] As a gift to his mother on her birth anniversary he wrote the other of his poems of maturity, ” Mi Retiro,” with a description of a calm night overlaid with a million stars. The poem, with its concept of a spontaneous creation and speaking of God as Plus Supra, is considered his accommodation of evolution. … the breeze idly cools, the firmament glows, the waves tell in sighs to the docile wind timeless stories beneath the shroud of night. Say that they tell of the world, the first dawn of the sun, the first kiss that his bosom inflamed, when thousands of beings surged out of nothing, and peopled the depths, and to the heights mounted, to wherever his fecund kiss was implanted. [20] His best friend, Blumentritt, kept him in touch with European friends and fellow-scientists who wrote a stream of letters which arrived in Dutch, French, German and English and which baffled the censors, delaying their transmittal. Those four years of his exile coincided with the development of the Philippine Revolution from inception and to its final breakout, which, from the viewpoint of the court which was to try him, suggested his complicity in it.[15] He condemned the uprising, although all the members of the Katipunan made him honorary president and used his name as a war-cry. Near the end of his exile he met and courted the step-daughter of a patient, an Irishwoman named Josephine Bracken. He was unable to obtain an ecclesiastical marriage because he would not return to the religion of his youth and was not known to be clearly against revolution. He nonetheless considered Josephine to be his wife and the only person mentioned in the poem, Farewell, sweet stranger, my friend, my joy…[21] Last days Main article: Philippine Revolution By 1896, the rebellion fomented by the Katipunan, a militant secret society, had become a full blown revolution, proving to be a nationwide uprising and leading to the proclamation of the first democratic republic in Asia. To dissociate himself, Rizal volunteered and was given leave by the Spanish Governor General Ramon Blanco to serve in Cuba to minister to victims of yellow fever. Blanco later was to present his sash and sword to the Rizal family as an apology. Before he left Dapitan, he issued a manifesto disavowing the revolution and declaring that the education of Filipinos and their achievement of a national identity were prerequisites to freedom. Rizal was arrested en route, imprisoned in Barcelona, and sent back to Manila to stand trial. He was implicated in the revolution through his association with members of the Katipunan and was to be tried before a court-martial for rebellion, sedition, and conspiracy. During the entire passage, he was unchained, no Spaniard laid a hand on him, and had many opportunities to escape but refused to do so. Rizal was convicted on all three charges and sentenced to death. Governor General Blanco, who was sympathetic to Rizal, had been forced out of office, and the friars had intercalated Polavieja in his stead, sealing Rizal’s fate. His poem, undated and believed to be written on the day before his execution, was hidden in an alcohol stove and later handed to his family with his few remaining possessions, including the final letters and his last bequests. Within hearing of the Spanish guards he reminded his sisters in English, ” There is something inside it,” referring to the alcohol stove given by the Pardo de Taveras which was to be returned after his execution, thereby emphasizing the importance of the poem. This instruction was followed by another, ” Look in my shoes,” in which another item was secreted. Exhumation of his remains in August, 1898, under American rule, revealed he had been uncoffined, his burial not on sanctified ground granted the ‘confessed’ faithful, and whatever was in his shoes had disintegrated.[1] In his letter to his family he wrote: ” Treat our aged parents as you would wish to be treated… Love them greatly in memory of me… 30 December, 1896.”[15] In his final letter, to the Sudeten-German professor Ferdinand Blumentritt – Tomorrow at 7, I shall be shot; but I am innocent of the crime of rebellion…[15] He had to reassure him that he had not turned revolutionary as he once considered being, and that he shared his ideals to the very end. He also bequeathed a book personally bound by him in Dapitan to his ‘best and dearest friend.’ When Blumentritt received it he broke down and wept. Execution Moments before his execution by a firing squad of Filipino native infantry, backed by an insurance force of Spanish troops, the Spanish surgeon general requested to take his pulse; it was normal. Aware of this, the Spanish sergeant in charge of the backup force hushed his men to silence when they began raising ‘vivas!’ with the partisan crowd. His last words were ” consummatum est”,–it is finished.[22][2][23] He was secretly buried in Paco Cemetery in Manila with no identification on his grave. His sister Narcisa toured all possible gravesites and found freshly turned earth at the cemetery with civil guards posted at the gate. Assuming this could be the most likely spot, there being no other recent ground burials, she made a gift to the guards to mark the site ” RPJ.” A national monument Main article: Rizal Park A statue now stands at the place where he fell, designed by the Swiss Richard Kissling of the famed William Tell sculpture.[24] The statue carries the inscription I want to show to those who deprive people the right to love of country, that when we know how to sacrifice ourselves for our duties and convictions, death does not matter if one dies for those one loves – for his country and for others dear to him.[15] Aftermath ‘Retraction’ controversy That his burial was not on holy ground led to issues raised on the veracity of accounts of his ‘retraction,’ which the Church ever since has been vigorously defending. Many continue to believe that Rizal neither married his sweetheart Josephine Bracken in Roman Catholic rites hours before his execution nor ever retracted those parts of his writings that were anti-Roman Catholic.[25][26] Those who deny the retraction point out to a revealing clue tucked in ‘Adios’, I go where there are no slaves, no hangmen or oppressors, where faith does not kill…[27] Whether this stanza was his final comment on the Catholic Church is a subject of dispute. In most of his writings Rizal maintained that the men of the cloth were the real rulers and the real government. Much of the Church’s case rests on claims of a signed retraction, a copy of which could not be produced and shown to the Rizal family despite their repeated requests. ” Mi último adiós” Main article: Mi Ultimo Adios The poem is more aptly titled, ” Adios, Patria Adorada” (literally ” Farewell, Beloved Country”). By virtue of logic and literary tradition, the words come from the first line of the poem itself. It first appeared in print not in Manila but in Hong Kong in 1897, when a copy of the poem and an accompanying photograph came to J. P. Braga who decided to publish it in a monthly journal he edited. There was a delay when Braga, who greatly admired Rizal, wanted a good job of the photograph and sent it to be engraved in London, a process taking well over two months. It finally appeared under ‘Mi último pensamiento,’ a title he supplied and by which it was known for a few years. Thus, when the Jesuit Father Balaguer’s anonymous account of the retraction and the marriage to Josephine was appearing in Barcelona, no word of the poem’s existence reached him in time to revise what he had written. His account was too elaborate that Rizal would have had no time to write ” Adiós.” Six years after his death, when the Philippine Organic Act of 1902 was being debated in the United States Congress, Representative Henry Cooper of Wisconsin, after a speech, rendered an English translation of Rizal’s valedictory poem capped by the peroration, ” Under what clime or what skies has tyranny claimed a nobler victim?”[28]. The Americans, however, would not sign the bill into law until 1916 and did not grant full autonomy until 1946–fifty years after Rizal’s death. Josephine Josephine Bracken promptly joined the revolutionary forces in Cavite province, making her way through thicket and mud, and helped operate a reloading jig for Mauser cartridges at the arsenal at Imus. The short-lived arsenal under the Revolutionary General Pantaleon Garcia had been reloading spent cartridges again and again and the reloading jig was in continuous use, but Imus was under threat of recapture that the operation had to move, with Josephine, to Maragondon, the mountain redoubt in Cavite. She witnessed the Tejeros Convention prior to returning to Manila and was summoned by the Governor-General but owing to her stepfather’s American citizenship, she could not be forcibly deported. She left voluntarily, returning to Hong Kong. She later married another Filipino, Vicente Abad, a mestizo acting as agent for the Philippine firm of Tabacalera. She died in Hong Kong in 1902, a pauper’s death, buried in an unknown grave, and never knew how a line of verse had rendered her immortal.[29] Polavieja faced condemnation by his countrymen. Years after his return to Spain, while visiting Giron in Cataluña, circulars were distributed among the crowd bearing Rizal’s last verses, his portrait, and the charge that to Polavieja was due the loss of the Philippines to Spain. Criticism Attempts to debunk legends surrounding Rizal, and the tug of war between free thinker and Catholic, have served to keep him a living issue. While some leaders, Gandhi for one, have been elevated to high pedestals and even deified, Rizal has remained a controversial figure. Some have succeeded in depicting his fallibility, such as the case of the numerous women in his life. In one recorded fall from grace, he had succumbed to temptation by a ” lady of the camellias” in Austria, leading to a presumption that he had patronized ” ladies of the night”.[30][31] Others present him as a man of contradictions. Miguel de Unamuno in ” Rizal: the Tagalog Hamlet”, said of him, ” a soul that dreads the revolution although deep down desires it. He pivots between fear and hope, between faith and despair.”[32] His critics assert this character flaw is translated into his two novels where he opposes violence in Noli and appears to advocate it in Fili, contrasting Ibarra’s idealism to Simoun’s cynicism. His defenders insist this ambivalence is trounced when Simoun is struck down in the sequel’s final chapters, reaffirming the author’s resolute stance, Pure and spotless must the victim be if the sacrifice is to be acceptable.[33] In the same tenor, Rizal condemned the uprising when Bonifacio asked for his support. Bonifacio, in turn, openly denounced him as a coward for his refusal.[34] Rizal believed that an armed struggle for independence was premature and ill-conceived. Here Rizal is speaking through Father Florentino: … our liberty will (not) be secured at the sword’s point… we must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it. And when a people reaches that height God will provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered, tyranny will crumble like a house of cards and liberty will shine out like the first dawn.[33] Rizal never held a gun or sword in the battlefield to fight for freedom. This fact leads some to question his ranking as the nation’s premier hero, with a few who believe in the beatification of Bonifacio in his stead. In his defense, the historian, Rafael Palma, contends that the revolution of Bonifacio is a consequence wrought by the writings of Rizal and that although the sword of Bonifacio produced an immediate outcome, the pen of Rizal generated a more lasting achievement.[35] Legacy Rizal’s advocacy of institutional reforms by peaceful means rather than by violent revolution makes him Asia’s first modern non-violent proponent of political reforms. Forerunner of Gandhi and contemporary of Tagore and Sun Yat Sen, all four created a new climate of thought throughout Asia, leading to the attrition of colonialism and the emergence of new Asiatic nations by the end of World War II. Rizal’s appearance on the scene came at a time when European colonial power had been growing and spreading, mostly motivated by trade, some for the purpose of bringing Western forms of government and education to peoples regarded as backward. Coinciding with the appearance of those other leaders, Rizal from an early age had been enunciating in poems, tracts and plays, ideas all his own of modern nationhood as a practical possibility in Asia. In the Noli he stated that if European civilization had nothing better to offer, colonialism in Asia was doomed.[36] Such was recognized by Gandhi who regarded him as a forerunner in the cause of freedom. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his prison letters to his daughter Indira, acknowledged Rizal’s significant contributions in the Asian freedom movement. These leaders regarded these contributions as keystones and acknowledged Rizal’s role in the movement as foundation layer. Rizal, through his reading of Morga and other western historians, knew of the genial image of Spain’s early relations with his people[37]. In his writings, he showed the disparity between the early colonialists and those of his day, with the latter’s atrocities giving rise to Gomburza and the Philippine Revolution of 1896. His biographer, Austin Coates, and writer, Benedict Anderson, believe that Rizal gave the Philippine revolution a genuinely national character; and that Rizal’s patriotism and his standing as one of Asia’s first intellectuals have inspired others of the importance of a national identity to nation-building.[22][38] Although his field of action lay in politics, Rizal’s real interests lay in the arts and sciences, in literature and in his profession as an ophthalmologist. Shortly after his death, the Anthropological Society of Berlin met to honor him with a reading of a German translation of his farewell poem and Dr. Rudolf Virchow delivering the eulogy.[39]. The Taft Commission in June 1901 approved Act 137 renaming the District of Morong into the Province of Rizal, and Act 346 authorizing a government subscription for the erection of a national monument in Rizal’s honor. Republic Act 1425 was passed in 1956 by the Philippine legislature that would include in all high school and college curricula a course in the study of his life, works and writings. The wide acceptance of Rizal is partly evidenced by the countless towns, streets, and numerous parks in the Philippines named in his honor, and monuments in such unlikely places as Madrid, Spain,[40] Wilhelmsfeld, Germany,[41] Jinjiang, Fujian, China,[42] Chicago,[43], San Diego,[44], and Seattle, U. S. A.;[45] and many poetic titles bestowed on him: ” Pride of the Malay Race,” ” the First Filipino”, ” Greatest Man of the Brown Race,” among others. The Order of the Knights of Rizal, a civic and patriotic organization, boasts of dozens of chapters all over the globe[19][20]. There are some remote-area religious sects who claim him as a sublimation of Christ. Art Man Department of Sociology & Anthropology Sociology is the study of group life: its characteristic changes, causes and consequences. It combines scientific and humanistic perspectives in the study of urban and rural life, family patterns and relationships, social change, inter-group relations, social class, environment, communications, health-seeking behavior, as well as social movements and community responses to disasters, natural and created. Anthropology is the comprehensive study of the human condition, the origin of our species in evolutionary biology, and the development of culture and society in its many variations among ancient and contemporary peoples. Its subject matter encompasses an immense time depth and a vast spatial range, including the simplest human societies and the most complex modern industrial civilization. Anthropology brings together many areas of scientific and humanistic inquiry, unifying and integrating knowledge about people and their perceptions of the world The Humanities and its Disciplines.   The humanities are academic disciplines that seek to understand, appreciate and critique the human conduction in all its depth and range of meaning.   They, in varied ways, consider the ” big questions,” both of the contemporary and the perennial, and with these understandings and methodologies engage civic life, both locally and globally, to address the challenges faced by humanity.    While there are many other disciplines that also seek to understand the human condition, the approaches and methodologies of the humanities are primarily interpretive (analytical, critical, and/or reflective), as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences, and the creative approaches in the arts. The second distinction is in what the humanities then attempt to do with the knowledge generated, in the application of understanding. The Idaho Humanities Council goes on to say, “ through [the] study [of the humanities it seeks to] yield wisdom. ” As written in the 1965 National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act which established the National Endowment for the Humanities and all the state councils, Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. ” Wisdom is that deep understanding that goes beyond knowing to application, engaging civic life, both locally and globally, to address the challenges faced by humanity. To take up the “ big questions. ” In his keynote address, Gary Williams, my predecessor in this role of Distinguished Humanities Professor, emphasized that the Humanities are “. . . a way of thinking about and responding to the world — tools we use to examine and make sense of the human experience in general and our individual experiences in particular. The humanities enable us to reflect upon our lives and ask fundamental questions of value, purpose, and meaning in a rigorous and systematic way” (Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities).    As the 1965 Congressional Act stressed, the term ‘humanities’ pays “ particular attention to our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life” . . . . to both the particular and diverse, as well as the national and general “ shared in common. ”  Attempting to address the “ big questions. ” The humanities disciplines typically include anthropology/ethnography, communications studies, cultural studies (such as American, Black, International, Latin American, Native American, Religious,   Women’s Studies), languages, law, literature, history, philosophy, and reflection and theory in creative writing, in the performing arts of music, dance and theatre, and in the visual arts of painting, sculpting and architecture. According to the 1965 National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, ” The term ‘humanities’ includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life” (emphasis added), to both the unique and diverse as well as the national and shared in common.   (from National Endowment for the Humanities website, http://www. neh. gov/whoweare/overview. html). Envi. Sci. What is Environmental Science? Environmental Science provides an integrated, quantitative, and interdisciplinary approach to the study of environmental systems. The magnitude and complexity of environmental problems are creating a growing need for scientists with rigorous, interdisciplinary training in environmental science. The Environmental Science curriculum is designed to prepare students for positions of leadership in this rapidly changing discipline. Environmental Science graduates have a solid foundation in biological and physical natural sciences and the specialized training necessary for integrated analysis of environmental systems.