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In This Issue...

The Mission, The Man, The Money: Marketing to Baby Boomer Men
Hunting boomer men takes work, but it can be worth the effort, especially if you know the different variations boomer males come in, and where they hang out.

Climate Change Marketing
We're the first generation in the history of our industry to have to factor climate change into marketing campaigns. Looking at wartime advertising may provide ideas to adapt to our current market climate.

Gutenberg's Rainbow:
Transformations of Media, Technology and Society in the 21st Century
Our new series is based on 25 years of experience helpimg develop and market new technologies, including the Apple Server product line and PostScript 3.

Data.gov - Part of Government 2.0
The government has launched a new one-stop Website for the public to find and download a variety of key government data sets. Meanwhile, SunlightLabs, a US organization dedicated to turning government data into useful information, has launched an Apps for America Website to track, reward and distribute open source applications designed to use data from data.gov.

Departments

Quality Assurance: Writing a Website Requirements Document

Export Assistance: BuyUSA.gov Offers Online Exporting Services for SMBs

Publication of the Month: Statistical Abstract of the US

Government Guides & Data Resources Directory: for marketing to the nation

Podcasting for the SMB: Making Your Podcast Sound Professional
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The Mission, The Man, The Money: Marketing to Baby Boomer Men

By Brent Green, author, Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers

Legendary guitarist and rock singer Steve Winwood gave optimism a new ringtone when he released Back in the High Life Again in 1986. He lyrically proclaimed: It's so hard to just slow down, so don't be surprised to see me back in that bright part of town.

And what is true for the ebullient classic rocker tends to be true today for the male Boomer cohort, of which Winwood is one high-profile example. This insight arrives in contradiction to some prevailing wisdom about Boomer segmentation opportunities.

For example, several new books identify women 40+ as today's muscle consumer. As Mary Brown and Carol Orsborn, Ph.D., co-authors of BOOM: Marketing to the Ultimate Power Consumer - the Baby-Boomer Woman, observe: “She is already making the majority of household purchases, spending well over a trillion dollars a year on consumer goods and services. And now, as both her numbers and dollars continue to dominate the consumer marketplace, she's poised to turn the marketing world upside down.”

According to these authors, women “make 80 percent of home improvement decisions… account for 65 percent of all new automobiles sold every year, and purchase over 66 percent of computers.”

These books would lead some not to focus on Boomer men. Why bother?

For one, Boomer Y chromosomes hand American business about $1 trillion annually. For another, gender proclivities coupled with generational affiliation present important targeting and business development opportunities that demand to be noticed.

When Demographics, Social Revolution and Business Converge
 Never before in the history of this nation have so many men entered the 50+ lifestage. Nearly six thousand Baby Boomer men turn 50 every day, and a Boomer male turns 60 about every 15 seconds. This inexorable march to 60+ will continue for the next seventeen years, and then this generation's longevity dash continues onward toward the eighth, ninth, and tenth decades of life. Someday, millions of Boomer men will survive beyond the average terminal age achieved by their grandfathers and fathers.

Demography by itself does not fully predict the future course for this generation. The idiosyncratic Boomer value set, inspired by the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960's and 1970's, adds dimension to future scenarios.

Generational cohorts consist of those born in a contiguous historical period. As a generation comes of age, roughly between 15 and 25, members experience the same major events, forming collective mentalities in reaction to these events, thereby influencing sociology and culture of the generation. Formative experiences can have enduring influence throughout life, with implications for the marketplace. How so for Boomer men?

First, this generation of men has experienced the consumer power that came with being at the top of the nation's traditional social hierarchy. When they were young adults, Boomer men were favored with jobs, wage and salary advantages, and access. Social status influenced them to resonate with ideals about manhood as demonstrated by heroic marketing archetypes such as the Marlboro Man and the Shelby Ford Mustang.

Second, they also remember standing side-by-side with female peers during long months of struggle to achieve greater economic and social equality for women. Many protested for greater racial inclusiveness. A man coming of age in the sixties and seventies learned to empathize with the underdog and to challenge authority.

Social inclusiveness has appeared in countless advertising and marketing campaigns during the last half of the 20th century. An iconic magazine ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle - “Think Small” - embodied the underdog achieving celebrity status. This sense of equality has powerful new implications as the nation embraces its first African American (and Boomer) president.

Third, Boomer men have always been unwilling to accept the status quo bequest by older generations. They have a feisty history of revolutionary behavior, and they've transformed every lifestage they've occupied.

They ushered in the yuppie. They gravitated to products such as the BMW sports car and Mont Blanc pen, reflecting their well-honed sense of technology, design and luxury. With their power lunches and 24/7 work style, they popularized a grueling productivity ethic.

Boomer men today are wary of disempowerment and restrictive rules governing full participation by mature men in society. They've watched too many of their resigned fathers trudge over the horizon. Caricatured advertising portrayals of men as silly and inane propose an unwelcome second-class status.

They are unwilling to accept systemic marginalization. They express their independence in a number of ways and particularly when consuming.

Aleve television commercials portray athletic Boomer men refusing to give up competitive sports and surrender to worn-out joints. The message resonates with a generation that continues to embrace metaphors of youth: conquer, don't capitulate.

An abundance of 50+ men promises to inculcate new vitality to masculine aging. Boomer men are creating new paths of meaning for all men to follow, and this will be revealed culturally through brilliant marketing.

Here are some underdeveloped opportunities for generational and gender nuances in marketing:

Collaboration between Boomer Men & Women
The Boomer generation has played a significant role popularizing gender inclusiveness. While one spouse may have greater influence on the choice of some product categories, big ticket purchases are usually a byproduct of spousal deliberation and cooperation. Gone are the days when Dad pulls into the driveway with a new car that he has selected and purchased unilaterally. And gone are the days when Dad comes home to find a new clothes washer and dryer. Boomer spouses have learned to collaborate, and males and females can often be reached effectively with messages shaped around gender considerations.

Mainstreaming Metrosexual Men
A new sociological male segment, identified in recent years by British writer Mark Simpson, is not dominated by homosexuals, but they've embraced the feminine sides of life while holding onto traditional male identity. As Simpson observed: “Metrosexuality actually gives men a certain amount of independence from women: after all, they can actually choose their own clothes, operate a washing machine, and maybe even cook for themselves. Whereas the retrosexual depended on women to mother him, the metrosexual mothers himself.” And they shop. He may go to Home Depot to buy a power drill and stop by Macy's to shop for an aftershave balm.

Single Boomer Men, Autonomous Shoppers
A significant number of Boomer men have never married and an even greater number have divorced and are living alone or with non-romantic roommates. I estimate about 15,600,000 or 20% of the Boomer generation are both single and male. Single males make most of their shopping decisions independently, so advertisers have untapped opportunities to reach those who are both male and living alone or without a female spouse.

The Allure of Gifting and Boomer Men
When was the last time you saw a woman buying an engagement ring? Or sending herself flowers on Valentine's Day? Boomer men buy a wide range of products for spouses and significant others, and opportunities abound for clever marketing strategies that simplify these harrowing tasks around the holiday gifting seasons and anniversaries.

Products and Services Just for Guys
Many products appeal more to men. Product categories most amenable to male marketing strategies include dress suits and upscale shoes, such as those purveyed by Cole Hahn; male magazines targeting Boomers, such as BestLife and Esquire; pharmaceuticals for male performance, such as Viagra; luxury muscle cars, such as Lincoln MKX; outdoors equipment, such as a sizeable male segment served by the boating and fishing industry under the cross-promotional rubric called Take Me Fishing; and the exploding industry of male grooming and personal care products now being addressed by traditionally female-focused companies, including Calvin Klein, L'Oreal, Lancôme, and Clinique.

Boomer Gay Men as a Market Force
A marketable percentage of Boomer men are homosexual and rely substantially on male marketing and culture for shopping and purchasing decisions. My estimate, based on studying GLBT survey literature, suggests this U.S. segment is comprised of over three million males. Critical success of the popular television series, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, underscores that gay sensibilities in popular culture can resonate with straight men.

Powerful Influences of Gender on Attitude
Natural Marketing Institute (NMI), based in Harleysville, Pennsylvania, has been conducting consumer research into the Boomer generation mindset since the beginning of this decade. NMI's research has uncovered significant trends in Boomer attitudes about aging, healthcare, shopping preferences and the impact of current economic conditions.

Boomer men and women share many core values. For example, based on NMI's Healthy Aging/Boomer Database, 81 percent of Boomer women and 78 percent of Boomer men strongly or somewhat agree with taking responsibility for health matters: I'm very concerned about my personal health and am actively managing it.

Both sexes strongly or somewhat agree that exercise is a primary way to promote healthy aging (94% of women and 92% of men). Both sexes strongly or somewhat believe vitamins and nutritional supplements promote healthy aging (75% for both genders). Both sexes believe that maintaining independence as they age is of highest priority (98% of women and 96% of men).

However, upon closer study of NMI data, noteworthy gender differences emerge. Steve French, managing partner of NMI, believes many attitudes have distinct gender influences that marketers can use to construct and target commercial messages.

“NMI research follows the opinions of 10,000+ Boomer men and women, and our survey data is revealing surprising gender insights,” said Steve French. “For example, Boomer men are more likely to aspire to live very long lives, but they are less likely to embrace the behaviors that correlate with longevity, such as prioritizing a healthy diet and pursuing supportive social networks. Differences between men's aspirations and reported behaviors create opportunities.”

When asked if they would like to live to 100-plus years old, 61 percent of Boomer men strongly or somewhat agree, while 53 percent of Boomer women hope for such advanced old age. Concerning a belief that the best years of life are still ahead of me, 77 percent of women strongly or somewhat agree while 68 percent of men share this degree of confidence in the future.

A large percentage of Boomer men aspire to long lives; yet, many do not have faith that bonus years will be so golden. A gap between ambition and outlook is an opportunity for marketers promoting late-life reinvention, such as community colleges offering curricula for men to learn meaningful new vocations.

While a majority of Boomer men hope to live long lives, Boomer females are more likely to share information with peers when they learn something new about health & wellness (80% female versus 63% male). Advertising and sales promotions can compensate for men's relative lack of reliance on peer opinions.

Finally, Boomer men are more prone to spend discretionary dollars during the economic crisis. They are more likely to make impulse purchases than women (25% men versus 9% women). They are more apt to spend than save (37% versus 28%). They are more self-directed on investment decisions (70% versus 46%).

At the grocery store, they are more willing to buy national brands over generic store labels (46% men vs. 26% women). At big-box wholesale club and specialty stores, they are more willing to spend today on home renovations, appliances, vacations, and new technology.

Men of the Boomer generation are moving into a time of renewal, as if a phoenix rising from ashes of irrelevance, when the generation's large numbers and antiauthoritarian persona are coalescing to challenge traditional views of aging, manhood and consumerism.

A new sociological construct for male aging is aptly being demonstrated by a former president, Bill Clinton, and his former vice president, Al Gore, who are at the leading-edge of this generation. Like these leaders, Boomer men are bringing new context to late-life generativity - sharing of wisdom and resources for the benefit of younger generations. They're spending lavishly on children and grandchildren.

Ready to change the meaning of aging and masculine identity, they will expect more, acquire more, challenge more, and give more than their predecessors. Business implications are transformational.

About the author:
Brent Green is a creative director, copywriter, author, professional speaker, and consultant focused on the Baby Boomer generation. Author of Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers: Perceptions, Principles, Practices, Predictions, Brent speaks and consults for organizations focusing on the Boomer segment. His blog, http://boomers.typepad.com, addresses media, marketing and social issues affecting this generation. Brent Green & Associates, Inc. is an internationally award-winning marketing communication firm based in Denver. http://www.bgassociates.com

About Natural Marketing Institute:
A leading business consulting and market research firm, NMI assists Fortune 500 and start-up companies across many types of industries with insightful market analysis and strategic planning surrounding new product opportunities, branding, communications, consumer target identification, sales strategy, and strategic business planning. http://www.nmisolutions.com

Copyright 2009, Brent Green & Associates, Inc.
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ADVERTISING & THE INTERNET
Climate Change Marketing
 By Glen Emerson Morris

Advertising is always a product of its time, and we live in interesting times. It appears that we will be the first generation in the history of modern advertising to have to integrate climate change into our marketing and advertising strategies.

The prestigious science magazine New Scientist has been running a series of articles on global warming and the news isn't good. It appears change is happening considerably faster than the scientific community had believed just a few years ago, and the closer you get to the scientists behind the reports, the worse the news gets.

A growing number of scientists are arguing that a large scale eco-collapse is underway and, among other things, the Himalayan glaciers are going dry. Since the Himalayan glaciers are the source of the seven biggest rivers in Asia, the effect on agriculture would be enormous, and the cost in life in the hundreds of millions. (This may explain why, in 2001, a member of the Dalai Lama's staff told me the Dalai Lama was not optimistic about humanity's chances of surviving the next 40 or 50 years, and was decentralizing the monasteries, scattering them across the planet, in the hope that at least some of them survive.) Is this being too pessimistic? Maybe not.

Recently New Scientist interviewed James Lovelock, the scientist who first worked out the effect of fluorocarbons on the upper atmosphere and that reaction's role in the creation of ozone. Lovelock said he believes the coming eco-collapse will be so severe that by the end of the century less than a billion people will be alive. Lovelock also said he believes that within 10 years extreme weather will be the norm and within 20 years France will have a climate much like the Sahara. Lovelock said he considers himself to be optimistic because he expects humanity to survive as a species.

Even if Lovelock is really being pessimistic, there's ample evidence climate change is really underway, and potentially very dangerous. Growing a business in the times ahead will not be easy, and will take some very careful planning.

Over the next decade advertisers will be selling to consumers facing both the trials of a depression and a growing climate change fear factor in many ways similar to that of a time of war like WWII. Fortunately, thousands of full page print ads from publications like the Saturday Evening Post have been preserved, so it's easy to see how a previous generation of advertisers handled the problem.

Scanning the archives of ads from the thirties and forties, themes that keep reappearing are value, reliability, honesty and responsibility.

Value
In hard economic times consumers demand more for their money, and business better be able to provide it. Consumers are getting better at researching product quality, at both the local and national levels, so track how your competitors are doing because you can be sure your customers will. Also, try to actively review and streamline business operations on a regular basis, your customers will appreciate it.

Reliability
Weather will increasingly disrupt production and transportation of goods, so if your company depends of imports it's a good time to consider how vulnerable supply lines are, and make sure you have a closer, more reliable, sources just in case. The message to the customers in your advertising should be, “You can rely on us. No matter what happens in the world, we will are prepared, and we will do everything humanly possible to provide you with the products and services you need, without interruption.”

Honesty
Fortunately for small to midsized businesses, most consumers still think of them as honest, compared to the Fortune 500. SMBs need to keep that reputation. If you know you can't avoid supply problems, be honest with your customers. They will plan accordingly and be able to minimize the cost of supply interruption. If you surprise them with a problem you knew in about in advance, it will probably inconvenience them more and they may never be back, and for good reason.

Responsibility
World War II had much in common with the depression, but overall was a time of far greater personal risk, a fact not lost on advertisers at the time. Ads of the war years of the 1940s, combine war propaganda with an increasing emphasis on the valuable role companies are playing in the war effort. It's part PR of course, but the ads were also a sincere effort to reassure Americans citizens that American corporations understood their responsibilities and were meeting them.

Meeting responsibilities today, may prove more difficult than in WWII. Unlike Hitler, nature is not limited by a national budget, and we are in a war for survival. We need to change priorities. Our main concern these days isn't about minimizing our footprint on nature, it's about minimizing nature's footprint on us.

In their timetables for the 21st century, both Arthur C. Clarke and Buckminster Fuller predicted that technologies like the Star Trek matter replicator would allow people to make everything they needed, and be completely self sufficient and independent from the environment. It looks like we're going to have to compress the development cycle of survival critical technologies from a century to about 30 years. It looks like we might be off to a good start.

The first under $5,000 3D printer, the forerunner of the Star Trek matter replicator, is due out late this year from a company called Desktop Factory. There should be an under $1000 3D printer on the market by the end of 2011, and by 2015 3D printers will be common in homes. Within a decade home 3D printers will be capable of printing electronic devices like cell phones, and eventually we can expect desktop units to make guilt free steak dinners. If Star Trek did it, so can we. And we'd better.

Since pre-history, the responsibility of the business/merchant community has been to provide the members of our community the things they need to survive and enjoy life, and in that order. Lately, we got the order reversed. It's time to get back to basics.
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ADVERTISING & THE INTERNET

Gutenberg's Rainbow
Transformations of Media, Technology and Society in the 21st Century
 By Glen Emerson Morris

Like Gutenberg's printing press, the combined technologies of personal computers, digital media and the Internet are acting like a giant prism to transform a highly standardized society into a relative rainbow of intellectual, social and political diversity. We are midway in an epic transformation, and this is a difficult time because many of our traditional social and media institutions are well into disintegration, while few new institutions have evolved yet to take their place.

It is hard to predict exactly what society will be like at the end of the Internet revolution, as that will depend on choices not yet made, but many aspects of this new balance of power it is bring about are apparent now. It is clear that in the new order, governments, business and commercial media will have lost any technological edge they may have had over consumers in terms of the ability to acquire, process and share information.

In addition, consumers will have the ability to produce the goods and services they need for themselves on their own, without depending on big business or big government. These are major changes, but highly likely given the forces at work.

R&D Feedback Loop
The miracle behind the Internet revolution is the research and development feedback loop. Companies spend money developing technologies that do more work for less expense, and continue to plow money back into R&D to make ever more efficient products. The evidence so far is that there is no limit to how far this curve could continue.

Research & Development is like oxidation. When it happens slowly, like rust, it's too slow for casual notice. When it happens quickly, like fire; it's hard to ignore, and it can be very difficult to stop. From an R&D perspective, the Internet revolution is the world's first five-alarm fire.

Technology downstreaming
The R&D fire is spreading through what I call technology downstreaming, which is the process of a technology becoming increasingly inexpensive and widely available as it matures. Applications like CRM and data mining, which were once reserved for the largest and most affluent companies, have become commodity prices and widely available, even to small businesses and individuals, due to downstreaming.

When the newspaper industry started buying Atex digital typesetting systems in 1973 to replace hot lead systems, few in the newspaper industry dreamed the technology they were helping fund into being would one day threaten their very existence. However, this may have occurred to at least one Atex employee, Paul Brainerd, who went on to found Aldus in 1985 and bring to market PageMaker, the first major desktop digital typesetting software application.

In the 25 years since then, many technologies funded by many industries have downstreamed, and combined, to give consumer tools of unprecedented power and abilities.

Cumulative action
A category of applications is emerging that allow consumers to work together in ways that eliminate duplication of effort, and on a huge scale. Gracenote, a service used in Apple's iTunes, automatically fills in the track list information when a CD is imported into iTunes. Without this feature, a person has to manually type in each song title for each track, which takes about a minute. Now, that's only necessary for the first person to import the CD since iTunes allows users to save the track in the Gracenote database for all other iTunes users to share. Based on a minute per CD, the amount of time people collectively spend entering track info is 1,666 hours for every 100,000 CDs imported. Gracenote has saved consumers centuries collectively.

Cumulative knowledge
The tobacco settlement marked the point information simply couldn't be managed effectively by corporations or the media anymore. The Internet allowed lawyers suing the cigarette companies, for the first time, to share and effectively pool all of the damaging information their various lawsuits discovered. Previously, there had been no way for a lawyer in one state to share and use information discovered by a lawyer in another state. Once the lawyers could pool resources, the tobacco companies lost their advantage. Now consumers are learning how to pool knowledge, and for that matter, how to create it.

Cumulative computing power
The computer power available to consumers is just beginning to be collectively channeled into useful research projects like seti@home. This project allows consumers to install a screen saver that automatically downloads and processes raw radio telescope data in the hopes of finding signs of extraterrestrial intelligent life. In the future, collective applications like seti@home will become common, and consumers, not politicians or big business, will select and sponsor major research projects my making the processing time available.

Open Source
Though seen more as a cult than a major social movement, the open source framework for development of complex software applications by volunteers will have profound effects on media and business in the future. In the future, manufactured products will also be developed in open source products (an open source car is already under design in Europe).

Desktop Manufacturing
3D printers that can print anything from flower pots to TV remote control units are just a few years away from being commodity priced and common household items. Consumers will begin to make the things they need at home with their own mini manufacturing plants, wrecking havoc on everything from sales taxes to entire manufacturing industries.

Media in the New World
By almost any metric, commercial media in the 21st century will have nowhere near the power it had in the 2oth century to mould and direct public opinion and preferences. It will not be an easy environment for media to survive in, either. Commercial media will have to compete with vast quantities of consumer created content that features no advertising, just bulletins about the latest free open source project releases.

To be viable in the future, media will have to do more than just deliver news, editorials and entertainment. Media will have to offer a high “value added” quality to everything they offer. Reporters for instance, will either have to become highly entertaining (common already) or become experts in the area they cover and offer insight and context into news issues (not common, but we can hope).

In the end, the successful media will be those that integrate with, and use the combined resources of, their audience. That approach won't guarantee success, but at this point it's fairly certain any other approach will guarantee failure.


Glen Emerson Morris was recently a senior QA Consultant for SAP working on a new product to help automate compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley law, an attempt to make large corporations at least somewhat accountable to stockholders and the law. He has worked as a technology consultant for Yahoo!, Ariba, WebMD, Inktomi, Adobe, Apple and Radius.
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BuyUSA.gov Offers Online Exporting Services
by Glen Emerson Morris

As with many government programs, many of the people who need the programs the most have never heard of them. This is probably true for BuyUSA.gov, and extremely unfortunate because this service can make exporting goods and services a lot easier for the small to mid-sized business.

BuyUSA.gov was designed to leverage off of existing Department of Commerce programs, combining them into a comprehensive, and heavily automated, online export assistance service. It's an ambitious idea, and extraordinarily well executed.

About 20 years ago the U.S. Commercial Service of the Department of Commerce began matching small and mid-sized businesses with international partners around the world. The service has grown to over 1,800 trade experts in 105 Export Assistance Centers and 151 posts located in 84 countries around the world.

At the core of the U.S Commercial Service is an IBM mainframe network that collects information from all foreign outposts and domestic U.S. Export Assistance Centers and stores it in a searchable database. This database is accessible to American businesses looking for marketing opportunities, partnerships, distributorships, agents, and capital, and to foreign companies wanting to buy American goods and services.

The BuyUSA.gov site is a real attempt at creating a next generation online export assistance service. It's designed to walk businesses through the export process from beginning to end, and absolutely no previous understanding of exporting is required. The BuyUsa.gov site has about all the information you'd need to know to export to anywhere. In most cases, even the forms needed to export a product can be filled out online. If you don't understand some aspect of the process, don't worry, the BuyUsa site can explain it to you.

The electronic hand-holding is accomplished by an interface described as a "Personal Trade Assistant," that leads businesses through six phases of the export process. Each phase has a Web page that explains what you should be doing in that phase and links to all the resources you need for what you have to do. This is the process:

Prepare for Trade: For starters, the BuyUSA.gov site offers a four-hour interactive multimedia seminar on exporting. This is a crash course overview of the whole export processes, and explains how BuyUSA can help at every phase. There are a number of additional online seminars covering specific types of services, products, and market conditions in specific countries in much more detail. For maximum detail on the export process, there are links to "A Basic Guide to Exporting," the DOC classic, and even live export advice, free, from one of the BuyUSA's many trade specialists.

Research New Markets: In this phase the BuyUSA.gov site offers links to Country Commercial Guides, World Reports by Industry and Country, and U.S. Commercial Information by State. In addition, searchable databases of market research are available, collected at our foreign embassies and outposts. Some of this is information is available nowhere else.

Develop Contacts: This is where the BuyUSA services really begin to take off. The Commercial Service has been building a database of trade contacts for about 20 years, and its contents are searchable for those businesses in the BuyUSA program. This is a good place to find agents, distributors, partners, investors, and other resources. For additional fees, the Commercial Service will provide matchmaker services, personally screening foreign partners and negotiating with them.

Promote Your Company: For promotional purposes BuyUSA members are given a Webpage on the BuyUSA site. This is an Internet based of a World Trade Fair, just limited to American products and services for sale. Basic level members are allowed to post product brochures in digital format up to 20 pages long. In addition, promotions can be staged in foreign countries by Commercial Service outpost personnel, which can prove much cheaper than send staff there.

Conduct Trade Transactions: The Trade Services Directory contains contact and background information for trade service providers around the United States. Services include logistics, finance, freight forwarding, banking and more.

Follow Up on Transactions: Once you've conducted transactions, you can then manage your trading relationships through BuyUSA and the U.S. Department of Commerce. An assortment of services is available.

Basic membership to BuyUSA is $400.00 per year. The advanced level subscriptions range from $1,000 to $2,000 depending on the number of items offered online. To qualify for basic membership, a business must have been in business over one year, and have a product ready for export that contains at least 51% American made components.

As this column has pointed out before, for political reasons the Department of Commerce is prohibited by Federal law from advertising about its programs in anything but Department of Commerce publications. This has left BuyUSA employees in a position similar to that of the Maytag Repairman.

We called the local U.S. Export Assistance Center in Denver (303-844-6623) and spoke with DOC representative Lana Lennberg. She confirmed the impact of the advertising restrictions on operations in Denver. She pointed out that special government financial assistance is available for small to mid-sized businesses wanting to export products that is simply not available to businesses not wanting to export. Literally millions of dollars is available, and few businesses are even applying for it. There are easily hundreds of businesses in Colorado with potentially exportable products that could qualify for loans & funding assistance, and they don't even know it's available. If you think this that number is unreasonably high, look at the number of sales being made daily on eBay by people in Colorado to people all over the planet.

BuyUSA is, in several ways, similar to eBay, except carried to the next magnitude of performance and service. Try getting a trade specialist at eBay to spend ten minutes on the phone with you explaining what a reasonable price for your product would be in India or China. As the DOC puts it, "Your local trade specialist can provide you with the right tools to handle regulations, compliance, logistics, transport, finance, insurance and all other transaction aspects," and they mean it.

As Lana Lennberg candidly pointed out, not all businesses that have a product to export will find BuyUSA the best export assistance available. There are competing services available, and some have competitive prices. However, for most small to mid-sized businesses BuyUSA is likely to be an extremely cost effective choice. For many businesses, the vast resources of BuyUSA may make it the only choice.

To find out if BuyUsa is right for you, and whether your business may qualify for financial assistance, call your local U.S. Export Assistance Center, or visit www.BuyUSA.gov.

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Writing a Requirements Document
By G.E. Morris

Note: This article is from our forthcoming book, "A Basic Guide to Website Quality Assurance." This article explains how to write a Website requirements document which specifies what a Website is actually supposed to do, and how it will be structured. This article assumes that you already have determined what the structure and function of Website should be. This issue is a topic unto itself will be covered in another section.

The product requirements document is the cornerstone of product quality. Without it, the chances of getting a quality product a very small. If you don't know exactly what a program is supposed to do, it's impossible to tell if it really does it.

In this example of a two field registration form, a product requirements document has been created that specifies exactly how the page should look and perform. The lengthy description is not overkill. In fact, this is about the bare minimum of documentation that could be used that could create a quality program.

The structure of the requirements document is nearly identical to the structure of a test case document. especially relative to numbering. Done properly, each requirement should have a test case with the same number.

In the previous example of testing a simple registration form (see Writing Thorough Test Cases), the number of test cases required to test a two field registration page increased to over two dozen. Even this number might not be enough. So how do you really know when you have enough test cases?

A good way to handle it would be to base the test cases on the product requirements document. This method establishes a one to one relationship between the requirements document and the test case document, so that every requirement has a corresponding test case (to be precise, both documents will use a corresponding numbering system so each test case will be numbered the same as its requirement).

Another reason for this approach is that it establishes a written document specifying exactly what QA is responsible for testing, and what QA is not responsible for testing. This approach puts the burden of determining coverage on whoever is responsible for defining the product requirements (which by definition is usually not QA).

So what does a product requirement document look like? Well, the usual format is a multiple number system with numbers separated by periods, as in 1.1.1. for example. This format makes it easy to insert additional requirements and test cases without having to renumber the whole document.

In applying the multiple number format to a product requirement document for the two field registration Webpage, the first number will represent the general category of tests like page appearance or individual fields, the second number will represent a type of tests, like field validation, and the third number will represent specific variations of field validation tests. Requirements and test cases ending in 0 are sub-titles.

The Registration Form:

Registration Form

Enter your first and last names and click the Submit button.

First Name:

Last Name:



The requirements document should have several sections, each dealing with a specific area of the product. The general format would look like this:

1.0.0 General Page Appearance Requirements

2.0.0 First Name Field requirements

3.0.0 Last Name Field requirements

4.0.0 The Submit Function


Registration Page Requirements Document

1.0.0 General Page Appearance Requirements

1.1.1 The title "Registration Page" shall be left aligned at the top of the page.

1.1.2 The words "Registration Page" shall be spelled correctly.

1.1.3 The words "Registration Page" shall be in 26 point type.

1.1.4 The words "Registration Page" shall be in sans sefif type.

1.2.1 The instructions "Enter your first and last names and click the Submit button." shall appear left aligned below the title.

1.2.2 The words "Enter your first and last names and click the Submit button." shall be spelled correctly.

1.2.3 The words "Enter your first and last names and click the Submit button." shall be in 12 point type.

1.2.4 The words "Enter your first and last names and click the Submit button." shall be in sans sefif type.

1.3.1 The words "First Name:" shall be left aligned below the instructions next to The First Name entry field.

1.3.2 The words "First Name:" shall be spelled correctly.

1.3.3 The words "First Name:" shall be in 12 point type.

1.3.3 The words "First Name:" shall be in sans sefif type.

1.4.1 The words "Last Name:" shall be left aligned below the label ïFirst Name" next to the Last Name entry field.

1.4.2 The words "Last Name:" shall be spelled correctly.

1.4.3 The words "Last Name:" shall be in 12 point type.

1.4.4 The words "Last Name:" shall be in sans sefif type.



2.0.0 The First Name field

2.1.1 Entry with a blank First Name shall result in an error message being displayed saying The First Name must be filled in.

2.1.2 Entry with a valid First Name shall be accepted.

2.2.0 First Name field maximum characters.

2.2.1 First Name field will accept a maximum of 50 characters.

2.2.2 First Name field will not accept more than 50 characters.

2.2.3 If more than 50 characters are entered in The First Name field an error message will be displayed saying "The First Name field will not accept more than 50 characters."

2.3.1.0 The First Name field will not accept numbers.

2.3.1.1 Entry with numbers in The First Name field shall result in an error message being displayed saying "The First Name field will not accept numbers."

2.4.0 First Name field character restrictions.

2.4.1 First Name field will not accept the characters: "`~!@#$%^&*()_:";'{}[]+<>?,./".

2.4.2 If any of the characters: "`~!@#$%^&*()_:";'{}[]+<>?,./" are entered in The First Name field an error message will be displayed saying "The First Name field will not accept the characters "`~!@#$%^&*()_:";'{}[]+<>?,./".

2.4.3 First Name field will accept the 50 character: "-".



3.0.0 The Last Name field

3.1.1 Entry with a blank Last Name shall result in an error message being displayed saying The Last Name must be filled in.

3.1.2 Entry with a valid Last Name shall be accepted.

3.2.0 Last Name field maximum characters.

3.2.1 Last Name field will accept a maximum of 50 characters.

3.2.2 Last Name field will not accept more than 50 characters.

3.2.3 If more than 50 characters are entered in The Last Name field an error message will be displayed saying "The Last Name field will not accept more than 50 characters."

3.3.1.0 The Last Name field will not accept numbers.

3.3.1.1 Entry with numbers in The Last Name field shall result in an error message being displayed saying "The Last Name field will not accept numbers."

3.4.0 Last Name field character restrictions.

3.4.1 Last Name field will not accept the characters: "`~!@#$%^&*()_:";'{}[]+<>?,./".

3.4.2 If any of the characters: "`~!@#$%^&*()_:";'{}[]+<>?,./" are entered in The Last Name field an error message will be displayed saying "The Last Name field will not accept the characters "`~!@#$%^&*()_:";'{}[]+<>?,./".

3.4.3 Last Name field will accept the 50 character: "-".

4.0.0 The Submit Function

4.1.1 Entering a valid first and last name and hitting the Submit button shall result the names being added to the registration list.

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