Nilewide Marketing Review articles from December 2003

Nilewide Marketing Review archives from December 2003

Strategy for existentialists.
December 7, 2003... Many marketers recognise the limitations of segmentation in a world where people's attitudes and roles are constantly changing. Some commentators have explained this in terms of postmodernism. However, another perspective on it comes from...

Marketing and organic growth.
December 7, 2003... Organic growth is generally the preferred strategy, whether it is through incremental or, more importantly, discontinuous innovation. However, many gurus of growth, such as Clayton Christensen, Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad, have dismissed...

Dominant firms do innovate.
December 7, 2003... A number of authors have suggested that large or dominant firms are poor at radical innovation and suffer in the long term by being unable to introduce radical or market-changing innovations. Their strength is purportedly in incremental...

All the fun of the brand.
December 7, 2003... Disney may be a leader in making customer experiences fun, but that does not make it a model for other companies. Perhaps the most important decision about fun experiences is whether attempts to make a neutral customer experience fun are...

New ways to lead.
December 7, 2003... As management thinking about leadership qualities changes, it is interesting to contemplate how brand leaders might also change. Brand leaders used to be like the business leaders of the past, taking pride in their size, power and impenetrable...

Banking on relationships.
December 7, 2003... While most people interact regularly with their bank, this does not mean that they have a relationship with that bank. However, banks, like other companies, want to have stronger links with customers to ensure or improve their continued...

Cellphone hell.
December 7, 2003... Telemarketing to mobile phones is widely considered to be a consumer nightmare, especially when combined with location-specific text message advertising. The sad reality is that this is just the tip of the iceberg for cellphone users. Spam and...

Worst practices.
December 7, 2003... The search for best practices is based on looking at previous successes and trying to emulate them. However, this is not how most people learn. They are far more likely to learn from their failures, or those of others. In this sense, it might...

Dealing with an angry customer.
December 7, 2003... Every business has to deal with angry customers, but how they deal with them can be the difference between impressing and losing them. When something goes wrong with the core service, it will be seen as a big mistake, as opposed to a non-core...

The complexity phenomenon.
December 7, 2003... There is a widespread belief that life is more complex than ever before and that we are looking for ways to simplify our lives. Recent research by the Future Foundation (UK) found that 78% of marketers believe they are responsible for...

Seeking happiness.
December 14, 2003... New research in psychology and economics demonstrates that when we make predictions about our future happiness we are inevitably wrong. When we predict the new sports car will make us happy for a long time, it doesn't, and when we predict that...

We don't think enough.
December 14, 2003... New insights into the way the mind works have greatly influenced our views on decision-making. Behavioural economics, for example, recognises that people do not always think or behave rationally. According to Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel...

Recommending growth.
December 14, 2003... Customer loyalty continues to be a somewhat contentious ingredient of long-term success. Proponents claim that loyalty leads to growth and greater profits through lower customer acquisition costs and long-term repurchasing. It must be noted...

The service trade-off.
December 14, 2003... Keeping the customer satisfied is no easy task, and there are no guarantees that a satisfied customer will return. Yet customer expectations of service delivery are higher than ever, with the lack of differentiation between products making good...

When we stop watching ads.
December 14, 2003... The introduction of personal video recorders (PVRs), such as TiVo, only confirms that many viewers stop watching TV commercials. Now they can zap or zip commercials, skip the pod of ads or even avoid them altogether. The issue for advertisers...

Researching the self sufficient.
December 14, 2003... One of the problems with much research, especially, qualitative research, is the suspicion that, if the sample were changed, so would the results. This naturally leads to many studies seeking what may be defined as mass market samples, eg,...

Does co-branding really work?
December 14, 2003... There are many examples of successful co-branding, such as Intel and IBM or Coca-Cola and Nutrasweet, but that does not mean that co-branding always works. The literature implies that co-branding is usually beneficial, but it is often based on...

Non-customer focus.
December 14, 2003... It was Peter Drucker who said that change always starts with non-customers. Yet today's relentless customer focus ignores the largest portion of the market. Non-customers are not only potential customers, but they are also unknown, and few...

Reducing extension risk.
December 14, 2003... The lower costs of brand extensions, rather than creating new brands, has led to their widespread use. But brand extensions carry the risk that, if the extension fails, it may reduce existing brand equity of the parent brand. However, a review...

Christmas time crunch.
December 14, 2003... It has gradually become apparent, to experts and the rest of us, that few people have enough time for Christmas. As modern life becomes increasingly frantic, in spite of all our time-saving devices, it could be asked whether there is time for...