Nilewide Marketing Review articles from February 2003

Nilewide Marketing Review archives from February 2003

When price is unethical.
February 2, 2003... Business ethics, or some suggest the lack of them, continue to dominate the business press. While much of the attention has focused on financial shenanigans, ethics play a role in all aspects of business, including pricing. But to understand...

Calls and conversations.
February 2, 2003... The call centre is now an essential part of any significant business, and the call centre industry employs 3% of the US and 2% of the UK workforces. But, it is also an industry with a poor reputation. Customers complain of negative experiences,...

Is cognition the issue?
February 2, 2003... As the debate over high- versus low-involvement processing in advertising effectiveness continues, with no obvious resolution in sight, it is worth asking whether cognition is really the key issue. Especially as some researchers suggest that...

Group mindset increases compromise.
February 2, 2003... One of the ways advertisers reach their market is by appealing to people's sense of belonging to a group, for example, by emphasising cultural identity. While it is natural to want to belong to a group, a group mindset may affect the way that...

Stand out strategies.
February 2, 2003... Standing out from the crowd is more important than ever, with the glut of me-toos and unremarkable brand extensions. For some brands, this means a hyper-differentiation strategy is needed, or as Seth Godin calls it, the need for a "purple cow"....

A web of relationships.
February 2, 2003... The emphasis on customer relationships, of any sort, hides that they are only one of the many relationships that a company has. A company is a kind of natural system, and each relationship is linked either directly or indirectly to others, or...

To contract or explore?
February 2, 2003... There are 2 opposing voices making themselves heard in the current economic slowdown. One urges cost-cutting, heads down and getting back to basics. One says it is time for innovation, freeing up talent and making the most of cheap office...

Phone survey hang-ups.
February 2, 2003... Once seen as the shining light of surveys, telephone surveys now face an increasingly uncertain future. Recent US data show that contacting potential participants will only get harder due to difficulties in reaching telephone numbers and...

What we have is good enough.
February 2, 2003... With all the emphasis on innovation it is easy to forget that the real barrier to successfully launching innovations is that the existing product or service is good enough. How important good enough is can be seen from asking a few key...

Who has negative views?
February 2, 2003... It is well recognised that users of a brand have higher awareness of that brand's advertising and more of them associate an attribute with the brand than do non-users. But, as the role of negative attributes is becoming an important issue, it...

Out of mind, into the shop.
February 9, 2003... There is no shortage of brand models or systems for branding. All the major communications companies have at least one, with many having multiple versions, such as Thompson Total Branding, Ogilvy 360 Degree Branding and Y&R BrandAssetValuator,...

The ethics of marketing.
February 9, 2003... By the sheer volume of articles in the marketing trade and academic press, there is little doubt that the key brand issue in 2003 is ethics. While the outcry over ethics in 2002 may have focused on financial manipulations, it is now marketing's...

English: not just a language.
February 9, 2003... While the Internet may be growing in its scope and uptake, its global nature raises questions for multinational brands about the need to localise sites. The reality is that some brands would need teams of translators to keep up with the...

Experience is overrated.
February 9, 2003... Marketers are keen to entice consumers to try a brand because they know the power of experience over merely telling people what to expect. Yet, the value of experience over education may be overrated, because experience is seductive. Experience...

Capability and decision-making.
February 9, 2003... How managers make decisions is a constant subject for research and is critical for understanding how consumers might make their choices. If a choice is framed in a positive way (say, a glass half full), people are more likely to respond than if...

Criminal projections.
February 9, 2003... Market research techniques have often been accused of being too rational, but it may be that they are not rational enough. One commentator believes many techniques, particularly projection techniques used in qualitative research, are not useful...

Measures of trust.
February 9, 2003... Trust is central to any good relationship and could even be the most valuable attribute a brand owns. Even so, there is no widely available measure of consumer trust in a brand. One attempt to measure trust conceives of it as "confident...

Deciding or finding segments?
February 9, 2003... There is no shortage of segmentation approaches and tools, but the one thing that most approaches have in common is that they allocate people to predefined segments. This is the case in segmentation based on common factors such as loyalty or...

Pay more for less.
February 9, 2003... While advertising support has been the backbone of TV, magazines, newspapers and Internet publishing, there is a gradual shift to reader- or user-supported media. On the Net, Salon.com has just introduced the option of paying for access or...

Happy with nothing.
February 9, 2003... Judging from the plethora of surveys, happiness is an obsession in today's western culture. The best measure of happiness appears to be to ask people and then to observe whether they do in fact look happy. It appears that the happiest countries...

The self-serving bias.
February 16, 2003... Customer participation in the production of goods or services has been widely advocated, with the main emphasis being on potential cost savings from self-service or co-production. However, participation has psychological implications for the...

Responding to disruption.
February 16, 2003... Disruptive innovations are innovations that provide a new way of competing, which is in conflict with the traditional way of operating in a category. The first direct bank, such as First Direct in the UK, was such an innovation, because the way...

Researchers unite!
February 16, 2003... With everyday access to the Internet, everyone has the ability to collect masses of data. As a result, the shape of market research is changing, with growing pressure on researchers to do more than collect data. Unfortunately, if they are...

4Ps: oh please!
February 16, 2003... The universal theory of marketing is probably the 4Ps, which were developed in the 1950s and 60s. That they are no longer applicable, or useful as a theory, does not seem to matter as they continue to be taught and slavishly followed even...

Diffusing the new.
February 16, 2003... There has been much discussion on word-of-mouth and other means of idea diffusion, such as memes and idea viruses, but it has rarely been linked to the existing concept of diffusion of new products. This is the well-known concept highlighting...

Brand loyalty at work.
February 16, 2003... There is no shortage of books or articles exhorting managers to seriously address internal marketing and to build brand champions among employees. However, a recent US study suggests that 70% of companies are already successfully fostering...

Watch for video email.
February 16, 2003... The success of viral marketing campaigns using video email, such as the John West salmon ad, led video email proponents to claim it is the next step after HTML email. However, there are a number of issues that must be carefully considered in...

Fads stumble with jargon.
February 16, 2003... Management obsessions come and go and marketing has seen its share of them. In the last few years, there has been a move from the more touchy-feely language of vision and mission statements to the hardline recognition that everything needs to...

Profits meet morals.
February 16, 2003... The current interest in business ethics has been sparked by recent corporate scandals, but business ethics have always been an issue. Usually they have been seen in a positive light, for example excellence and attainment, rather than in a...

Why advertising must be win/win.
February 16, 2003... There are plenty of doom-laden forecasts for advertising's future as well as credible reports that it will pick up again after the recession. There are reasons why both may be true: advertising needs to become more relevant to consumers, and...

Marketing in the now.
February 23, 2003... Analysis Effective marketing should lead to a steady stream of profits and it is to be expected that marketing departments spend enormous amounts of time planning their future activities. In the same vein, brand equity (by any definition)...