Nilewide Marketing Review articles from July 2004

Nilewide Marketing Review archives from July 2004

Positives and negatives from communities.(do brand communities lead to brand loyalty?)
July 4, 2004... While the now stereotypical brand communities, such as the Harley Owners Group, are widely claimed to be financially beneficial to brand owners our lack of knowledge of why and how individuals participate and how membership leads to actual...

Purpose or process in communities.(virtual communities )
July 4, 2004... Today, virtual communities are the most popular form of brand community building by marketers. Yet, as with brand communities in general, there appears to be a prevailing attitude that the bigger the community the better. This ignores the...

Social software and weak ties.(online social networking)(Editorial)
July 4, 2004... One of the promises of the Internet is its incredible ability to connect people and social software Web services do just that. With names like Friendster, Orkut, Tribe.net and MySpace, they provide online gathering places for people to network...

Retailer controlled brand equity.(making or breaking the brand)
July 4, 2004... Most conceptualisations of brand equity relate in some way to the buyers of the brand and how the brand fulfils its promises to generate revenues over time. However, for brands that are sold through major retail outlets, especially through the...

Better to come second.(success for second comers who try to take advantage of a first mover)
July 4, 2004... There are many examples where the innovators of a new product saw the profits from their idea go to another company. This is because the skills needed for innovation are not always the same skills as those needed for scaling up, distribution,...

Marrying value and values.
July 4, 2004... There is no denying the prominence given to shareholder value in business today. At the same time, many companies have made attempts to state and adhere to a set of values. Yet there have been very few attempts to bring the two together or, as...

Innovativeness expanded.(analyzing forms of innovativeness)(Brief Article)
July 4, 2004... Research into consumer innovativeness usually looks at someone's potential to buy innovative new products. This definition of innovativeness generally reveals the young affluent male to be the most innovative consumer. However, the definition...

Changing how and what we say.(fact-based technology-oriented communication tools)(Brief Article)
July 4, 2004... As technology becomes more pervasive, it is easy to ignore the fact that what we say is changed by how we say it. The most obvious business example is PowerPoint, which is so pervasive that we often accept that its simplified journalistic style...

Broadband threatens TV.(survey)(Brief Article)
July 4, 2004... In 2002, the "Fishbowl" study of 1,000 UK Net users found that the Internet was the third most used medium (after radio and TV), taking three times as much audience attention as newspapers and six times more attention than magazines. A second...

In whom we trust.(trusted companies)(Brief Article)
July 4, 2004... When a sample of Americans was asked to reveal which companies they trusted the most, they gave some surprising results. Unprompted with company names, their top four were eBay, American Express, Procter & Gamble, and Amazon, followed by...

Slaves to the master brand.
July 11, 2004... The appeal of a master brand that stretches over diverse businesses has been hard to ignore, due to a range of benefits from cost savings to creating depth for the brand. However, the strategy has obvious risks, which are all too often glossed...

Everyday marketing and the individual.
July 11, 2004... The frequently cited and rather heroic case studies in marketing, that dominate effectiveness awards, give the misleading impression that marketing effectiveness means dramatically exceeding growth targets. The truth is most marketing and...

Stop making promises!
July 11, 2004... While many services promise to deliver excellent customer service, service standards and satisfaction levels are declining all round the world. The reason for this is relatively straightforward. People provide service and the amount companies...

Relationships and transactions.
July 11, 2004... From recent literature, it could appear that there needs to be a shift from transactional to relationship marketing, or that the two can not exist together in one company. Yet this is not the case for a service provider, which must balance its...

The leader's trap.
July 11, 2004... Many companies have struggled to maintain their market leadership over time, and are often challenged by new and smaller competitors who compete on price. The strategic problem of how to respond to price competitors can be referred to as the...

Pricing is a cultural matter.
July 11, 2004... While pricing is a critical tool in marketing, it too often fails to get the attention it deserves. A book by McKinsey, The Price Advantage, suggests 50% of firms do not know how to use pricing effectively. This does not mean having the highest...

Put pop-ups down.(Brief Article)
July 11, 2004... The apparent universal dislike of pop-up ads has not stemmed their flow, just as universal dislike and even legislation has not stemmed the flow of spam. As with spam, the creators of pop-up ads are fighting a continuing technology battle with...

Beware false claims.(Brief Article)
July 11, 2004... Repeated warnings that a claim about a product may not be true tend to lose their original meaning. In fact, they may even leave older people in particular feeling more familiar with the brand and claim, which makes sense in view of low...

Think global, market local.(Brief Article)
July 11, 2004... There has been much discussion about the benefits of going global versus the need to be local. Most would agree there needs to be a judicious combination of both. According to the chairman of Bain & Co, companies must produce, package, brand...

Killing ideas.(Brief Article)
July 11, 2004... Rather than there being a shortage of good ideas, it is more accurate to say there are many reasons why great ideas never get off the ground. The problem is not the inventions themselves, but the process that leads to their development and...

The brand is the medium.(My Coke Music)
July 18, 2004... It was Steve Heyer (ex-Coke) who, in 2003, put the idea of brands as media on the centre stage with the rather simple recognition that there are over two billion Coke brand impressions everyday. Now Coke's My Coke Music has sold more than...

Those reports of the death of the mass.(mass marketing)
July 18, 2004... The death of mass marketing has been so widely proclaimed that even P&G views each of its major brands as being highly targeted, not mass. The loss of TV audiences, the rise of ad avoiding technology and behaviour, fragmentation of most media,...

Long live the new mass market!
July 18, 2004... The death of the mass market is a rarely challenged wisdom in a marketing world focused on CRM and the ideal segment of one. However, Accenture argues that while the old mass market may exist no longer that does not mean there are no mass...

Piloting fighter brands.
July 18, 2004... Today, discount competitors are inevitable in all markets and this is fuelling a growing interest in multi-brand and portfolio strategies. The most common approach is to introduce a fighting brand to take on the low-priced competitors and to...

Beware the facts!
July 18, 2004... As neuroscience provides new insights into how the brain works, it is also challenging marketers to think differently about the way they and their customers see the world. Our "mental models" about the world, far from being based on the facts,...

Why we don't share knowledge.(Copenhagen Business School)
July 18, 2004... Knowledge sharing has been in vogue for many years, but it increasingly appears that knowledge sharing systems are not the answer. This is because employees are rather hostile to sharing knowledge. It is clear that people value themselves by...

The life or death decisions.(Brief Article)
July 18, 2004... It is often argued that companies, like people, have a natural life and it is usual for them to eventually die. But just as people can work to extend their lives, so companies also have the ability to endure for longer. One way to do this is by...

Why we should share technology.(Brief Article)
July 18, 2004... Many companies believe it is not in their interest to share their technologies, so they rush to patent them and are unwilling to license them. Yet, there are advantages in sharing technology because, while there may be an initial loss of market...

Put your marketing in the product!(Brief Article)
July 18, 2004... The claim that advertising does not work anymore may be overblown, (like many statements about marketing), but that should not stop the search for more effective marketing. Seth Godin believes that all products are now "good enough" and merely...

Because we can: Paradoxes in customer behaviour.
July 25, 2004... Analysis If there were one phrase to describe the current mood, and one on the lips of many people, it might be "because we can". These three words, far from being simple, have something to say about the power of technology in our lives,...