Nilewide Marketing Review articles from June 2003

Nilewide Marketing Review archives from June 2003

Will the real consumer please stand up?
June 2, 2003... Analysis "Who do you think you are, calling me a customer? The nerve of you! I am a person, with endearing qualities and obnoxious ones. I love and hate, or more to the point, I can be lovable and hateable. You seem to think that you need...

Do something, don't strategise.
June 8, 2003... Strategy may be the creative and exciting part of business, but US academic Jeffery Pfeffer argues that it does not deliver sustainable advantages. The problem is that all competitors can follow each other's announcements and even employ the...

Identity is key to change.
June 8, 2003... If identity is the answer to the question "Who are we?" then it could be the key to strategic change. It can be argued that identity, with all stakeholders, must either evolve slowly or rapidly change via a revolutionary change in the company...

Insider trading.
June 8, 2003... Just as some individuals have good relationships with their partners, some companies have special relationships with their customers. This has variously been described as a "marriage" type relationship, the brand as a "lovemark" or as genuine...

Too timid to dare.
June 8, 2003... Business has never been under as consistent an attack than it is today, with constant pressure to be more accountable, more transparent, more socially aware and more profitable than ever before. As business struggles with these accusations and...

In hot pursuit of cool.
June 8, 2003... Malcolm Gladwell coined the phrase, "coolhunter" to describe the people who scour the world to discover what cool people are doing. The thinking goes that whatever cool people are doing will eventually appeal to everyone else who is not cool....

Choosing not to choose.
June 8, 2003... It is common for research to ask respondents to make choices between a number of options. Unfortunately, there is rarely an opportunity to make no choice at all (also known as free choice). This is claimed to be because a no-choice option would...

Dangerous wisdom.
June 8, 2003... Customer focus continues to be the mantra of corporate leaders, with a recent US study highlighting that 95% of US companies claim to be "extremely" or "somewhat" customer focused. Those who are not, plan to be extremely customer-driven within...

Internet fraud.
June 8, 2003... A recent survey by MasterCard found that 70% of US consumers are concerned about online security and fraud, while 61% are worried about hackers stealing their credit card details. These fears are affecting their online buying behaviour, as 73%...

The benefits of online surveys.
June 8, 2003... The Internet is often heralded for making processes cheaper, faster and easier, and research surveys on the Net are no exception. As the technology becomes more sophisticated, it becomes easier to achieve online what could only be shown in...

When decisions reflect attitudes.
June 8, 2003... Although we claim to have certain attitudes, these are not always reflected in our final decisions. This unfortunately confounds research into attitudes, despite continual attempts to understand how people make their consumption choices. One...

A battle in the brain.
June 15, 2003... Marketing has emphasised the role of emotions over rational thought, but it is only the most recent scientific evidence that supports this fundamental contention. New research that measured activity in different parts of the brain when someone...

Brands for social change.
June 15, 2003... The trend for companies to take on corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues amid some pertinent questioning about what it is all about. For some companies, it means shoring up their reputations, for some it means environmental...

It's not what you know.
June 15, 2003... The trend towards knowledge management is part of our obsession with having more information and, more critically, the right information. Yet having information is not the same as knowledge and having accurate knowledge does not mean that our...

Value innovation or conventional logic.
June 15, 2003... While telephone banking is now old news, the concept behind it can be applied to many new technologies and can also be mis-applied in business. First Direct was the first company to successfully operate telephone banking and it took many...

The CMO: back to brand management?
June 15, 2003... When Procter & Gamble introduced the brand management system in 1931, brand managers were senior executives who ran their brands like separate businesses. They created new products, drove distribution and managed communications, while competing...

The company identity audit.
June 15, 2003... Few companies may think about their own identity, because it is so central to everything they do. But they have an identity, just as an individual has, and the way they relate to the environment, carry out their business and deal with people is...

Persuading through stories.
June 15, 2003... While so much of business and marketing hinges on communication, few people know how to be persuasive in the way they communicate. The reason why they can not persuade is because they do not use the right tools: Powerpoint, slides, memos and...

Ideal identities.
June 15, 2003... One of the important impacts that the Internet is anonymity. Millions of people log into chat rooms and other sites using pseudonyms and often create different personalities to those in real life. As a consequence, while someone's personality...

Pricing beats cost-cutting.
June 15, 2003... In 1992, McKinsey studied the impact of key strategies on the bottom line of 2,400 companies. Critically, the results showed that a 1% reduction in fixed costs improved profitability by 2.3%; a 1% increase in volume increased profit by 3.3%; a...

Beyond marketing functions.
June 22, 2003... If we believe that marketing is not providing the benefits it so willingly claims to be its role, it may be because we are still thinking in terms of the marketing function, rather than the processes that lead to serving the customer. For...

Permission denied?
June 22, 2003... Permission marketing (PM) claims to be the answer to customer-focused marketing, as it promises to give customers power over the mass of messages that bombard them everyday. And better still, it promises to give people power over their own...

Mobile madness.
June 22, 2003... While daily use of mobile phones is par-for-the-course, the future of Internet-enabled, multimedia phones appears less certain. This is because many mobile users are not yet convinced of the utility of multimedia options, especially when they...

Get on the virtuous cycle.
June 22, 2003... Multinationals are in the spotlight, whether they like it or not. They have never been subjected to such intense scrutiny as they now are, and they are forced by customers, employees, pressure groups and the media to review their behaviour....

Customer focus in M&As.
June 22, 2003... While the dot-com disaster wiped $US1 trillion off shareholder wealth, a recent book claims that the M&A wave from 1995-2000 lost more than $US12 trillion. With these statistics, we should ask why so little attention is paid to the devastating...

Ethics of pricing revisited.
June 22, 2003... It has been suggested that price promotions can be unethical if they cause harm to other companies or stakeholders. For example, if a company knowingly used a price promotion to harm another company or another person, then this was deemed to be...

Trust and dynamic pricing.
June 22, 2003... The profit maximising appeal of dynamic pricing on the Internet has led many retailers to experiment with it. While there is no doubt that it can increase profits, customers can react negatively to it. This negative reaction involves a loss of...

Managers don't know much.
June 22, 2003... In an era of knowledge management, it is an interesting paradox that managers may know much less than they think. This is because they naturally focus on what is right in front of them: immediate business problems, their own departments and...

The ethics of fear appeals.
June 22, 2003... Advertising that attempts to reach its audience through fear is common in campaigns aimed at changing social behaviours, such as giving up smoking. While there have been many studies on the use of fear in advertising, none has looked at the...

The same but different.
June 22, 2003... When manufacturers introduce new products they often compare them to existing products, so that new features are more easily understood. This can be a useful strategy, but it can also backfire. If the new functionality is available in a product...

Where have the relationships gone?
June 29, 2003... Analysis While many companies strive to build long-term relationships with their customers, western adults appear to have fewer long-term relationships with anyone, let alone companies. Today there are 82 million single adults in the USA,...