Nilewide Marketing Review articles from March 2003

Nilewide Marketing Review archives from March 2003

Technique over substance.
March 2, 2003... Every company recognises that it owns at least one brand and every marketing partner, from direct mail to design to advertising, is in the brand building business. This ubiquity is no doubt the strength of brands, but it is also the source of...

Trust is what you do.
March 2, 2003... It may be no surprise that, after years of claiming that shareholders come first, there is a dramatic lack of trust in corporations. Research across 46 countries, carried out for the World Economic Forum's Davos meeting, found there are more...

Riding the centaur.
March 2, 2003... As the Internet matures, the people using it are also changing as they grasp the fundamentals of the new technology. This has given rise to what has been termed, the "centaur". In Greek mythology, this was a creature that was half man, half...

Coke's new marketing.
March 2, 2003... Until recently media and entertainment have been neatly boxed as creating culture and defining what is hip and relevant. Advertising has interpreted brand values and connected them with people in interesting ways. While marketers have...

Incredibly weak thinking.
March 2, 2003... The high failure rate for new products remains and with it, all the usual excuses why. Perhaps the idea was not consumer based, the product did not meet customer needs, the value perception was poor, the launch was poor etc. All of these may be...

A price for all seasons.
March 2, 2003... What price to charge has always been a fundamental marketing issue, but it seems to have become much harder in recent years. Prices are so low across the board, that few companies feel they can raise prices without losing to a cheaper...

Microsoft grieving?
March 2, 2003... As the open source operating system Linux is now taking market share from Microsoft's Windows, the responses of Microsoft to Linux seem to fit with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief ascribed to terminally ill patients. In 1998,...

Watch out for weblogs.
March 2, 2003... Use of weblogs or "blogging" is not new to the Internet, but has become much more popular since the software was created to make it easy. A weblog is a kind of online diary, where someone can record their own thoughts and opinions on a topic,...

Be your own customer.
March 2, 2003... The history of marketing may be described in terms of 3 main eras: the product era, the service era, and now the experience era. In other words, it is the customer experience that counts today. One way to find out what it is like to be a...

Forget vision, get reality.
March 2, 2003... Businesses are being challenged to reassess their mission, vision and values, in the light of recent corporate scandals. Some research suggests that mission statements are only for show anyway and most firms really want to do whatever they can...

Big brands are media too.
March 9, 2003... When Coca-Cola's COO, Steve Heyer, called for a new marketing based on merging entertaining content and brands, he touched on a fundamental change in marketing today. Big brands now have far more person contacts per day than any one medium has....

Beware the budget!
March 9, 2003... At a time when many companies claim to be more customer focused and increasingly responsive to the changing business environment, they paradoxically remain wedded to the budget. In general, the budget process begins at least 3 months before the...

Trust after the merger.
March 9, 2003... The failure rate in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) is as high as 50-70%, but little research has been done on the influence of trust. One possible reason is that too great a focus is on the financial or strategic implications of M&As, and too...

Experience management.
March 9, 2003... As marketers focus their attention on the total customer experience, they can develop processes to ensure better experience management. The key to any possible process approach is to recognise that the total experience is made up of clues....

ROI: it's a philosophy.
March 9, 2003... Marketers are well aware of the pressure to demonstrate their contribution to the bottom line. Advertising, media and promotions now make up 20-25% of sales of packaged goods in the USA and 2002 ad spending on TV was up $US1 bill to $US8 bill,...

Fence sitting in research.
March 9, 2003... There are many occasions when it is difficult to make a decision and someone prefers to sit on the fence. In market research, this is seen as taking a neutral position, such as "don't know" or "no preference". However, this neutral position may...

Marketing loves metaphor.
March 9, 2003... It is easy to forget that even the most commonly used marketing expressions, such as relationship marketing and corporate identity, are metaphors. This is important because metaphor always implies a statement of similarity and a hypothesis of...

Losing more than a customer.
March 9, 2003... Most companies calculate a customer's worth and are aware of how much they may lose if they lost that customer. This common perspective ignores the fact that people are social and a customer provides direct value, through purchasing and...

Should brands stand up?
March 9, 2003... While the current pressing issue is the pending war with Iraq, brands have many opportunities to stand up for what they believe in. The question is whether they should stand up and be counted. It could be argued that taking a stance on, say,...

Wanted: alive, not dead.
March 9, 2003... Technology has managed to change our perceptions about talking to real people, as opposed to automated systems. This first became apparent with telephone answering machines and has grown with automated systems for customer service. Now we are...

What's the big idea?
March 16, 2003... Ideas are an essential energy source for business, but some commentators suggest that business has run out of big ideas. However, others argue that we do not need any more big ideas, and that big ideas often turn out to be big failures. Yet...

Creating an icon.
March 16, 2003... Iconic brands, such as Nike, Apple, Absolut, and Volkswagen, are the popular subjects of many case studies on branding. To some these brands are the epitome of branding, but a recent study of iconic brands by a Harvard Business School academic...

Beware expert knowledge.
March 16, 2003... Marketers expect experts to have better knowledge of and more easily accept new products than novices and typically target them as potential early adopters. While this makes sense, experts (and people in general) also tend to generalise from...

Repertoire or subscription loyalty?
March 16, 2003... Repeat purchase is a critical source of revenue, which has given rise to loyalty cards and customer relationship management (CRM). However, there are two types of repeat purchase, repertoire and subscription, which manifest in very different...

Consumption through our children.
March 16, 2003... There has always been passionate debate about marketing to children, with parents and consumer groups claiming that children are not equipped to deal with marketing, and advertisers claiming that children are cleverer than we think. Even so,...

Stop asking the customer!
March 16, 2003... Everyone is justifiably looking for ways to reduce their risks, and market research (MR) is often used to confirm that a new product has potential. In the US, US$6,149 mill was spent on MR (4.8% of adspend) compared to US$1,652 mill in the UK...

The price of happiness.
March 16, 2003... Few people would say you could put a certain price on happiness or that any money at all could buy them happiness. Yet some recent UK research found that $US1.5 mill made a real difference to people's happiness. It also found the reverse: that...

More to learn about churn.
March 16, 2003... As customers become better informed, the ability to anticipate and manage churn rates has become more pressing. This is particularly so for mobile phone operators, but also holds for other contractual services, such as financial services....

The value of social regard.
March 16, 2003... In our attempts to understand what drives customer satisfaction, most of the attention has been focused on the quality of the product or service and value for money. But these conveniently ignore the much harder issue of what can be called...

iTV needs to get active.
March 16, 2003... When first introduced, interactive TV was often proclaimed to signal the death of the 30 second ad. Now, several years on, comparatively few advertisers are committing to iTV in the UK. Some big brands experimented with the medium in the...

Redefining CRM.
March 23, 2003... Studies continue to show that CRM technology remains the hottest area of IT spending. However, because 55-75% of implementations have failed to deliver most of that money is wasted. In the light of this real lack of success it is probably no...

Serving the unprofitable.
March 23, 2003... The belief that businesses should let go of their unprofitable customers is deeply embedded in the claims of marketing consultants, loyalty marketing and customer relationship management (CRM). Despite this unquestioned view, it is clear that...

Growing up is hard to do.
March 23, 2003... It does appear that the days of shareholder-pleasing double-digit growth are over, at least for now. Only 7% of all publicly traded companies had eight or more years of double-digit growth in revenue and operating profit during 1990-2000. That...

Fuzzy logic for clear decisions.
March 23, 2003... While it is difficult to pin all aspects of a decision down to a set of rules, many kinds of statistical modelling are used to help companies make marketing decisions about their customers. Unfortunately, making good decisions involves asking...

Searching questions.
March 23, 2003... At the height of the dot-com boom, the technologists assured the world that the Internet was the future of consumer information searching. Because information was so easily accessible on the Net, it was supposed to have given power the buyer...

Brands go to Hollywood.
March 23, 2003... As advertising becomes more expensive and less effective, marketers are looking for alternative ways to spend their budgets. Coca-Cola is one company that has already said it is time for a new kind of marketing, where it aims to create content...

The real Internet.
March 23, 2003... The boom and bust of the dot-coms upset many investors, but it has had very little effect on the real Internet. This is the Internet that is now so much a part of daily life for ordinary people. While it is able to stand alone as an information...

Why online ads go further.
March 23, 2003... The online advertising industry appears to be growing up, accepting that it does not offer attractive, actionable clickthroughs and that certain types of advertising, such as pop-ups and pop-unders, are just irritating. However, it is beginning...

Brands for comfort.
March 23, 2003... In the wake of September 11, most commentators forecast a return to more homely pursuits, with a strong emphasis on comfort, security and family. A move that suited the time as a 2001 Australian survey had already found people were "actively...

Famous in a one-to-one world?
March 30, 2003... Analysis In response to the apparent decline in marketing effectiveness, most people seem to be asking the standard questions, such as whether advertising is effective or how can we build stronger relationships with our customers. In...