Nilewide Marketing Review articles from May 2003

Nilewide Marketing Review archives from May 2003

Integration and the experience.
May 4, 2003... Analysis The call from Coca-Cola's COO for advertising to join with Hollywood to create compelling brand experiences through new content, is only the latest call for marketing to address the brand experience, as opposed to just marketing...

An options view of ROI.
May 11, 2003... Calculating returns on marketing investments, based on incremental sales, captures only part of the value created by brand marketing. Value is also generated in other important ways, such as willingness to pay a price premium or ease of...

CRM: simply inappropriate?
May 11, 2003... The high failure rate for CRM projects, reportedly anywhere from 60-97%, means it is essential to reexamine CRM in a more sober light. Certainly, a number of possible reasons have been proposed, including the most popular that too few managers...

Brands for singles.
May 11, 2003... Despite our innate desire to mate and participate in social groups, there are now more single adult households in western countries than ever before. In the US alone there are more than 82 mill unmarried adults. The single population is a...

Be a good sport.
May 11, 2003... It might be assumed that the most valuable sports lovers are the ones who eat, sleep and drink sport (and spend big money on tickets and merchandise). In fact, there is a big group of people who like sport, but are not fanatics. They may be...

Psychology of queuing.
May 11, 2003... It is well known that self-reports are generally unreliable. But when self-reports are compared across groups of people, from different countries or different age groups, they are even less reliable. Unfortunately, marketing training rarely...

It's not what they say.
May 11, 2003... Few people like to wait in queues, even for a service that they want or need. This is why many companies have tried to develop different queuing methods to improve customer service. However, they have usually been based on mathematics, rather...

Who is on and off the Net.
May 11, 2003... While the Internet is a regular, almost unremarkable part of daily life for many people, there are nearly as many people who do not use it. In the USA, 42% of people say they do not use the Internet, although some will have used it once, and...

No quick fix.
May 11, 2003... Perhaps the mantras of "big is better" and "fast is best" are slowly being silenced. The energetically-inclined magazine, Fast Company, published an article that claimed the new fast company is gradual, slow, measured and organised. By that,...

When email marketing works.
May 11, 2003... There are two faces to email marketing: one is spam, and the other is permission marketing. One recent study suggests that emails for which permission has been given appear to have certain common factors that are more likely to elicit a...

Focus on the negative.
May 11, 2003... Focus groups remain the backbone of qualitative research and are used for everything, from gaining a deeper understanding of attitudes, to generating ideas. However, recent research suggests that using focus groups to better understand...

Living with uncertainty.
May 18, 2003... There has never been a time of certainty, although it is tempting to believe in the good old days. But now there is less certainty than ever due to the creation of many new technologies with incalculable risks. In fact, there are two types of...

To measure an experience.
May 18, 2003... The recognition that, if we are to truly understand the relationship someone has with a brand we must understand the brand experience, raises many unresolved measurement questions. Put simply, we have very few tools with which to measure, model...

A human ROI?
May 18, 2003... Marketing is not the only industry that is grappling with ROI. It appears information technology is having exactly the same problem proving that it improves the bottom line. The fact that the big guns, such as Microsoft and Hewlett Packard,...

Hedging customer risk.
May 18, 2003... With the advent of CRM technologies most companies are relentlessly collecting data on their customers and analysing them in terms of their future value to the company. Lifetime value analysis is now an everyday activity, even if it remains...

Strategic licensing.
May 18, 2003... Competitive advantage has generally been thought of as something that "I have and you don't", and naturally this has fuelled patent protection and the closely guarded development of intellectual property (IP). The idea that these properties are...

Reading a reverse auction.
May 18, 2003... Online reverse auctions are now common in business markets and in some consumer markets. While most marketers are concerned about their effect on price, it is important to note that the buyer is not only concerned with price, but also with the...

We're just not rational.
May 18, 2003... While it appears the number crunchers are winning in business, with more attention being paid to ROI than ever, there is movement away from traditional economics. This is the field of behavioural economics, which recognises that people do not...

We're just not rational.
May 18, 2003... While it appears the number crunchers are winning in business, with more attention being paid to ROI than ever, there is movement away from traditional economics. This is the field of behavioural economics, which recognises that people do not...

More lock-in, more cash.
May 18, 2003... With so much competition on the Internet, there has been a focus on how to make sites "sticky" and a consequent reliance on measures such as "duration of visit" to demonstrate good site design. However, while duration of visit may be...

Continuity or cusp.
May 18, 2003... At any one time, there are new business phases beginning while older trends are continuing. The herald of a new phase may be called a cusp, eg, when IBM brought out the first computer. Activities on the cusp always gain more attention than...

We forget our experiences.
May 25, 2003... The brand experience is widely perceived to be a key factor in whether people choose to buy again or not. However, it is debatable whether people really remember their experiences. This is particularly so when they are asked to compare...

Satisfied, but not loyal.
May 25, 2003... The debate over the links, if any, between satisfaction and loyalty continues to rage. One software company has found there is no correlation between customer satisfaction scores and purchase behaviour. This is despite spending considerable...

Few winners through IT.
May 25, 2003... The history of the impact of major innovations on business strategy shows that they initially provide opportunities for competitive advantage, but even if they are truly disruptive technologies they eventually become commodities. Examples of...

Strategy to development.
May 25, 2003... The debate over whether it is better to be a pioneer or a follower in a new category remains unresolved for many people. Perhaps the logical reason for the lack of certainty is that there is no easy answer, and sometimes it pays to be a...

How IT affects B2B.
May 25, 2003... The whole concept of relationship marketing developed in the B2B sector in the 1980s, but since then the rise of IT has heavily influenced the way that many business relationships are begun and maintained. However, recent research suggests that...

Segmentation outcomes.
May 25, 2003... Segmentation studies have often been criticised over their validity and whether they actually reflect actionable differences between segments. Some studies have even shown that there are no real differences between buyers of directly competing...

Social software follows people.
May 25, 2003... The reason why technologies, such as mobile phones and email, have taken off is because they so easily support the basic need for people to talk to each other. Other more recent manifestations are instant messaging, texting and blogging, all of...

Touching matters.
May 25, 2003... One of the reasons why many widely-hyped Internet retailers failed may be that people actually want to touch the goods before they buy them. This view is supported by academic research that shows people vary in their need for touch (NFT) and,...

The ethnic paradox.
May 25, 2003... Attempts to reflect the ethnic diversity of many countries are not always met with enthusiasm. One UK example shows that advertising using different ethnic groups can attract the attention of those groups, but it also often attracts their scorn...

Rhetorical ads stick.
May 25, 2003... What makes an ad memorable is one of the magic ingredients for advertisers. Use of rhetorical figures, such as metaphor, pun or rhyme, appear to imprint the ad more fully in someone's mind. This is so, whether they are directed to process it...