Nilewide Marketing Review articles from November 2004

Nilewide Marketing Review archives from November 2004

A customer focus strategy.
November 7, 2004... During the internet boom, a number of companies created the senior position of Chief Customer Officer. The role was charged with increasing the share of wallet from each customer, as opposed to the more traditional structure that focuses on...

A model for internal marketing.
November 7, 2004... Internal marketing has been an important strategy for many companies but, like most areas of marketing, has often not been well understood or appreciated by senior managers. Consequently, there has been little senior management responsibility...

MR measures up.
November 7, 2004... The clamour to measure the effectiveness of marketing and its various tools grows ever louder, but whether it is reflected in the actions of successful companies is another question. One recent US study of marketing research (MR) departments...

Investing styles.
November 7, 2004... One way to understand human behaviour is to look at the way people approach their finances, and especially their different styles of investing money. It is often argued that, with wider access to information, people are able to make better,...

Technology made simple.
November 7, 2004... While technology is there to serve us, it often appears as though we are here to serve it. Too often we seem to be slaves rather than masters of our technology. One of the main reasons for this is because each new technology is so irrefutably...

Put the pressure on.(Brief Article)
November 7, 2004... The power of pressure groups continues to increase well beyond their actual membership as they learn how to use marketers' tools against them. One of the latest to increase its power is the American Family Association. It has very effectively...

Two sides of Do Not Call.(Brief Article)
November 7, 2004... While the recipients of cold calls at mealtimes may be cheering, the US Do Not Call Registry has had a deleterious effect on telemarketers. Estimates suggest the size of call lists has fallen about 20-50% for the higher volume callers and a...

Demographics of satisfaction.(Brief Article)
November 7, 2004... Satisfaction is a widely-used measure of marketing success and as a predictor of future repurchase but has its detractors, especially those who believe loyalty is a better measure. However, most of the satisfaction research is presented as an...

Square-eyed loyalty.(Brief Article)
November 7, 2004... As advertisers become increasingly perturbed about the number of people who are switching off their TVs, or simply multi-tasking, they must find ways to woo them back. One approach is to take the hackneyed idea of loyalty cards into a new area...

Brands among individuals.
November 14, 2004... Brands significantly reduce the cost of taking products or services to market through their efficiency at reaching many people with a promise to deliver a clear, differentiating benefit. Over time, brands make purchase decisions easier and...

Connecting with identities.(consumers)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2004... Many people buy certain brands because they embody a particular identity or lifestyle. This means that marketers are keen to associate their products with a desirable identity. However, merely having a desirable identity is not enough if that...

Brands and company value.
November 14, 2004... The intangible value of brands is a much researched and discussed topic, but we still lack a good understanding of what is the best branding strategy for increasing the value of a company. There are generally three potential strategies: a...

Globalisation and marketing.
November 14, 2004... While marketing has played a role in the impact of globalisation, it is only one element of a complex process. It may often appear, from anti-globalisation protests, that it is the brand that is responsible for globalisation, and for its...

Clutter free.(Business Management)
November 14, 2004... Much attention has recently been paid to the complexity of life and the way consumers are overwhelmed with too much choice. Yet, much of the complexity begins in the way that companies are run. According to a new book, Conquering complexity in...

Responsible to whom?(Corporate social responsibility)
November 14, 2004... Many companies are concerned with raising their profile in corporate social responsibility (CSR), particularly if they have suffered a slight to their reputations. This is unfortunate, given that social responsibility is a much wider mandate,...

Shopping religiously.
November 14, 2004... Religion is often underestimated in our secular society, yet it appears to have a strong effect on shopping behaviour. A study in Mauritius, a culture influenced by a few active religions, found clear differences between Hindu, Muslim, and...

Problem of placement.(Brief Article)
November 14, 2004... Product placement has now reached into most areas of TV, film, and other entertainment media, yet we still lack the right tools to measure its effectiveness. There are a number of proprietary research products available and they tend to either...

More affinity marketing.
November 14, 2004... Affinity marketing is a collaborative marketing effort between two or more companies in order to acquire or retain more customers. In an environment where marketing budgets are being cut, or not growing, and there is a greater emphasis on...

To try or buy?(Acquisitions and mergers)
November 14, 2004... While some companies have a strategy of making acquisitions, and others specialise in alliances, there is still a skill in deciding which is appropriate. Companies that keep doing what they think they are good at may miss other opportunities,...

Hardwiring and unlearning habits.
November 21, 2004... As our knowledge of how people make decisions improves, it has become clear that influencing their purchase behaviour is far more complex than we thought. Even so, this does not mean we should ignore recent advances in neurobiology or continue...

New products not promotions.
November 21, 2004... Any serious consideration of the impact of marketing strategies and tactics needs to cover top line revenues, bottom lines, and changes in the value of the company, over both the long and short terms. The US auto industry provides a suitable...

A dashboard of metrics for the board.
November 21, 2004... Marketing's lack of influence at board level in most companies is a multifaceted problem that relates, not only to its past lack of successes, but also to changing emphases in the skills required to manage a company. Despite its lack of...

Interactive is old hat.
November 21, 2004... One of the much-touted features of technology is its ability to be interactive, and marketers are enamoured with their new abilities to interact with customers. Yet interactivity itself is nothing new, for example, the telephone is more...

The tangibility of goods.
November 21, 2004... While consumers are always somewhat sensitive to price rises, it appears that there is a difference in their reaction depending on whether the price increase applies to products or to services. This is because services are more intangible than...

Ending the relationship.(Brief Article)
November 21, 2004... While beginning relationships with customers is often a focal task for many companies, ending them is regularly disregarded. This is because no-one wants to admit that a relationship can end. Yet there are many kinds of ending, each of which...

The shape bias.(Brief Article)
November 21, 2004... When marketers are considering a change of packaging, they need to be aware of the relationship between shape and volume perceptions. This is because a package that attracts attention is more likely to be perceived as bigger. Therefore, a brand...

Extinctive marketing.(Brief Article)
November 21, 2004... One of the risks of market research is that it favours the average. In practice, this means that the concepts or ideas that create strong feelings struggle to get past the research stage. However, wanting to avoid the strongly held feelings,...

Ads on blogs.(Brief Article)
November 21, 2004... The recent US election again showed the power of blogs, as one forced the Bush campaign to change one of its ads. With over 30,000 visitors per week, most of whom are assumed to be rather independent thinkers, the logical question is whether...

Getting all the credit.(Brief Article)
November 21, 2004... Frequent flyer programs are supposed to induce greater loyalty to an airline and its partners, but the real benefactors of these programs are not the airlines or the passengers, but the credit card partners. Nowhere is this clearer than in the...

In search of a problem.
November 28, 2004... There is an all too common pattern in marketing, and probably other disciplines, of creating theories and techniques that seem destined to fail in just a short period of time. This was the case for CRM, integrated marketing communications and...

To kill or keep.
November 28, 2004... While the theory of brand portfolio management is sound, putting it into practice can be very difficult. This is because it goes against many of the things that marketing holds dear, such as the sanctity of brands, the push to extend the...

The creative consumer.
November 28, 2004... It is often assumed, when products come to market, that their benefits, meanings and uses are already fixed. Yet, people do not always use products in the way marketers intended, and they contribute new uses or meanings. The process of using,...

Creativity in the wild.
November 28, 2004... Creativity, like innovation, is both sought-after and misunderstood, and it is vital to human endeavour. Yet there are common beliefs about creativity that will hamper it, or even quash it completely. One Harvard research study analysed the...

The empowered cynics.
November 28, 2004... TV continues to be a powerful advertising medium despite the threats to its dominance from alternatives. It remains an effective means to make emotional connections, as it involves sight and sound. It is a shared experience that facilitates the...

Age-related recall or persuasion.
November 28, 2004... Recall and persuasion measures are commonly used to judge the potential effectiveness of advertising yet there has been little attempt to look at the influence of age on these results. When responses of consumers aged 18-35 are compared with...

Deception and promises.
November 28, 2004... Many companies have at some point lost the trust of their customers, but acted quickly to restore it. This is because trust is very valuable and, it is said, can not be easily restored once damaged. One study aimed to understand the influence...

Unshakeable belief in advertising.(Brief Article)
November 28, 2004... US ad industry leaders are changing their views on the major challenges confronting their industry. More than three quarters believe that DVRs like TiVo, will have a significant impact, with over 20% believing DVRs will kill the 30 second TV ad...

Deep commitment phobia?
November 28, 2004... Deeply committed organisational cultures are often touted as the route to competitive advantage, due to innovation and commitment to excellence. But deep commitment has its risks. Deeply committed people can be hard to manage because they can...

Sleep on it.
November 28, 2004... Even though sleep takes up a large chunk of our lives (25 years), we tend to pay little attention to it. Yet as we increasingly demand service at all hours, the Future Foundation predicts that, by 2020, up to 13 million people in the UK will be...