Nilewide Marketing Review articles from October 2005

Nilewide Marketing Review archives from October 2005

Being there: presence in marketing.
October 30, 2005... Analysis Back in 2000, US technology marketing consultant and author, Regis McKenna, set out to provoke the marketing world by proclaiming that Coke was not a great brand, rather it was a great infrastructure system. Without the...

Real or not: risks are a buzz.
October 23, 2005... Risk taking behaviour appears to be part of our collective genetic make-up, whether it is gambling, sports, or having an affair we seem unable to help ourselves. This is despite our rational, developed side that knows that this behaviour...

Older rich and younger poor.(targeting the youth market)
October 23, 2005... The days of free education, automatic pensions, and cheap property are over. Many young people, dubbed "generation broke", are already deep in debt when they leave university and rely on credit cards to get them through. Meanwhile, there is a...

Metrics and motives.(Editorial)
October 23, 2005... There appears to be a consensus that marketing needs metrics if it is to move forward with dignity into the age of accountability. Yet this may be less of a consensus than it first appears due to three factors: there is little agreement on...

Money in a green mouth.
October 23, 2005... It is often difficult to assess whether companies are truly making an effort to be environmentally responsible. The companies making the most noise may not necessarily be the ones who are doing the most, eg, Wal-Mart, meanwhile, smaller...

Unintended consequences.
October 23, 2005... Systems dynamics is a field of science that simulates the complex flows of real-life experiences and is used to suggest solutions to difficulties. The principles of system dynamics have been incorporated into scenario planning, "lean...

Customer and brand connections.
October 23, 2005... There is still no accepted structure for the nature of relationships between customers and brands, although many attempts have been made. They are inhibited by the inability to deconstruct such concepts as "trust", "satisfaction" or...

Copy testing has a brainwave.(Brief Article)
October 23, 2005... When a new technology comes along, it is reasonable to ask whether it yields credible results, and whether it adds insights that older technologies could not deliver. In the case of brain imaging, it must be asked whether it can supplant copy...

Imitate excellence?(Lockheed Shipbuilding Co.'s management)(Brief Article)
October 23, 2005... Management fads should be the curse of the business world — as inevitably as night follows day, the next fad follows the last. Nothing more typifies the disastrous nature of this following so-called excellence than the example of...

Just your mere presence.(social impact theory)
October 23, 2005... When we are in the presence of others, we tend to behave differently than if there were no-one around. This is the basis of social impact theory (SIT). An example of its use in research is wanting to know whether having no-one, one or three...

Marketing and big business.(Brief Article)
October 23, 2005... It seems that marketing has more problems with its relationship with big business than it does with small business. A recent MORI/Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) poll found marked differences in priority, budgeting and board...

The dream of understanding.
October 16, 2005... Excitement about the potential of neuroscience to change marketing ignores some serious questions about our level of knowledge and the inadequacy of our state-of-the-art research tools to even begin to understand consciousness. Any mental...

Self-targeting.(trends in personal information management services )
October 16, 2005... Managing a database of customers is a monumental task and fraught with deceptions, dangers, and complexities. None of which is more important than the fact that 47% of British consumers do not want to be contacted by marketers at all and 10...

The end of service as we know it.(customer service trends)
October 16, 2005... While many companies trumpet the excellence of their customer service, most customers know the truth. Service has declined. For those of us who remember the days of the milkman, the real person on the phone, or being served petrol at the...

Read my lips.
October 16, 2005... Modern life assumes that everyone can read and write to a certain level, but the rates of functionally low literacy in America, Australia, and the UK are still alarmingly high and hover at around 50% of the population. It is perhaps...

Thrifty but not cheap.(Brief Article)
October 16, 2005... It is easy to ignore the size and growing importance of the secondhand or thrift market, due to perceptions that only low income people frequent such retail outlets or markets. In fact, the US thrift store market is worth over $8bill and that...

The health kickers.
October 16, 2005... Health and fitness is a global obsession and the market for products that meet this need is set to grow. In the US health-oriented products, such as functional foods, accounted for five of the seven food categories that experienced double...

Measuring the implicit.(effect of advertisements)(Brief Article)
October 16, 2005... Advertising has for too long been based on cognitive science rather than the more mysterious realm of the unconscious or the emotional. It is now understood that many ads get under the radar, but that does not mean they do not have an effect....

More media, less thinking.(Brief Article)
October 16, 2005... The amount of time spent with mass media continues to grow far beyond what would have been suspected even 10 years ago. A recent US study, suggests the average American spends nine hours a day with mass media, the main form still being TV but...

Differentiation and stock prices.
October 16, 2005... Brand differentiation should lead to increased purchases and ultimately to improved corporate performance, and a recent US study suggests this is the case. Even so, investors and analysts seem not to recognise the changes to brands and...

Who has good taste?(Brief Article)
October 16, 2005... There is a longstanding debate about whether consumers generally have good taste in the way they consume. Certain people become the arbiters of good taste and then it is up to the rest whether they choose to follow or not. Previous research...

Deter the tyre kickers.(Brief Article)
October 16, 2005... One common way of signalling pricing is to make general statements, such as "Most things below $50" or "Cheapest prices in town". This is non-committal advertising, as it does not state exactly what the customer is buying, nor does it commit...

The paradox of enhancement.
October 9, 2005... The flow of new technologies and new features for existing technologies continues unabated, primarily because technology companies use features as their key form of differentiation. Unfortunately, much of this technology is not used, even...

From mass to fetish.(managing product quality cycle)
October 9, 2005... Marketing is always coming up with a new, improved version, but what constitutes new or improved is a moot point. This is especially so when the new version is of poorer quality than the old one. Looking at the product quality cycle, it is...

When it's best we forget.(managing organizational forgetting)
October 9, 2005... While knowledge management is widely understood to be an important corporate skill, knowing when (and what) to unlearn, or forget, may be just as critical. Moreover, some companies "overlearn", and generalise from one bad experience to...

Why most brands are trustworthy.
October 9, 2005... It has often been claimed, particularly in a climate of fear and uncertainty, that a brand can stand out from the rest by owning customer trust. A great deal of research is undertaken in the quest to understand and measure trust. Tim Ambler...

Too many happy returns.(product returns research)
October 9, 2005... Product returns are expensive for retailers, yet our understanding of why people return is still rather limited. The problem may be in the product itself or in the customer, but a recent study suggests that it is related to the process of...

Do ads make kids eat bad foods?
October 9, 2005... The debate over the effects of advertising food to children is raging and the path is strewn with accusations at marketing for promoting obesity. At one level, it is natural to wonder why advertisers would spend 743 million pounds a year in...

Segment or mass?(investigation of segmentation strategy)
October 9, 2005... It is widely believed that a high level of competition favours a market segmentation strategy, although there is still a lack of evidence. As empirical data was not available, Australian researchers set out to investigate the link using...

I feel I can do it.(effect of perceived control)(Brief Article)
October 9, 2005... Everyone feels at some time that they have the ability to control events, and this feeling of mastery is described as "perceived control". It is one of the motivating factors for humans. People have different levels of perceived control...

Sustainable collaboration or competition.
October 9, 2005... As environmental problems mount, many companies have nominated a sustainable future as a key strategic goal, including the CEOs of BP, GE and Nissan. Many other companies have become involved in a host of initiatives, from working with...

Self-help branding.(brand identity)(Brief Article)
October 9, 2005... Interest in branding remains buoyant, despite the apparent decline in the effectiveness of many brand building tools, including advertising. Yet, there is a hint of the self-help book craze within much of the discussion on branding. All too...

The perils of marketing lit.(publishing industry)
October 2, 2005... Analysis (1) "Anybody who reads my [work] literally, I have no patience with. Relative to my conclusions and framework, if you adopt it hook, line, and sinker, then I think you're a fool. It ain't the Bible." Tom...