Nilewide Marketing Review articles from September 2003

Nilewide Marketing Review archives from September 2003

Mass self-prophecy?
September 1, 2003... The self-prophecy effect is well recognised, particularly in relation to influencing normative behaviour. For example, if people are encouraged to say they will eat lower fat foods, go to the gym more regularly or recycle paper, they are more...

Flintstone marketing.
September 1, 2003... One growing, although controversial, field of science is evolutionary psychology. It is based on the claim that our bodies and minds are still adapted to conditions that existed during the Stone Age, which in evolutionary terms is the recent...

Equity is in strategic drivers.
September 1, 2003... Brand equity remains a confusing area despite the many claims and its potential importance. At present the concept spans a spectrum from customer brand value at one end to economic brand value for the company at the other. On their own, each is...

Myths of the model.
September 1, 2003... The American/Western European business model is often held up as the ultimate blueprint for how things ought to be done. Unfortunately, many beliefs about it are based on a caricature of the model, rather than the way it really works. This is...

Death of the Value Chain.
September 1, 2003... The concept of the Value Chain has been around since Michael Porter first invented it for manufacturing firms, but even though from 1960 to 1999 manufacturing companies' share of GNP in the US halved from 30% to 15%, the Value Chain (VC) lives...

It's your call on mobile privacy.
September 1, 2003... Privacy is about to dominate the marketing agenda, as millions of people register on "do not call" lists, or complain about pop-up ads or the barrage of spam. And the driver of consumer angst will be the arrival of m-commerce via mobile...

Frequent flyers!
September 1, 2003... The volume of sales flyers delivered to households continues to grow rapidly in many countries, as retailers find they drive sales of advertised brands. But the dramatic increase in both frequency and number of pages of these flyers is also...

Drink the advertising.
September 1, 2003... Alcohol and alcohol advertising have always attracted their fair share of opponents and both UK and Australian governments are revisiting their alcohol strategy. Unfortunately, while the alcohol industry spends considerable sums on advertising...

The behaviouralists have it.
September 1, 2003... Behaviouralist economists contradict traditional economics because they say that people do not always act rationally. People judge their wellbeing relative to others, they take action depending on how choices are presented, and they fear loss...

It's unreal.
September 1, 2003... It appears that many people are interested in what is fake, virtual and overblown, but there may be an equal and opposite trend towards finding a new version of reality. Marketing has always been famous for its hype and spin, but some people...

The agency sees many faces.
September 14, 2003... The tendency of advertising practitioners and marketers to avoid theory, and instead concentrate on the practical, may be the cause of some ineffective work. For example, consumer research tends not to specify a model of the consumer, instead...

Brands lead to value.
September 14, 2003... The quest to link the soft measures of marketing with hard financial measures continues, fuelled by academics and developers of proprietary systems and databases. Yet, despite all the activity, new studies still struggle to show how building...

Dropping your bundle.
September 14, 2003... One of the more obvious trends in recent years has been to go beyond a product focus to attempt to sell solutions to problems. This is a logical response to overcrowded commodity markets, because it appears to offer companies closer...

Don't lose the metaphor.
September 14, 2003... Metaphors are widely used in marketing and business, and in everyday life, but their real potential is often unrealised because the nature and power of metaphor is poorly understood. Because metaphors are by nature unclear, there is a tendency...

The corporate village.
September 14, 2003... Charles Handy is well known for upsetting some rather traditional thinkers, and his views on the way corporations ought to be run are no exception. Handy introduced the idea of the corporation as a village, which may sound quaint, but is more a...

Sustainability means reputations.
September 14, 2003... The fact that some companies use credible reporting practices as proposed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GBR), and others only pay lip service to sustainable practices, only highlights the paucity of proof that sustainability equals...

Innovative or paranoid?
September 14, 2003... Opinions on whether dominant companies are more or less innovative than their competitors probably differ as a result of overly simplistic perspectives on what is dominance and what are the expectations of managers in an industry. The first...

Hierarchies: flat chat.
September 14, 2003... In the 1990s, it was fashionable to lose a tier of middle management and become a leaner, flatter organisation. Some recent research of companies during the period 1986-1999, suggests that, not only was it fashionable, but many companies did in...

No ads? Will pay.
September 14, 2003... It appears that people are slowly turning from free to paid media to escape the ads, confirming the old adage, "you get what you pay for". Rather than spend time with free TV and radio, or even newspapers and magazines, they are turning to...

Budget for internal branding.
September 14, 2003... Internal branding is neglected in most companies despite the fact that employees spend about eight hours a day at work, compared to customers who are unlikely to spend eight minutes a year thinking about a particular brand. For a marketing...

Exploring evolutionary psychology.
September 21, 2003... Analysis Over the last 50 or more years marketing has evolved from being a discipline based on economics to one influenced by many fields of study, including psychology, sociology, neuroscience and behavioural economics. Each new influence...

Making life easier.
September 28, 2003... Once upon a time, people took care of their own needs - they did not pay companies to manufacture their food or clothes, or to provide personal services, such as travel or hairdressing. However, the fact that what companies provide is so much a...

The age of influence.
September 28, 2003... One of the biggest changes in the past 50 years has been a shift in the nature of authority. After the industrial revolution, people in authority, such as priests, police, and politicians, were highly respected, and messages were more credible...

Happiness, we just adapt.
September 28, 2003... Just as it is very difficult to predict the future with any accuracy, people are also very poor at predicting their emotional reactions. One example of this is that they routinely overestimate how much something will influence their future...

Customer focused and other myths.
September 28, 2003... One of the central tenets of marketing, customer focus, may be no more than a myth that makes executives feel good. This controversial view may not be popular, but it does seem to reflect the reality that in some companies customers do not come...

Pioneer or scaler?
September 28, 2003... The common wisdom that it is the pioneers, or first-movers, who take the market, has proved to be misguided. Time and again, the companies that succeed with a new technology are not the ones who invented it. Xerox, for example, has consistently...

An empowering culture.
September 28, 2003... The spotlight is on corporate governance and companies are scrambling to make sure that they comply with new, tighter regulations. However, applying more rules from above can have the effect of disempowering employees, particularly if they...

Trust and satisfaction.
September 28, 2003... Customer satisfaction is widely believed to be critical for customer retention and positive word-of-mouth (WOM), but the impact of trust on retention and WOM could be different from that of satisfaction and potentially mitigate its effects....

Misuse of inputs.
September 28, 2003... One way to speed up decision-making is by focusing on the available information and judging outcomes by it. This could make sense, but there is not always a straight line between inputs and outcomes. While it might seem as if having more...

In the darknet.
September 28, 2003... One of the benefits, and downfalls, of the Internet is the way it offers so much public accessibility. But not everyone wants this level of transparency, for example, political dissidents who want to express themselves freely, companies that...

Sponsorship wreck.
September 28, 2003... Sponsorship is often hailed as a valuable marketing tool because it helps to cut through the clutter to provide something that people really value. There is some evidence to suggest that fans of various sports do appreciate the financial...