Nilewide Marketing Review articles from September 2005

Nilewide Marketing Review archives from September 2005

The loyalty myth.(customer retention and gaining customers-evaluation )
September 4, 2005... When Reichheld first studied and then extolled the benefits of customer retention, as opposed to finding new customers, he may not have realised just how influential it would become. Marketing seems to have seized on loyalty as a kind of...

Postmodern, post-global.(globalization and effects)
September 4, 2005... Theodore Levitt's famous 1983 article, "The globalization of markets" heralded an era of thinking beyond national borders to the whole world. Levitt when so far as to suggest that companies could treat the entire globe as a single market....

A twisting road ahead.(Technological innovations)
September 4, 2005... Many people will be shocked to realise how slow business is to develop and benefit from new technologies. For example, it is widely thought that the internet was developed and grew to be ubiquitous in only a few years. But the reality is that...

From the end to signals.(resisting company's downfall before it actually happens)
September 4, 2005... There is no shortage of books proclaiming "The end of …", and the flow of such titles is set to continue. But, most of these books, while sometimes insightful, tend to neglect the importance of reading the weak signals that portend a...

Customers as inventors.
September 4, 2005... One of the misconceptions about creativity is that it is inherent within some people but not others. It is one of the reasons why companies employ certain people to be creative but do not consider that others might also contribute to the...

Trigger hybrid vigour!
September 4, 2005... When companies make the decision to acquire another, the decisions are generally made on the basis of increasing market share or increasing synergies. It would be less likely that they want to challenge their existing cultures or invigorate...

Growing with brands.
September 4, 2005... While the importance of the connection between self-concept and brand has long been recognised, its development in children is still a less studied area. The development of these connections has important implications for marketers and for...

Guaranteed profits.
September 4, 2005... Retailers in seasonal and fashion categories have often demanded guaranteed profit margins from suppliers, because these categories tend to be higher risk in terms of sales demand and unsold stock is difficult to clear. But, suppliers have...

Who is winning more?(efficient customer response programs)(Brief Article)
September 4, 2005... Despite the media discussion of the win-win potential of efficient customer response programs between large retailers and suppliers, such as Wal-Mart and P&G, many suppliers continue to feel that the retailers are benefiting far more and even...

Biased against innovation.(failure rate effect on business creativity)
September 11, 2005... The failure rate for new products is estimated to be anywhere from 40% to 90%, and there are good reasons to believe that the samples used may underestimate the real rate of failure. Many reasons are given for this high failure rate, including...

Planning for conversations.
September 11, 2005... If the goal of a marketing communications program is to have a conversation then we probably need to rethink some of our media planning concepts, such as reach and frequency. Instead of these current concepts it may be more appropriate to think...

Is it all about search?
September 11, 2005... The potential impact of TiVo on TV advertising has been widely discussed, but a more interesting perspective may be that TiVo, and other technologies such as podcasting, are really part of the push to search being the single most important...

Too much engagement?(online games and short films as marketing tools)
September 11, 2005... The rise in the use of online games and short films as marketing tools attests to marketers' desires to engage more deeply with a brand. Some of the games are designed to compete with the commercially available electronic games and follow their...

A final call?
September 11, 2005... As outbound telemarketing becomes a virtual no go in the USA, due to do not call lists, call centre operators in other countries must face up to the challenge of remaining viable. A key to understanding how they may survive comes from...

Time is not always money.
September 11, 2005... In the West time and money are easily and frequently equated, we are paid an hourly rate and the busier we are the more "time is money". This is also reflected in our Western desire for instant consumption and gratification. But other cultures...

Famous in a neurone.
September 11, 2005... As the marketing world seems ever ready to jump on the latest piece of neuroscientific insight, one recent advance gives credence to the warning that much of the information is preliminary and probably easily misinterpreted. This recent study...

A long way to the target.
September 11, 2005... US research, supported by companies with an interest in direct marketing, shows that target marketing accounts for close to 50% of marketing budgets, and most companies plan to increase their expenditure on target marketing tools, including...

The good with the community bad.
September 11, 2005... Brand communities appeal to many marketers as a means to attract new customers and to maintain the involvement of existing customers. And while the benefits to a brand of some of the better known communities are well known, such as Harley...

A radio library.
September 11, 2005... The hype about podcasting may be focused around young people and music, but of greater interest is in how podcasts can act like TiVo does for TV. What podcasting can do is allow the storing of and access to radio programs that were broadcast in...

Seeking to recommend.
September 18, 2005... There is no doubting the influence of word-of-mouth (WOM) on brand choice, but it appears that all WOM is not equal. For example, there are differences in the impact of WOM in different categories. In one recent study, 59% of people had found...

Panels of unsought WOM.
September 18, 2005... The challenge of how to maximise sought-for word-of-mouth (WOM) is still beyond most of the offerings from the new breed of WOM agencies, including the P&G created agency Tremor. The Tremor approach is to build a panel of "connectors", those...

Postmodern credit cards.
September 18, 2005... Credit cards are such an everyday part of life that most marketers probably give little consideration to their positive roles as lifestyle enhancers and their negative effects of placing many people in a "debtors prison". The significance of...

No simple lifecycle.(technologies)
September 18, 2005... Much of the strategy literature about the life stages of new technologies suggests they tend to follow an S curve. There is a rather flat period after introduction, where performance may be below that of existing technologies and uptake is...

The time for analytics?
September 18, 2005... The gradual demise of segmentation due to technologies that can truly analyse individual customer data in real time, and deliver insights directly to the customer contact person, is getting closer (at least in the eyes of people from...

Local, dynamic planning.
September 18, 2005... As marketing continues to struggle to regain credibility with other senior managers, it is reasonable to assume that marketing managers would follow the rather linear approaches to planning and implementation that are advocated and taught by...

Powerful but not so profitable.
September 18, 2005... The power of retailers has unsettled many brand manufacturers in recent years, but it is interesting to note that despite increasing their power retailers are not increasing their profitability. This lack of growth in profitability comes from...

Ads and market share: a partial picture.
September 18, 2005... A well recognised advantage for brands with a large market share is they are able to spend relatively less on advertising as a proportion of market share compared to brands with a small market share. In effect small brands (not just during the...

Too many results: poor choice.(online search)(Brief Article)
September 18, 2005... One of the great advantages of the internet is being able to search for the best possible solution to a problem or purchase need, based on a number of criteria. As search technology improves, most approaches provide ordered lists of options...

Wanted, blogger apply now.
September 18, 2005... Only about 4% of US companies have corporate blogs, but this number is slowly growing and "blog writer" is a new job tile. The main corporate users of blogs remain the technology companies, but some examples demonstrate their wider potential...

We are what we love.
September 25, 2005... The fragmented selves of the postmodern consumer may be well accepted, but it is interesting to reflect on research that suggests there is a more core self and that consumption reflects this core rather than multiple selves. This is perhaps...

Head in the sand effect.
September 25, 2005... Our natural tendency to avoid negative emotions and the role this plays in decision-making is well recognised. But in the marketplace, consumers are faced with imperfect and missing information, which could impact on their decision making. One...

Keep it local.
September 25, 2005... One disappointment of the ongoing push to globalisation is that it has often failed to increase profit margins and, in many cases, has prompted them to fall. The consequence has usually been endless rounds of acquisitions to prop up...

Who is doing the branding?
September 25, 2005... The beliefs that brands are held in consumers' heads or that companies alone decide what the brand is, both overlook the fact that there are multiple influences on the process of branding. At times, the proliferation of brand methodologies and...

Resisting the path of last resistance.
September 25, 2005... There is a great deal of interest in encouraging customers to co-create their own solutions or even to design products. Companies may wonder whether some people are inherently more creative or whether they must simply provide the conditions for...

Mind and market share?(grabing market using brand )
September 25, 2005... In spite of a plethora of brand equity models, the search continues for an ultimate model that can subsume all others. While some believe that brand equity is a function of its market share, others believe that it is how the brand is held in...

SMS is relevant.
September 25, 2005... Mobile or m-commerce may not have lived up to expectations, but text messaging appears to be a quite well accepted form of direct marketing, as long as the basics of permission marketing are followed. When people opt in to receive text message...

Marketing takes stock.(Brief Article)
September 25, 2005... Most people would be familiar with the Hollywood Stock Exchange which trades H$ on the value of a movie. The price moves in response to promotional campaigns, reviews and audience reactions, with anecdotal reports that the value placed on some...

Hormonal marketing.
September 25, 2005... Interest in the role of fragrances in marketing is increasing as we learn more about the powerful influence of smell. Taking this a step further are hormones, which we cannot always consciously smell, but which influence us subconsciously. The...

Screen or page?(Brief Article)
September 25, 2005... People have rapidly become accustomed to reading information on a screen and it might be assumed that they understand or recall what they read in the same way as if it were printed on a page. However, it is common for people to claim that they...