2403 Posts Found

Three actions are key as companies consider dynamic pricing models.

Content: Article | Author: Arnab Sinha | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing

If we only focus on the monetary barriers to adopting a product, we miss out on a lot. There are also time, effort and energy costs — ones that we are often unaware of. Consider when the real cost of change occurs in a transaction, and solve for that uncertainty.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jonah Berger | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Innovation, Marketing / Sales

Global consumer strategist Aparna Bharadwaj shares a fascinating glimpse at under-the-radar affinities that transcend cultures and borders — from the way people snack in China and Saudi Arabia to how people shop for clothes in the US and Russia. “There are patterns where you least expect them,” she says – and paying attention to them just might bring the world a little bit closer.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Aparna Bharadwaj | Sources: Boston Consulting Group (BCG), TED Conferences LLC | Subjects: Customer Related, International, Marketing / Sales

Inflation-fatigued shoppers are witnessing prices fluctuate across categories with unprecedented scale and frequency — a trend often seen as yet another cunning commercial scheme. Is the extra profit companies see from dynamic pricing worth the risk of alienating customers? If done well, companies shouldn’t be making that trade-off — dynamic pricing.

Content: Article | Authors: Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing

Companies are responding to a number of headwinds by transforming their marketing organizations to achieve measurable improvement in performance and efficiency and to ensure future sustainable growth. Chief marketing officers (CMO) are pursuing long-term changes instead of short-term fixes by focusing on structure, talent, and operating models—in that order—as they reshape their organizations.

Content: Article | Authors: Joe Simon, Lachelle Trout, Raakhi Agrawal, Shelby Senzer, Siwei He | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Marketing / Sales

We have not found a single market where customer needs are homogenous. Yet, time and time again, companies design products for the average customer.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Georg Tacke, Madhaven Ramanujam | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Marketing / Sales

For the past three decades, the business mantra has been “customer first.” Yet focusing on retaining and expanding an existing customer base often results in finer segmentation and the greater tailoring of offerings to better meet customer preferences, which will likely lead companies into too-small target markets of an existing industry.

The blue ocean strategist’s mantra is “noncustomers first.” By looking to noncustomers and building on … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Mi Ji, Renée Mauborgne, W. Chan Kim | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales, Strategy

Customer behavior and the study of why people make the purchase decisions that they do can be a complicated landscape to navigate in marketing.

The psychological tool of persuasion and the use of established persuasion techniques can help cut through the nuance of customer behavior to influence purchase decisions. That influence shapes customer behavior by helping them form useful mental shortcuts during the buying process.

Content: Article | Author: Sam Bowman | Source: MarketingProfs | Subject: Marketing / Sales

BCG has developed a unified pricing theory, manifested in a tool they call the Strategic Pricing Hexagon, by bringing all the disparate pricing ideas, and the drivers and forces behind them, into one master structure. This article shows how the Strategic Pricing Hexagon allows leaders to look beyond the numbers and develop a pricing strategy that can change the entire trajectory of their business and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Arnab Sinha, Jean-Manuel Izaret | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing

Personalization based on customer attributes and behavior is a familiar concept among marketers, and artificial intelligence is making it increasingly effective. AI-based hyper-personalization employs both sophisticated methods and far more data than previous methods and is far more precise as a result. Thomas H. Davenport discusses the role of AI in personalization as well as the growing backlash against personalization fueled by data privacy concerns. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Thomas H. Davenport | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Customer Related, IT / Technology / E-Business, Marketing / Sales

It turns out that our brains are wired to critique situations. And so if we’ve got a global economic downturn and the salesforce has really been hit hard by this, we’ll tend to focus on the people that are doing the worst and try to coach them and help them out. What we don’t often do is look at the best people and steal their … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Chip Heath | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Best Practices, Marketing / Sales

The words we use — or don’t use — impact decisions and, in turn, money. Money words are the execution arm of persuasion. If we can agree that the words we choose are persuasive levers — and our job is to pull those levers intentionally and strategically — then allow me to share with you two money words and one lose-money word. They are the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Joanna Wiebe | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Advertising, Marketing / Sales

Among advertising sequences, there’s a gold standard to build brand appeal in consumers’ minds.

Content: Article | Authors: Albert Valenti, Gokhan Yildirim, Koen Pauwels, Marc Vanhuele, Shuba Srinivasan | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Advertising, Marketing / Sales

When is the last time you took stock of your customer base? Two marketing and data experts say it’s due for a systematic review.

Content: Article | Authors: Anita Balchandani, Michael Ross, Peter Fader | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust.

Content: Quotation | Author: Kenneth Arrow | Source: The Atlantic Monthly | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, Marketing / Sales

Reducing investments in brand marketing during downturns backfires in many ways. Such budget cuts are sound bites that may play well on earnings calls, but their effectiveness is dubious at best—and destructive at worst. CMOs and CFOs should instead see times of economic uncertainty as a marketing and sales opportunity to double down on the right customers, gain share, enhance the value of their customer … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alex Almeida, Chris Murphy, David Ratajczak, Emily Kruger, Leonardo Fascione, Mario Simon | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Brand, Marketing / Sales

For decades, salespeople have been taught that there is only one possible reason for lost sales: that salespeople have failed to defeat the customer’s status quo. Perhaps the customer doesn’t fully appreciate the problem that their solution is designed to solve. Or maybe they don’t yet see enough daylight between their company’s solution and that of the competition. So, salespeople break out their arsenal of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Matthew Dixon, Ted McKenna | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Marketing / Sales

What makes an organisation an opinion leader and how it affects business revenue.

Content: Article | Author: Pawel Korzynski | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Brand marketing is an easy target when CMOs face pressure to shrink budgets in times of uncertainty. CMOs often struggle to resist such cuts because most companies lack an unequivocal answer to this long-lingering question: Can brand-marketing spending be dialed down as needed to shore up financials, or is it an essential, always-on investment that must be safeguarded to avoid devastating long-term impacts on the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alex Almeida, Chris Murphy, David Ratajczak, Emily Kruger, Leonardo Fascione, Mario Simon | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Brand, Marketing / Sales

When Raymond Loewy arrived in Manhattan, U.S. companies did not yet worship at the altars of style and elegance. That era’s capitalists were monotheistic: Efficiency was their only god. American factories—with their electricity, assembly lines, and scientifically calibrated workflow—produced an unprecedented supply of cheap goods by the 1920s, and it became clear that factories could make more than consumers naturally wanted. To sell more stuff, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Derek Thompson | Source: The Atlantic Monthly | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales