2423 Posts Found

Is this the end of brands? Of course not. Brands still play some important roles that are not likely to go away. And in categories where prestige, status, and emotional links to brands matter a great deal, the rate of change is likely to be slow. So luxury brands are on safer ground. Yet in domains where objective, specification-based quality is important—and can be assessed … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Emanuel Rosen, Itamar Simonson | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Brand, Marketing / Sales

Bonus programs are effective for motivating sales people, but also costly for companies to maintain. Doug Chung and Das Narayandas study several compensation schemes to see which work best.

Content: Article | Author: Roberta Holland | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Human Resources, Marketing / Sales, Organizational Behavior

Companies adept at using digital tools along the consumer decision journey are gaining a sizable lead over competitors.

Content: Article | Author: Jacques Bughin | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Marketing / Sales

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No consumer can absorb, interpret, store, recall and use all of the information available, not even all the relevant bits. This imbalance between available information and available mental processing and storage capacity gives rise to a necessary principle of scarcity. Without it, there would be no need for firms to compete for awareness and privileged positions in the consumer’s mind.

A direct corollary of limited capacity … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Niraj Dawar | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

When customers … come across a new product, their cognitively economical approach is to try to classify it, to sort it into a familiar bin or category, so they can make sense of it in familiar terms. If they can do this, they can efficiently apply existing knowledge. For example, coming across a bean bag for the first time, a customer might be confused. But … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Niraj Dawar | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

During a typical customer research process, we will interview customers and might ask them questions like these. All of these questions are customer and product discovery questions, almost identical to the ones product managers use to understand if the company has unlocked product-market fit. In addition, these interviews surface insights about marketing positioning and true perception in the market; customer support effectiveness; overselling; and product … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Tomasz Tunguz | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research

Setting the right price for your product or service is hard. In fact, determining price is one of the toughest things a marketer has to do, in large part because it has such a big impact on the company’s bottom line. One of the critical elements of pricing is understanding what economists call price elasticity. To better understand this concept and how it impacts marketing, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Amy Gallo, Jill Avery | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Pricing

Moving at the speed of the crowd has become mandatory for any company that is on the Web (which is just about every company). These companies must understand how influence gets peddled in the marketplace today (and constantly refresh their understanding) – and they must constantly reevaluate how customers are influenced and what the appropriate response should be. Readers will learn what the responses should … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Joshua B. Bellin, Paul F. Nunes | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

How can you create beautiful infographics without using Photoshop? I’m not a Photoshop expert, so I take days to create a basic infographic. I’m a Paint ninja, but I can’t create nice infographics by using Paint. So I searched for fast, easy, and cheap (even free) alternatives. [Easel.ly, Piktochart, Infogr.am, Venngage, Canva, Visme, Infoactive]

Content: Article | Author: Tamas Torok | Source: MarketingProfs | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Productivity / Work Tips

Do you know the “50/50 rule” of content marketing?

How about the “99:1 rule” of affiliate marketing?

Or the “25-50-25 rule” of time management for entrepreneurs?

Or Fred Gleeck’s “10X rule” of information product pricing?

This infographic shows you in a concise, graphic format the 12
important marketing rules of thumb every marketer should know.

Content: Article | Author: Bob Bly | Source: bly.com | Subject: Marketing / Sales

The first person to think seriously about how businesses function was Ronald Coase. In his groundbreaking 1937 paper he argued that firms gained competitiveness by reducing transaction costs, especially those related to information. In his view, firms could grow until the point that organizational costs cancelled out transactional benefits.

In the 1980s, Michael Porter built on this idea and made it more possible for … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Greg Satell | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

What makes things popular?

If you said advertising, think again. People don’t listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He’s studied why New York Times … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Jonah Berger | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Using big data to improve a business means more than just collecting the information, or even analyzing it — companies must develop a strategy for how to use the information to build their brands. Unfortunately, many firms are using big data tactically, rather than strategically. Marketers, in particular, are not realizing the full potential of big data —they’re mainly using it to drive programmatic advertising. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Colin Strong | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Marketing / Sales

Doesn’t every business want to maximize its profits? Pricing textbooks certainly all assume they do, or at least that they want to achieve a certain profit level under given constraints. But in truth businesses rarely focus on only profitability; most strive to satisfy various stakeholders and meet the goals of balanced scorecards. And even when a company is focused tightly on financial performance, there are … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Stefan Michel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Finance, Management, Pricing

Here are some sobering statistics for entrepreneurs. In 2011, more than 400,000 new business entities were launched in the United States, but 34% of those companies are now out of business. Two years from now, less than half will still be around. By 2018 only 30% will have survived.

What’s behind these failure rates? In many cases it’s a lack of salesmanship, says Waverly Deutsch, clinical … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Robin Mordfin | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales

According to Marketing Sherpa, email is consumers’ preferred method of communication with business, eclipsing social media. Research by Econsultancy cites 20% of sales can be attributed to the email channel, and McKinsey found email is forty-times as effective as Facebook or Twitter. Building an email opt-in list and optimizing your call-to-action and capture process is just as important as ever. But how are today’s top … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Linda Bustos | Source: Get Elastic | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Marketing / Sales

Advertisers often use multiple publishers for their online campaigns, but many are not using the best metrics to decide which publishers they should compensate, new Wharton research shows.

Research by Wharton marketing professor Ron Berman finds that the “last touch” or “last click” method advertisers typically employ to compensate publishers is the wrong way to go about it. Berman’s research shows that the “last click” … [ Read more ]

Content: Multimedia Content | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Advertising, Marketing / Sales

An important part of an optimized website is your pricing page. So how can you best structure it? How can you present the information in the most effective way to help your site visitors decide to start using your product or service? Here are seven rules for designing your pricing page for optimal conversion.

Content: Article | Author: Dimitar Stojanov | Source: MarketingProfs | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing

The sweet spot in marketing is the break point between individual and culture, where needs, values, and aspirations coalesce. […] People buy products to accomplish particular jobs. That job may be functional (a quarter-inch hole), social (fitting in on the job site), emotional (impressing your spouse), or aspirational (feeling like Norm Abram of This Old House). In most cases, it will be a combination. And … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Dick Martin | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales