2423 Posts Found

The ‘social media revolution’ is over-hyped nonsense. The real business opportunity is to become more relevant and meaningful to customers in ways that create sales.

Few will question the impact social media is having on people’s lives. From assisting political revolutions to simply reconnecting us with old friends, social media is touching our lives in meaningful ways every day. But with all the stories you’re hearing … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jeff Molander | Source: ChangeThis | Subject: Marketing / Sales

You’ve got a list of e-mail addresses and it’s growing and growing. Great! But you also know that sending everyone on your list the exact same message may not be the most efficient marketing strategy. The last thing you want is to drive a recipient to click on the dreaded “unsubscribe” link due to a lack of interest.

An effective e-mail marketing campaign is all about … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Janine Popick | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Using this script below, I will demonstrate nine of the most effective sales techniques info-marketers are using, and how you can use them, too—the slimy, manipulative part aside.

Content: Article | Author: Mike Michalowicz | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subject: Marketing / Sales

When marketing researchers explore brand perception, we tend to focus on eight primary areas. These qualitative markers go beyond the typical gauges of brand awareness to encompass how consumers feel about a brand, how they respond to it, talk about it, and interact with it. Let’s define the eight areas perception studies cover and take a deeper look at each.

Content: Article | Author: Kentin Waits | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Behind many a successful product, there’s a sharply focused intention to improve lives.

Content: Case Study | Author: Jim Stengel | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Marketing / Sales | Industry: Consumer Products | Company: Procter & Gamble (P&G)

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To reach it’s full impact, customer experience needs to be thought of as a strategic agenda item on par with and actually integrated with corporate strategy, managing the brand, and new product development. Customer experience should not be confused with existing efforts to focus on customer service or touch-point management. These efforts are focused more on delivering tactical reengineering of customer-facing processes.

As a customer experience … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael T. Kanazawa | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Word-of-mouth buzz is highly valued by marketers, but generating it can be a tricky proposition. In a new paper, Wharton marketing professors Jonah Berger and Raghuram Iyengar discuss how marketers can be more precise in crafting their campaigns to achieve better results. It’s not as simple as blanketing the web with pop-up ads or blasting the airwaves with commercials, they note. It’s about picking the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Some companies attempt to segment customers based on characteristics such as profitability and cost to serve. But not many organizations have mastered global segmentation: creating shared messages and comparable selling models for like customers regardless of location. Across markets worldwide, enlightened manufacturers, retailers and service providers are leveraging customer commonalities.

Content: Article | Authors: Robert E. Wollan, Tzeh Chyi Chan | Source: Outlook Journal (Accenture) | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Only if managers define market segments that correspond to the circumstances in which customers find themselves when making purchasing decisions can they accurately theorize which products will connect with their customers. We believe that customer segmentation (or categorization) should be based on the notion that customers “hire” products to do specific “jobs.” Doing so will help managers segment their markets to mirror the way their … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor | Source: CIO Magazine | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation, Marketing / Sales

For many companies, scoring a competitive advantage entails pouring millions of dollars into research and development to come up with revolutionary new products and technologies.

But new research by INSEAD Assistant Professor of Marketing Myungwoo Nam and associates Jing Wang of the University of Iowa and Angela Lee of Northwestern University shows that companies don’t always need to focus on developing new tools and products … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Upgrades to existing product lines make up a huge part of corporate research and development activity, and with every upgrade comes the decision of how to brand it. Harvard Business School marketing professors John T. Gourville and Elie Ofek teamed up with London Business School’s Marco Bertini to suss out the best practices for naming next-generation products.

Content: Article | Author: Carmen Nobel | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Though webinars are live and sometimes free-flowing, they should never be disorganized. Careful planning demonstrates respect for your attendees and their time. Here are 47 tips for hosting a webinar that’ll wow your audience.

Content: Article | Author: Agnieszka Wilinska | Source: MarketingProfs | Subject: Marketing / Sales

In practice, competitive brands are mostly very similar. Michael Porter’s “sustainable competitive advantage” suffers from two disadvantages: Competitive advantages seldom exist; and if they do, they are rarely sustainable.

Almost any difference between brands that makes a difference in sales gets copied very quickly. “The trends in our technology lead to competing products being more and more the same,” the famed advertising guru James Webb Young … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Andrew Ehrenberg | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Brand, Competition, Marketing / Sales

Marketers complain that their business colleagues and the public don’t take their work as seriously as they would like. But marketers have only themselves to blame. They tend to set goals that cannot be fulfilled: sustained growth; brand differentiation; persuasive advertising; added values; maximizing profits or shareholder value; and instant new knowledge based on just a single set of isolated data.

Content: Quotation | Author: Andrew Ehrenberg | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Most boards should pay more attention to marketing governance to accomplish two main benefits for the company: shareholder value enhancement and the effective management of those emerging and future risks which marketing might affect. This article discusses the linkage of marketing to shareholder value and risk, and notes important areas for boards of directors to consider if they are to achieve clearer insight and better … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ian Gordon | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Marketing / Sales

The concept behind any dialogue has to be focused on increasing the consumer’s sense of comfort or value. If you offer incentives on brands people don’t accept or know, you aren’t offering anything. But if your offer underscores a key value of your proposed relationship, an incentive can work wonders.

Content: Quotation | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Brand, Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

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People do not buy products but meanings. People use things for profound emotional, psychological, and socio-cultural reasons as well as utilitarian ones. Analysts have shown that every product and service in consumer as well as industrial markets has a meaning. Firms should therefore look beyond features, functions, and performance, and understand the real meanings users give to things.

Content: Quotation | Author: Roberto Verganti | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Marketing / Sales

In a multi-polar world—a volatile, interdependent, globalized marketplace where upstart rivals can emerge quickly from any corner—competitiveness at speed remains imperative. But many of the previous bases for competition are no longer viable. Companies offer mostly similar products and use comparable technology. Proprietary technologies can be copied quickly. Physical location matters less when customers use the Internet to search and transact.

What’s left as a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research, Marketing / Sales