Marketing

For several years now, marketers have been urged to embrace one-to-one marketing and to offer microsegmented consumers customized products and services through targeted outreach. While the "market of one" approach can pay off, says the author, it requires a significant upfront investment, including: implementing customer relationship management software applications; filtering, enhancing and cleaning customer data; and personalizing interactions (e-mail, billing, offers and so on). These activities take time and coordination of multiple parts of the organization (marketing, customer service, sales, information technology), which can be daunting for companies trying to react quickly to a changing environment. In addition, those systems have often produced disappointing results because their use was not well integrated with corporate strategy. Also, micro-marketing strategy, on its own, is too narrow. Companies still need to reach broad groups of people with messages that are not dependent on an individual's decision to open an envelope (whether virtual or physical), pick up the phone or click on a box. But broad-based, broadcast media is ineffective and expensive. Fortunately, there are alternative solutions, such as one-to-one targeting and the broadcasting of 30-second television spots. The author's research on trends in marketing spending and consumer attitudes about advertising reveals four strategies available to companies that want to reach broad groups of people without breaking their marketing budget. The strategies are liberally illustrated with examples of Nike, Microsoft, UBS, Delta, Sony, Procter & Gamble, Citibank, Nextel, Honda, Nokia and McDonald's, among others.

Globalization, at its core, is about a new operating theory of the world based on connectedness between, across, above, below and through preexisting political, social, economic, thematic, geographic and security boundaries. The connections and interactions can be so intense and transformative, says the author, that we can no longer distinguish between actors and their environments. Advances in telecommunication have linked the information and economic domains of customer, competitor and collaborator as never before. And, because all players have access to virtually the same information and information technologies, and can therefore equally target a demographic with precision, there is no compelling competitive advantage in any digital marketing capability. At the end of the day, marketers confront the same dilemma they turned to the Internet and information technology to solve: consumers opting out in ever greater numbers. To grow a business today, says the author, companies must take a marketing ecosystems view, which shifts away from the logic of "brand" as the primary unit for business strategy. Citing Microsoft, Google, AT&T and McKinsey, among others, the author suggests that the only sensible way for a company to compete is not by offering new products with similar functional attributes, but by being better than its rivals at molding the ecosystem in which the competition takes place.

When one company acquires another, executives have 10 distinct options for the corporate rebranding.

INTELLIGENCE: New developments, research and ideas in management

A company must have a three-dimensional view of its brand.

Netflix’s allocation policy is part of a growing trend.

As companies use self-service technologies, responsibility for service quality shifts to customers.

To find out how well you are serving your customers, ask your employees.

When targeted promotions appeal to non-targeted customers.

Service businesses now make up about 70% of the aggregate production and employment in the OECD nations, yet true innovation is rare in the service sector. Many companies incrementally improve their offerings, but few succeed in creating service innovations that launch new markets or reshape existing ones. The premise of this article is that by thinking about a service in terms of its core benefits and the separability of its use from its production, managers can more easily see how to outinnovate their competitors. Before they can do so, though, they must understand the different types of market-creating service innovations as well as the factors that enable them. The authors introduce and describe a two-by-two matrix whose taxonomy helps managers think strategically about service innovations that can create new markets. The dimensions of the matrix refer to the type of benefit offered and the degree of service separability. The article references best-practices examples including Enterprise Rent-A-Car, FedEx, eBay, Starbucks, Cirque du Soleil, Google, Southwest Airlines, Walgreens, Netflix and Barnes & Noble to illuminate each of the four cells of the matrix and explain the value to managers of understanding the dynamics of the cell that is most applicable to their service innovation efforts.