Marketing

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.

Case studies suggest that companies including Avon, Stonyfield Farm and Starbucks have benefited from marketing initiatives associating the company with a socially beneficial cause. But how should managers allocate dollars between social-cause marketing and other types of marketing programs? The authors use a market-research technique called "conjoint analysis" to help managers evaluate the relative benefits of various types of affinity marketing programs, including sponsorship of social causes, sports or entertainment events. Conjoint analysis involves creating a variety of hypothetical brand profiles that contain combinations of brand attributes; by asking consumers to rank the profiles, researchers can gain insights into how different brand attributes affect consumers' preferences. In several experiments, the authors used conjoint analysis to examine how consumers' responses to a brand of beer, milk or juice would be affected if the brand had a marketing affiliation with a social cause or with a sport or entertainment event. For some of the products studied, affiliations with social causes had more positive effects on consumer rankings than affiliations with sports or entertainment events. However, this was not always true; for example, it was not the case for the milk brands studied, suggesting that the effect of social-cause marketing initiatives may vary by industry. The authors also discuss how brand managers can use conjoint analysis to compare potential marketing initiatives.