Marketing

What do the Burroughs Corporation, Crown Cork & Seal Co., Inc., and the Union Camp Corporation have in common? Although none of them enjoys a dominant market share, all three earn quite respectable returns on their equity, have healthy profit margins, and continue to maintain strong sales growth year after year. In this article, the […]

Normally, the Olympic Games are a positive force in marketing. Worldwide marketing expenditures increase as official sponsors and unofficial free-riders attach themselves to the Olympic logo, to particular sports, national teams or individual athletes. Global brands, in particular, see the Olympics and World Cup soccer as the two most important international sporting events; brand linkage […]

There's no going back to the old normal.

Strategies for leveraging hidden value.

Companies may want to shift a brand's position--to exploit less crowded territory, for example, or grow sales. Companies have long used perceptual mapping...

Many companies approach product development as if it were manufacturing, trying to control costs and improve quality by applying zero-defect, efficiency-focused...

The best insights often come from seeing the world through someone else's eyes.

With new tools, the marketing department can do more than ever.

China celebrated the start of the Year of the Rabbit last week, and the country’s marketers are hoping that a surge in sales will kick off the new year. Demand in the Chinese economy soared by between 15% and 30% during the spring festival last year. In fact, some marketers of baijiu, the liquor that’s […]

I advise companies on their pricing strategies, and I’m surprised how often I hear the same flawed piece of conventional wisdom. Many executives and Wall Street analysts continue to think that a high profit margin signifies good pricing. It’s hard not to see that big differential between revenue and costs as a signal that you’ve […]

As technology becomes more powerful and affordable, your company is only limited by its imagination.

Smartphones make it possible, if you set the right assignments.

The Toyota story has been intensively researched and painstakingly documented, yet what really happens inside the company remains a mystery. Here’s new insight into the unspoken rules that give Toyota its competitive edge.

It’s not ads, but affiliates, that drive revenue.

I've spent the week in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where billion-dollar companies unveil multi-million-dollar products looking for...

Your strategy should be driven by relationship-building - not shiny new tech.

It has become fashionable to issue dire projections of declining prosperity based on demographic aging. But is that really such a problem? There is no doubt that all the countries of the world are getting older, but they are at very different stages of the process. The median age in the United States—with half the […]

Here’s an answer to an age-old parental question that may also have business implications: Why are adolescents miserable so much of the time? In many cases, it’s because they want to be miserable. Not most adolescents, and not most of the time. But a sizable number of people ages 14 to 18 appear to want […]

A distinctive brand is good for business, of course. But you’d be surprised how important it is to a firm’s overall performance. We studied how customer perceptions of brand differentiation related to stock price over the course of 11 years in 275 “monobrand” companies such as AT&T, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, and Reebok. (Customer brand-perceptions data […]

This key metric can help you measure customer loyalty.