During your annual planning ritual - do you study and analyze the current situation in your market and then move on straight to setting your goals? Thought so. Common practice but a big mistake! Chances are that your goals are far less ambitious than they should have been and consequently, so are your financial results and growth rate.
Am I sure? YES. The flaw lies in the limiting...
A spate of recent articles about the Obama brand have, in my view as an expert on marketing, neglected the brand's strategy and focused its verbal or visual expressions. But far more important is the distinction between the short-term brand, "Candidate Obama," and the long-term brand, "President Obama."
So far candidate Obama's campaign exemplifies perfect wizardry in short term branding....
Are you an MBA Clone? Was your business education more like "business programming"? If your answer is no, you are probably not fully aware of the fact that you have been "produced", together with many other executives, to think and act in a similar predictable manner.
This phenomenon happens as many MBA programs around the
world gravitate towards standard sets of concepts and tools. As...
In our hyper-competitive markets, MBA clones pose an imminent and tangible threat to the competitiveness of the companies they work for. Many executives today attend the same MBA programs, study the same books, read the same newspapers and magazines, and go to the same conferences and workshops. Standardization in MBA programs results in a similarity in the professional approach and managerial...
By definition, a luxury brand is an outstanding brand, justifiably priced highly and destined, at least primarily, to a select group of the social-economic elite. Luxury is not about unattainability though. After all, you cannot profit from consumers that cannot buy your brand. However, luxury is about the consumer outstretching herself a bit to buy something extraordinary but rather expensive...
Our starting point is to be clear as to what we mean by "love for a brand". The love of a brand is more similar to the love of ice-cream than the love for a spouse. Love for a brand is actually a strong feeling of anticipation for something good, pleasant or beneficial that we believe with great certainty that we will get from the brand. It is the anticipation for good experiences, pleasant...
This is how we, marketers, usually think: "Find out what they want, give it to them nicely wrapped and with a big shiny smile, and let the surveys show that they are satisfied." Good old Satisfying Marketing, right? Well, not any more.
Consistent data from all over the globe indicates that even the most satisfied customers tend to keep an open mind towards other offers. We live in the "post...
I have encouraging news for you: many of your competitors are afraid of strategy. You might call it strategophobia. Strategy has two terrifying characteristics. First, strategy is a choice. "We are going to go for target customers X, and not the rest," or "The major benefit we will offer consumers is Z and not all sorts of other things."
It seems that when you choose, you have to give...
If you are trying to segment your market in the traditional way, what you may be looking for would be groups of consumers sorted out in such a way that a certain likeness exists within each group, and a difference exists between them. The variable determining the meaningful likeness or difference between those groups would be the segmentation variable. A trivial segmentation variable, just for...
The vast red and blue oceans of the marketing world tsunamied into our awareness and vocabulary a few years ago, when two INSEAD professors, W.Chan Kim and Rene Mauborgne, claimed that competition can be rendered irrelevant.
Their book, Blue Ocean Strategy, heralded the news to marketing managers and CEOs all over the world: after years and years of surviving in red bloody oceans, swarming...
