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Business Administration / Re: Actuarial Valuation
« on: December 13, 2014, 10:20:59 PM »
Actuarial Science is a new taught course in our sub-continent
News:
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Business Administration / Re: Plastic money: Bangladesh perspective
« on: December 13, 2014, 10:17:08 PM »
Informative
3
Business Administration / Re: Drip marketing
« on: December 13, 2014, 10:16:37 PM »
Sir, its a new word for me. Thank you very much
4
Business Administration / Re: Relationship Between the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility & Consumer surplus
« on: December 13, 2014, 10:15:12 PM »
Please madam continue it.
5
Business Administration / Re: Determine Sample Size for research activity
« on: December 13, 2014, 10:14:04 PM »
very much effective
6
Business Administration / Professional Ethics
« on: December 13, 2014, 10:12:39 PM »Professionally accepted standards of personal and business behavior, values and guiding principles. Codes of professional ethics are often established by professional organizations to help guide members in performing their job functions according to sound and consistent ethical principles.
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Business Administration / Cold Calling
« on: December 13, 2014, 10:10:43 PM »
(1) Visiting a prospect (who may not know the visitor) without a prior appointment. (2) Calling a prospect (who does not know the caller) for a sales appointment. Called also cold canvassing. (3) Making unsolicited phone calls to strangers, usually to generate a sale or seek a donation. Such practices are illegal in several countries.
8
Business Administration / The summery of two Movies- Corporate and Wolf of The Wall Street
« on: December 13, 2014, 10:05:56 PM »
The summery of two Movies:
1. Corporate
• Summary the movie of corporate : I saw this movie after many people recommended it, and because it had Rajat Kapur in it. But, I was quite disappointed!
Actually, it was a desperate attempt to be different, which, according to me, fell rather flat. It was an old story, packaged into an allegedly 'real' corporate world. Simply put, two rival industrialists fight to gain the upper hand in the big (read HUGE), bad (read ROTTEN BEYOND PUTRID) world of business. Everyone has elastic morals, except the ones who lose out at the end. That's it!
The acting was decent - Rajat was great, Raj Babar was very good, Kay Kay Menno was good, but could have been excellent if he had stayed away from stereotypical expressions, as always, immaculate. But the revelation to me was Harsh Chaya - he was outstanding in underplaying his emotions! Great job!
Finally, Bipasha Basu... what can one say! I had not seen her in any other movie thus far (thank my lucky stars). Many told me she was good in this movie. GOOD? Good God is more like it! She had a single expression throughout - whether she was smiling, laughing, crying, scheming, copulating (figuratively and literally) and collapsing. Atrocious!
Also, there are certain actors who were given roles in the movie, and the director simply did not know what to do with them. For example, Lilette Dubey's character suddenly showed a new side, and that was the end of her role.
All in all, watch this movie if you were in the same predicament as me .
. Ethical Terms: This movie inspired us to take a new challenge . And we also sea that,the result of awareness , how we go ahead in corporate life .
Unethical Terms: The unethical terms of this movie is , it is harmful that ,to believe another in a corporate life .
2. The wolf of wall street :
• Summary: The Wolf of Wall Street is a 2013 American back comedy film directed by martin Scorches , based on Jordan Belford 's memoir of the same name. It was released on December 25, 2013. The screenplay was written by Terence Winter , and the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, a New York stockbroker who runs a firm that engages in securities fraud and corruption on Wall Street in the 1990s. The film received positive reviews from critics, but was also controversial for its moral ambiguity, sexual content, and presence of drug abuse, vulgarity, and use of animals.
Ethical terms: By seeing this movie, we can say that an entrepreneur can do everything . And a good speaker is another important part of an organization.
Unethical terms: We know that Money is all. When you have much money then you fall in much dangerous stages which we saw this movie. Jordan started a fake business and he got much profit by this business. But fortunately when he started real business that’s time he theft by police.
So lastly we can say that a fake business cannot keep much stability.
1. Corporate
• Summary the movie of corporate : I saw this movie after many people recommended it, and because it had Rajat Kapur in it. But, I was quite disappointed!
Actually, it was a desperate attempt to be different, which, according to me, fell rather flat. It was an old story, packaged into an allegedly 'real' corporate world. Simply put, two rival industrialists fight to gain the upper hand in the big (read HUGE), bad (read ROTTEN BEYOND PUTRID) world of business. Everyone has elastic morals, except the ones who lose out at the end. That's it!
The acting was decent - Rajat was great, Raj Babar was very good, Kay Kay Menno was good, but could have been excellent if he had stayed away from stereotypical expressions, as always, immaculate. But the revelation to me was Harsh Chaya - he was outstanding in underplaying his emotions! Great job!
Finally, Bipasha Basu... what can one say! I had not seen her in any other movie thus far (thank my lucky stars). Many told me she was good in this movie. GOOD? Good God is more like it! She had a single expression throughout - whether she was smiling, laughing, crying, scheming, copulating (figuratively and literally) and collapsing. Atrocious!
Also, there are certain actors who were given roles in the movie, and the director simply did not know what to do with them. For example, Lilette Dubey's character suddenly showed a new side, and that was the end of her role.
All in all, watch this movie if you were in the same predicament as me .
. Ethical Terms: This movie inspired us to take a new challenge . And we also sea that,the result of awareness , how we go ahead in corporate life .
Unethical Terms: The unethical terms of this movie is , it is harmful that ,to believe another in a corporate life .
2. The wolf of wall street :
• Summary: The Wolf of Wall Street is a 2013 American back comedy film directed by martin Scorches , based on Jordan Belford 's memoir of the same name. It was released on December 25, 2013. The screenplay was written by Terence Winter , and the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, a New York stockbroker who runs a firm that engages in securities fraud and corruption on Wall Street in the 1990s. The film received positive reviews from critics, but was also controversial for its moral ambiguity, sexual content, and presence of drug abuse, vulgarity, and use of animals.
Ethical terms: By seeing this movie, we can say that an entrepreneur can do everything . And a good speaker is another important part of an organization.
Unethical terms: We know that Money is all. When you have much money then you fall in much dangerous stages which we saw this movie. Jordan started a fake business and he got much profit by this business. But fortunately when he started real business that’s time he theft by police.
So lastly we can say that a fake business cannot keep much stability.
9
Business Administration / Marketing in different Dimensions
« on: December 13, 2014, 10:01:48 PM »
Marketing Definitions
To start, here are explanations from the American Marketing Association (AMA), marketing’s professional organization, and Dr. Philip Kotler, the author of business school marketing classics. They’re followed by the other definitions in alphabetical order by author’s last name.
According to the American Marketing Association (AMA) Board of Directors, Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Dr. Philip Kotler defines marketing as “the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential. It pinpoints which segments the company is capable of serving best and it designs and promotes the appropriate products and services.”
Marketing is the messages and/or actions that cause messages and/or actions. Jay Baer – President, Convince & Convert. Author with Amber Naslund of The Now Revolution
Marketing is traditionally the means by which an organization communicates to, connects with, and engages its target audience to convey the value of and ultimately sell its products and services. However, since the emergence of digital media, in particular social media and technology innovations, it has increasingly become more about companies building deeper, more meaningful and lasting relationships with the people that they want to buy their products and services. The ever-increasingly fragmented world of media complicates marketers’ ability connect and, at the same, time presents incredible opportunity to forge new territory. Julie Barile – Vice President of eCommerce, Fairway Market
Marketing includes research, targeting, communications (advertising and direct mail) and often public relations. Marketing is to sales as plowing is to planting for a farmer—it prepares an audience to receive a direct sales pitch. Mary Ellen Bianco – Director Marketing & Communications, Getzler Henrich & Associates LLC
Marketing is an ongoing communications exchange with customers in a way that educates, informs and builds a relationship over time. The over time part is important because only over time can trust be created. With trust, a community builds organically around products and services and those customers become as excited about the products as you are — they become advocates, loyal evangelists, repeat customers and often, friends. Marketing is a really great way to identify what grabs people and gets them excited about your brand and give it to them, involve them in the process, and yeah, the best part, build great friendships in the process. Renee Blodgett – Chief Executive Officer/Founder, Magic Sauce Media
Professor Philip Kotler explained that marketing was “meeting the needs of your customer at a profit.” For me that definition extends beyond just communicating product features. Marketers are responsible for a 360-degree experience. For example, in the social media world, a customer’s Twitter needs may differ from her needs to “play with the brand” in terms of a social game promotion. Every customer touchpoint from customer service to sales to accounting and more are part of the “new marketing.” Toby Bloomberg – Bloomberg Marketing/Diva Marketing
Marketing when done well is (a) the strategy of the business – its value proposition, go to market strategy, and brand positioning and image to the world. Marketing when not done well is (b) an endless checklist of advertising and promotional to-dos that can never be completed. Marketing in the twenty-first century must be (c) largely, but not entirely, measurable and accountable around driving business goals. Marketing when done brilliantly is driven by (a) includes a small, disciplined subset of (b), and is steeped in a culture of (c). Matt Blumberg – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Return Path
Marketing is the process by which a firm profitably translates customer needs into revenue. Mark Burgess – Managing Partner, Blue Focus Marketing
Intuitive by design, marketing matches the right message/cause to the right person. Finding someone who has a personal connection with your product, service or cause in a way that is unobtrusive and inviting. Marketing can be as simple as networking at an event or as complex as a multi-million dollar global campaign that integrates print, digital, PR, social media and broadcast delivering a specific message with one unified goal. Some of the best marketing outcomes come from the simplest initiatives. Keeping it simple is sometimes the best strategy. Lisa Buyer – President and Chief Executive Officer, The Buyer Group
Marketing is building your brand, convincing people that your brand (meaning your product/service/company) is the best and protecting the relationships you build with your customers. Marjorie Clayman – Director of Client Development, Clayman Advertising, Inc.
Marketing is meeting the needs and wants of a consumer. Andrew Cohen – President, The A Team (Disclaimer: I’m not related to Andrew.)
In line with the firm’s business goals, marketing attracts consumers’ scarce resources, attention and disposable income, to drive profitable revenues. Marketing is the process of getting a product or service from a company to its end customers from product development through to the final sale and post purchase support. To this end, marketing strategy consists of business goals, target customers, marketing strategies, marketing tactics and related metrics. As a function, marketing extends across the customer’s entire purchase process including research, engagement, purchase, post-purchase (including supplemental support and returns) and advocacy. Heidi Cohen – President, Riverside Marketing Strategies
Marketing is creating irresistible experiences that connect with people personally and create the desire to share with others. Saul Colt – Head of Magic, Fresh Books
Marketing is how you tell your story to attract customers, partners, investors, employees and anyone else your company interacts with. It’s the script that helps users decide if they’ll welcome you into their lives as a staple, nice-to-have or necessary annoyance. It’s the way that everyone interacts with your brand. It’s impression, first, last and everything in between. Jeff Cutler – Executive Vice President and General Manager, Vitals.com
Marketing is products that don’t come back and consumers that do. Steve Dawson – President, Walkers Shortbread Inc.
Marketing is making connections between customers with your products, brand(s) and business, such that they are likely to buy from you. Or as Regis McKenna said, “Marketing is everything.” Sam Decker – Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Mass Relevance
Marketing has little to do with the service provider and everything to do with the customer. Marketing educates and engages the customer, satisfying their needs while simultaneously positioning the service provider as a trusted advisor and source. Good marketing is a two way street. Great marketing understands what the customer wants and gives it to them. Shennandoah Diaz – President and Master of Mayhem, Brass Knuckles Media
Marketing is delighting a consumer, customer and/or user to achieve a profit or other pre-established goal. Steve Dickstein – Chief Executive Officer, Hugo Naturals
Marketing is essentially involved in outward communication, in promoting the corporate goals of the company it is serving. It is the process through which companies accelerate returns by aligning all communication objectives (advertising, marketing, sales, etc), into one department to more efficiently achieve the overall corporate goals. Antoine Didienne
Marketing is branding, naming, pricing, and the bridge between paid and earned media. It is NOT sales. Gini Dietrich – Chief Executive Officer, Arment Dietrich, Inc.
Marketing today is finally customer-focused. Social media made that happen. Markets are once again conversations. Marketing is about knowing the market, creating the right product, creating desire for that product and letting the right people know you have it. The old adage that says, “If you build a better mousetrap people will beat a path to your door” doesn’t hold true without marketing. You might indeed have a better mousetrap, but if people don’t know you have it, and they don’t know where your door is, there will be no path beating and no conversation going on. Sally Falkow – APR, PRESSfeed
Marketing is helping people buy your product or service. Jason Falls – Social Media Explorer
Marketing is the business’ play-maker. As with successful hockey franchises, the most valuable player is not always the player who scores the most goals but the player who creates the play that allows others to score (think Gretzky, Crosby or Orr). A great marketing team assesses the brand’s playing field, quickly captures their competitor’s position, strengths and weaknesses, maps it against their team’s position, strengths and weaknesses and puts the puck on the stick of the salesperson with the greatest opportunity to score.” Sam Fiorella – Web/Social Media Strategist, The Social Roadmap
Marketing is the act of developing an engaging relationship with every single human being that shows an interest in you. Paul Flanigan – Consultant, Experiate.net
Marketing is the process of exposing target customers to a product through appropriate tactics and channels, gauging their reaction and feedback, and ultimately facilitating their path to purchase. Dr. Augustine Fou, Founder, Marketing Science Consulting Group, Inc.
Marketing is the process of building relationships with prospects and customers so that you can profitably develop and promote products and services. Chris Garrett – Chrisg.com
Marketing is the word we use to explain how we encourage people to buy our products. If it’s going to work in a big way, there needs to be a strategy or big idea to whet peoples’ appetites for what we’re selling. When we’re marketing, we begin with a plan: objectives, strategy and tactics (how we implement the strategy). It’s a process that helps companies build relationships with prospects and customers and creates unique value for them…when it’s done right. Lois Geller – President, Lois Geller Marketing Group, Author of Response! The Complete Guide To Profitable Direct Marketing
Marketing should be channel agnostic, data driven and customer-centric. This provides measurable results leveraging the marketplace at large; responding to consumer/business interests and needs. Sue R.E. Germanian – Senior Vice President and Chief Communications Officer, DMA
Marketing is the conversation between a company or brand and a consumer that ultimately leads to brand recall, preference or a transaction. In today’s socially networked world, that conversation is being disintermediated by word of mouth referrals. Traditional marketers will have to work harder to get ahead of and to influence this trend. Josh Glantz – Vice President and General Manager, PCH Online-Publishers Clearing House
Marketing is a way to connect what products and services you have to offer with customers who want and need such products and services. It is multi-faceted, starting with researching your target market and how best to deliver the message to coming up with a plan to execute your promotion via various marketing media. The goal is to develop a strategy to create, price and distribute your products and services for an exchange that will satisfy both your and your customers’ objectives. It is an ever evolving process – always evaluating that your message still meets the needs and wants of your market. Trish Green – Executive Vice President, Head of Marketing, Student Funding Group, LLC
Marketing is ultimately responsible to create enterprise value via the brand, the face of the business strategy. To do so, marketing identifies the target, attractive high growth segments. Marketing drives the organization to define the single minded, differentiated brand value proposition and deliver on it every single day across every touch point. Marketing ensures the delivery of a compelling, differentiated offer to that target and proposition. And, marketing measures and improves the consumers/businesses/partner satisfaction, and the brand health and strength. Marketing is the single point of accountability for growth, identifying and delivering on new customers, new offerings & new market profitable growth. Cathy Halligan – Senior Vice President Sales & Marketing, PowerReviews
Marketing is anything you create or share that tells your story. Ann Handley – Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs, Author with C.C. Chapman of Content Rules
With a good product, marketing can all be boiled down to education. Effectively educating people about any good product will create the desire needed to produce action. Jeffrey Harmon – Chief Marketing Officer, Orabrush
Marketing has to examine why you’re in the game and ask the tough questions. Next, there has to be a plan—and it must be tied to specific sales expectations –clear conditions of satisfaction. Passion is not a substitute for planning. Remember, buzz is NOT sales. Tension is good. Good healthy debate causes tension and moves your group forward. Take risks and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. No one ever died because of a marketing campaign. If you want to grow you’ve got to get out there. Get your business into a new stratosphere. Jeffrey Hayzlett – The Hayzlett Group, Author of The Mirror Test
Marketing is about knowing the customer (whether current or prospective) so well that there is no question I will read your newsletter and share it with your friends, that I will carry a frequent buyer card in my wallet, and that I already interact on your Facebook page. Ari Herzog – Policy and Communications Specialist
Marketing is the umbrella term covering research, branding, PR, advertising, direct response, promotions, loyalty, demand generation, etc. Anne Holland – Publisher, WhichTestWon.com
Marketing is defined as we help people sell more stuff. Joey Iazzetto – President, UniCom Marketing Group
Marketing is the art and science of creating, delighting and keeping customers, while making a profit and building enterprise value. Marketing integrates, formally or informally, many disciplines and every organizational function. Marketing should embrace the highest ethical standards, respect the environment, and strive to make the world a better place. Max Kalehoff – Vice President of Marketing, Clickable
Profitable marketing is reminding likely-to-buy prospects of the value of your products/services in meeting their needs, over and over, at an acquisition cost lower than your allowable acquisition cost. Jerry Kaup – MemberLink.org
Marketing is the art and science of persuasive communication. Dave Kerpen – Chief Executive Officer, Likeable Media
Marketing is the practice of increasing awareness, consideration, purchase/repurchase and preference for a product or service through consumer-driven benefits, advertising, packaging, placement, pricing and promotions. Historically, marketing was a one-way interaction but is increasingly becoming two-way through the use and influence of social media and viral marketing which is often fueled by the company offering the good or service. Robin Korman – Senior Vice President, Global Loyalty and Partnerships, Wyndham Hotel Group
Marketing is discovering what the prospect wants and demands and delivering it more efficiently and effectively than the competition. Paul Kulavis – Managing Partner, Sterling Park Group
Marketing, defined as a value-exchange, is a two-way exchange of value between a marketer and a consumer by providing the right product or service to the right target in the right state of need and by using the right vehicles for interaction and purchase. As a conversation, marketing discovers and tells the right story about its product or service that engages the consumer in an authentic conversation including true listening, engagement, affiliation, and ultimately purchase. Gerry Lantzm – Stories That Work, Inc.
Marketing is a strategic and tactical multifaceted process that supports sales as well as customer service and retention. The primary stages include identifying target audiences, developing a marketing/communications strategy that usually includes several methods and channels (e.g. advertising, PR, content, events/digital print, broadcast), measuring and assessing results, and constantly refining the process based on learnings and marketplace developments. Marketing can also become a feedback loop between an organization and its customers and prospects that helps to inform and shape the business going forward. Rebecca Lieb, Author of The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
Marketing defines the business opportunity, identifies profitable customers and products/services that will meet customer needs, builds customer relationships, drives customer demand and communicates corporate or product/services value.” Ann Z. Marshman – Executive Director, TheLeadersCouncil.com
Marketing is the art and science of creating demand to drive profitable growth. David W. Mischler – President, Altascend Consulting
Marketing is helping your customers understand how much they need something they never knew they needed. Doreen Moran – Digital Strategist
Marketing is the art and science of persuading a potential buyer of a product/ service to purchase from a company that’s responsible for creating a compelling message and communicating that message through targeted channels with enough reach and frequency to guide that potential buyer through the purchase cycle of “attention, interest, desire, action.” Paul Mosenson President, NuSpark Marketing
Marketing is an integrated, multi-channel (online and offline), customer-centric process used to define, segment, reach, and convince potential clients to purchase your product or service, followed by analyzing the metrics to refine your strategy and repeat the process as needed to optimize the ROI (return on investment). Sharon Mostyn – Assistant Vice President, 1st Mariner Bank
Marketing is the unique opportunity to establish respect and a relationship with your target audience in a way that compels them to become addicted to your products or service, your support. Successful marketing is recognized at the precise moment when your target consumer feels so strongly about your company they integrate you into their daily routines and lifestyle. Jeanniey Mullen – Global Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer, Zinio and VIVmag
Marketing is strategic communications and promotions delivered in a mix of forms, such as advertising, public relations, and direct marketing, through multiple online and offline channels, to acquire customers, retain customers, increase share of wallet and shorten the sales cycle. Valerie Oben – President, Foxboro Consulting Inc.
Marketing is everything a company does, from how they answer the phone, how quickly and effectively they respond to email, to how they handle accounts payable, to how they treat their employees and customers. Done right, marketing integrates a great product or service with PR, sales, advertising, new media, personal contact. In other words, marketing is not a discipline or an activity – it is everything a company is – at least if the company wants to be successful. B.L. Ochman – President, What’s Next
The modern definition of marketing is the practice of creating value for the mutual benefit of meeting consumer needs and business objectives. In action, that means knowing and meeting target audience/community information discovery, consumption and sharing behaviors with relevant and timely communications throughout the customer lifecycle. Those communications and relationships influence consumer behavior to drive revenue outcomes. Lee Odden – Chief Executive Officer, TopRank Online Marketing
Marketing is the ongoing process of engagement whereby strangers are nurtured into advocates. Trey Pennington
Marketing is all activities designed to attract and connect customers with the products and services they need. Includes inbound and outbound marketing tactics across all channels – one-to-one and one-to-many. Ideally, marketing fosters a long-term relationship, includes the entire customer brand experience – i.e. support and customer service. Marketing starts with the design of the product itself and extends through post purchase. Patrick Prothe – Marketing Communications Manager, Viewpoint Construction Software
Marketing strives to connect a product or service with a market for that product or service. Michael Puican – Associate Director of Corporate Training, DePaul University
Marketing is identifying the pain points of your customers, developing content and processes to best solve those pain points – which ultimately makes it easier for your customers to buy or stay customers. Joe Pulizzi – Founder, Content Marketing Institute (Disclaimer – I write for the Content Marketing Institute.)
Marketing is about focusing efforts to develop deep insights into customer behavior and overall market conditions to drive sustainable profitable growth for the company. Humphry Rolleston
Marketing is deciding how to offer something specific customers crave and then engaging customers and other stakeholders to create preference. Ken Rosen – Managing Partner, Performance Works
Marketing is the ability to communicate a message to your audience and soliciting a response from them. This response can take the form of a positive impression of your company brand, an urge to purchase an item, to reach out to your company for more information or even spread your message to others. And no matter what the desired response is, marketing should always map it back to your overall business objectives. Cece Salomon-Lee – PR Meets Marketing
Marketing is the combination of messages and programs (the 4 P’s–product/packaging, price, placement and promotion) that drive shoppers to choose your product or service over someone else’s. Charlene Samples – Director of Marketing, Heartland Sweeteners
Marketing is understanding your buyers really, really well. Then creating valuable products, services, and information especially for them to help solve their problems. David Meerman Scott – Bestselling author of Real-Time Marketing and PR
Marketing is influencing behavior to get more people to buy more stuff, more often, for more money. Mark W. Schaefer – Executive Director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. Author of The Tao of Twitter
Marketing, when done correctly, is creating such an amazing experience around your brand or product, that people with no other connection to it want to tell their friends about how amazing it is, and the cycle begins again. Peter Shankman – Founder of Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and Social Media Consultant. Author of Customer Service – New Rules for a Social Enabled World [Affiliate link]
Marketing is marshaling all available resources to deliver constantly on the fundamental principle that it’s not what you want to sell, but what customers are looking to buy. Successful marketers constantly think from the customer’s viewpoint and constantly ask, ‘What’s in it for them?.’ Successful marketers earn trust through every contact and transaction. Jim Siegel – Director of Marketing and Communications, HealthCare Chaplaincy
Marketing creates integrated campaigns to generate leads that positively influence sales, brand, value and vision. Jayme Soulati – Soulati Media
Marketing, in general, is the communication of information about a product or service to an audience. Effective marketing is a two-way communication that combines both art and science. It is a discipline with no end game that must be constantly honed, tweaked, and tested. Effective marketing builds relationships and inspires trust; it is not “push” or “pull”. The key to effective marketing is getting the communication mix correct for your brand, product or service, understanding how it best interacts with customers or users in the most conducive and accepting environment. Mike Sprouse – Chief Marketing Officer, Epic Media Group
Marketing is building an offer you believe and know in your bones you can deliver on consistently and elegantly to the people who will love it. And it’s constantly listening to polish, tweak, and refine that offer so that it’s irresistible by taking away whatever customers don’t need, adding more of what customers love, and building in some extraordinary value that only you can provide — an extraordinary surprise that makes customers fall in love. Liz Strauss – Founder, SOBCon, and Chief Executive Officer, Inside-Out Thinking
Marketing from a scope perspective is anything that modifies the perceived value and/or desirability of a product or service. From a function perspective is moving the demand curve to the right, reducing the elasticity of demand. Bill Tanner – Senior Director of Strategic Research, A. H. Belo
Marketing is inextricably linked to sales and unless it drives a trial or sale, the effort should not be labeled ‘marketing.’ The critical steps in marketing include defining what is currently known about a business (trends, regulations, target audience, competitors), who are the target users or buyers, what are the measurable business objectives in terms of where to take that business, what is the plan to get there and what are the measures of success of initiatives defined to reach those objectives. This marketing approach can be applied whether the objective is expanding a current business or entering new markets. Each step in the marketing process is meant to move the user or buyer closer to making a buy decision. Alexandra Tyler – Vice President of Branded and Social Media Marketing, Citi Global Transaction Services
Marketing builds relationships between consumers and brands. The many disciplines that go into the process, together create a brand personality designed to be compatible with the target. Marketing romances the consumer in the hopes of establishing a long term commitment. This takes persuasion and nothing moulds opinion like the third party endorsement power of PR. As Bill Gates says “If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on PR.” Deborah Weinstein – President, Strategic Objectives
- See more at: http://heidicohen.com/marketing-definition/#sthash.q1ffEKD6.dpuf
To start, here are explanations from the American Marketing Association (AMA), marketing’s professional organization, and Dr. Philip Kotler, the author of business school marketing classics. They’re followed by the other definitions in alphabetical order by author’s last name.
According to the American Marketing Association (AMA) Board of Directors, Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Dr. Philip Kotler defines marketing as “the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential. It pinpoints which segments the company is capable of serving best and it designs and promotes the appropriate products and services.”
Marketing is the messages and/or actions that cause messages and/or actions. Jay Baer – President, Convince & Convert. Author with Amber Naslund of The Now Revolution
Marketing is traditionally the means by which an organization communicates to, connects with, and engages its target audience to convey the value of and ultimately sell its products and services. However, since the emergence of digital media, in particular social media and technology innovations, it has increasingly become more about companies building deeper, more meaningful and lasting relationships with the people that they want to buy their products and services. The ever-increasingly fragmented world of media complicates marketers’ ability connect and, at the same, time presents incredible opportunity to forge new territory. Julie Barile – Vice President of eCommerce, Fairway Market
Marketing includes research, targeting, communications (advertising and direct mail) and often public relations. Marketing is to sales as plowing is to planting for a farmer—it prepares an audience to receive a direct sales pitch. Mary Ellen Bianco – Director Marketing & Communications, Getzler Henrich & Associates LLC
Marketing is an ongoing communications exchange with customers in a way that educates, informs and builds a relationship over time. The over time part is important because only over time can trust be created. With trust, a community builds organically around products and services and those customers become as excited about the products as you are — they become advocates, loyal evangelists, repeat customers and often, friends. Marketing is a really great way to identify what grabs people and gets them excited about your brand and give it to them, involve them in the process, and yeah, the best part, build great friendships in the process. Renee Blodgett – Chief Executive Officer/Founder, Magic Sauce Media
Professor Philip Kotler explained that marketing was “meeting the needs of your customer at a profit.” For me that definition extends beyond just communicating product features. Marketers are responsible for a 360-degree experience. For example, in the social media world, a customer’s Twitter needs may differ from her needs to “play with the brand” in terms of a social game promotion. Every customer touchpoint from customer service to sales to accounting and more are part of the “new marketing.” Toby Bloomberg – Bloomberg Marketing/Diva Marketing
Marketing when done well is (a) the strategy of the business – its value proposition, go to market strategy, and brand positioning and image to the world. Marketing when not done well is (b) an endless checklist of advertising and promotional to-dos that can never be completed. Marketing in the twenty-first century must be (c) largely, but not entirely, measurable and accountable around driving business goals. Marketing when done brilliantly is driven by (a) includes a small, disciplined subset of (b), and is steeped in a culture of (c). Matt Blumberg – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Return Path
Marketing is the process by which a firm profitably translates customer needs into revenue. Mark Burgess – Managing Partner, Blue Focus Marketing
Intuitive by design, marketing matches the right message/cause to the right person. Finding someone who has a personal connection with your product, service or cause in a way that is unobtrusive and inviting. Marketing can be as simple as networking at an event or as complex as a multi-million dollar global campaign that integrates print, digital, PR, social media and broadcast delivering a specific message with one unified goal. Some of the best marketing outcomes come from the simplest initiatives. Keeping it simple is sometimes the best strategy. Lisa Buyer – President and Chief Executive Officer, The Buyer Group
Marketing is building your brand, convincing people that your brand (meaning your product/service/company) is the best and protecting the relationships you build with your customers. Marjorie Clayman – Director of Client Development, Clayman Advertising, Inc.
Marketing is meeting the needs and wants of a consumer. Andrew Cohen – President, The A Team (Disclaimer: I’m not related to Andrew.)
In line with the firm’s business goals, marketing attracts consumers’ scarce resources, attention and disposable income, to drive profitable revenues. Marketing is the process of getting a product or service from a company to its end customers from product development through to the final sale and post purchase support. To this end, marketing strategy consists of business goals, target customers, marketing strategies, marketing tactics and related metrics. As a function, marketing extends across the customer’s entire purchase process including research, engagement, purchase, post-purchase (including supplemental support and returns) and advocacy. Heidi Cohen – President, Riverside Marketing Strategies
Marketing is creating irresistible experiences that connect with people personally and create the desire to share with others. Saul Colt – Head of Magic, Fresh Books
Marketing is how you tell your story to attract customers, partners, investors, employees and anyone else your company interacts with. It’s the script that helps users decide if they’ll welcome you into their lives as a staple, nice-to-have or necessary annoyance. It’s the way that everyone interacts with your brand. It’s impression, first, last and everything in between. Jeff Cutler – Executive Vice President and General Manager, Vitals.com
Marketing is products that don’t come back and consumers that do. Steve Dawson – President, Walkers Shortbread Inc.
Marketing is making connections between customers with your products, brand(s) and business, such that they are likely to buy from you. Or as Regis McKenna said, “Marketing is everything.” Sam Decker – Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Mass Relevance
Marketing has little to do with the service provider and everything to do with the customer. Marketing educates and engages the customer, satisfying their needs while simultaneously positioning the service provider as a trusted advisor and source. Good marketing is a two way street. Great marketing understands what the customer wants and gives it to them. Shennandoah Diaz – President and Master of Mayhem, Brass Knuckles Media
Marketing is delighting a consumer, customer and/or user to achieve a profit or other pre-established goal. Steve Dickstein – Chief Executive Officer, Hugo Naturals
Marketing is essentially involved in outward communication, in promoting the corporate goals of the company it is serving. It is the process through which companies accelerate returns by aligning all communication objectives (advertising, marketing, sales, etc), into one department to more efficiently achieve the overall corporate goals. Antoine Didienne
Marketing is branding, naming, pricing, and the bridge between paid and earned media. It is NOT sales. Gini Dietrich – Chief Executive Officer, Arment Dietrich, Inc.
Marketing today is finally customer-focused. Social media made that happen. Markets are once again conversations. Marketing is about knowing the market, creating the right product, creating desire for that product and letting the right people know you have it. The old adage that says, “If you build a better mousetrap people will beat a path to your door” doesn’t hold true without marketing. You might indeed have a better mousetrap, but if people don’t know you have it, and they don’t know where your door is, there will be no path beating and no conversation going on. Sally Falkow – APR, PRESSfeed
Marketing is helping people buy your product or service. Jason Falls – Social Media Explorer
Marketing is the business’ play-maker. As with successful hockey franchises, the most valuable player is not always the player who scores the most goals but the player who creates the play that allows others to score (think Gretzky, Crosby or Orr). A great marketing team assesses the brand’s playing field, quickly captures their competitor’s position, strengths and weaknesses, maps it against their team’s position, strengths and weaknesses and puts the puck on the stick of the salesperson with the greatest opportunity to score.” Sam Fiorella – Web/Social Media Strategist, The Social Roadmap
Marketing is the act of developing an engaging relationship with every single human being that shows an interest in you. Paul Flanigan – Consultant, Experiate.net
Marketing is the process of exposing target customers to a product through appropriate tactics and channels, gauging their reaction and feedback, and ultimately facilitating their path to purchase. Dr. Augustine Fou, Founder, Marketing Science Consulting Group, Inc.
Marketing is the process of building relationships with prospects and customers so that you can profitably develop and promote products and services. Chris Garrett – Chrisg.com
Marketing is the word we use to explain how we encourage people to buy our products. If it’s going to work in a big way, there needs to be a strategy or big idea to whet peoples’ appetites for what we’re selling. When we’re marketing, we begin with a plan: objectives, strategy and tactics (how we implement the strategy). It’s a process that helps companies build relationships with prospects and customers and creates unique value for them…when it’s done right. Lois Geller – President, Lois Geller Marketing Group, Author of Response! The Complete Guide To Profitable Direct Marketing
Marketing should be channel agnostic, data driven and customer-centric. This provides measurable results leveraging the marketplace at large; responding to consumer/business interests and needs. Sue R.E. Germanian – Senior Vice President and Chief Communications Officer, DMA
Marketing is the conversation between a company or brand and a consumer that ultimately leads to brand recall, preference or a transaction. In today’s socially networked world, that conversation is being disintermediated by word of mouth referrals. Traditional marketers will have to work harder to get ahead of and to influence this trend. Josh Glantz – Vice President and General Manager, PCH Online-Publishers Clearing House
Marketing is a way to connect what products and services you have to offer with customers who want and need such products and services. It is multi-faceted, starting with researching your target market and how best to deliver the message to coming up with a plan to execute your promotion via various marketing media. The goal is to develop a strategy to create, price and distribute your products and services for an exchange that will satisfy both your and your customers’ objectives. It is an ever evolving process – always evaluating that your message still meets the needs and wants of your market. Trish Green – Executive Vice President, Head of Marketing, Student Funding Group, LLC
Marketing is ultimately responsible to create enterprise value via the brand, the face of the business strategy. To do so, marketing identifies the target, attractive high growth segments. Marketing drives the organization to define the single minded, differentiated brand value proposition and deliver on it every single day across every touch point. Marketing ensures the delivery of a compelling, differentiated offer to that target and proposition. And, marketing measures and improves the consumers/businesses/partner satisfaction, and the brand health and strength. Marketing is the single point of accountability for growth, identifying and delivering on new customers, new offerings & new market profitable growth. Cathy Halligan – Senior Vice President Sales & Marketing, PowerReviews
Marketing is anything you create or share that tells your story. Ann Handley – Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs, Author with C.C. Chapman of Content Rules
With a good product, marketing can all be boiled down to education. Effectively educating people about any good product will create the desire needed to produce action. Jeffrey Harmon – Chief Marketing Officer, Orabrush
Marketing has to examine why you’re in the game and ask the tough questions. Next, there has to be a plan—and it must be tied to specific sales expectations –clear conditions of satisfaction. Passion is not a substitute for planning. Remember, buzz is NOT sales. Tension is good. Good healthy debate causes tension and moves your group forward. Take risks and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. No one ever died because of a marketing campaign. If you want to grow you’ve got to get out there. Get your business into a new stratosphere. Jeffrey Hayzlett – The Hayzlett Group, Author of The Mirror Test
Marketing is about knowing the customer (whether current or prospective) so well that there is no question I will read your newsletter and share it with your friends, that I will carry a frequent buyer card in my wallet, and that I already interact on your Facebook page. Ari Herzog – Policy and Communications Specialist
Marketing is the umbrella term covering research, branding, PR, advertising, direct response, promotions, loyalty, demand generation, etc. Anne Holland – Publisher, WhichTestWon.com
Marketing is defined as we help people sell more stuff. Joey Iazzetto – President, UniCom Marketing Group
Marketing is the art and science of creating, delighting and keeping customers, while making a profit and building enterprise value. Marketing integrates, formally or informally, many disciplines and every organizational function. Marketing should embrace the highest ethical standards, respect the environment, and strive to make the world a better place. Max Kalehoff – Vice President of Marketing, Clickable
Profitable marketing is reminding likely-to-buy prospects of the value of your products/services in meeting their needs, over and over, at an acquisition cost lower than your allowable acquisition cost. Jerry Kaup – MemberLink.org
Marketing is the art and science of persuasive communication. Dave Kerpen – Chief Executive Officer, Likeable Media
Marketing is the practice of increasing awareness, consideration, purchase/repurchase and preference for a product or service through consumer-driven benefits, advertising, packaging, placement, pricing and promotions. Historically, marketing was a one-way interaction but is increasingly becoming two-way through the use and influence of social media and viral marketing which is often fueled by the company offering the good or service. Robin Korman – Senior Vice President, Global Loyalty and Partnerships, Wyndham Hotel Group
Marketing is discovering what the prospect wants and demands and delivering it more efficiently and effectively than the competition. Paul Kulavis – Managing Partner, Sterling Park Group
Marketing, defined as a value-exchange, is a two-way exchange of value between a marketer and a consumer by providing the right product or service to the right target in the right state of need and by using the right vehicles for interaction and purchase. As a conversation, marketing discovers and tells the right story about its product or service that engages the consumer in an authentic conversation including true listening, engagement, affiliation, and ultimately purchase. Gerry Lantzm – Stories That Work, Inc.
Marketing is a strategic and tactical multifaceted process that supports sales as well as customer service and retention. The primary stages include identifying target audiences, developing a marketing/communications strategy that usually includes several methods and channels (e.g. advertising, PR, content, events/digital print, broadcast), measuring and assessing results, and constantly refining the process based on learnings and marketplace developments. Marketing can also become a feedback loop between an organization and its customers and prospects that helps to inform and shape the business going forward. Rebecca Lieb, Author of The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
Marketing defines the business opportunity, identifies profitable customers and products/services that will meet customer needs, builds customer relationships, drives customer demand and communicates corporate or product/services value.” Ann Z. Marshman – Executive Director, TheLeadersCouncil.com
Marketing is the art and science of creating demand to drive profitable growth. David W. Mischler – President, Altascend Consulting
Marketing is helping your customers understand how much they need something they never knew they needed. Doreen Moran – Digital Strategist
Marketing is the art and science of persuading a potential buyer of a product/ service to purchase from a company that’s responsible for creating a compelling message and communicating that message through targeted channels with enough reach and frequency to guide that potential buyer through the purchase cycle of “attention, interest, desire, action.” Paul Mosenson President, NuSpark Marketing
Marketing is an integrated, multi-channel (online and offline), customer-centric process used to define, segment, reach, and convince potential clients to purchase your product or service, followed by analyzing the metrics to refine your strategy and repeat the process as needed to optimize the ROI (return on investment). Sharon Mostyn – Assistant Vice President, 1st Mariner Bank
Marketing is the unique opportunity to establish respect and a relationship with your target audience in a way that compels them to become addicted to your products or service, your support. Successful marketing is recognized at the precise moment when your target consumer feels so strongly about your company they integrate you into their daily routines and lifestyle. Jeanniey Mullen – Global Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer, Zinio and VIVmag
Marketing is strategic communications and promotions delivered in a mix of forms, such as advertising, public relations, and direct marketing, through multiple online and offline channels, to acquire customers, retain customers, increase share of wallet and shorten the sales cycle. Valerie Oben – President, Foxboro Consulting Inc.
Marketing is everything a company does, from how they answer the phone, how quickly and effectively they respond to email, to how they handle accounts payable, to how they treat their employees and customers. Done right, marketing integrates a great product or service with PR, sales, advertising, new media, personal contact. In other words, marketing is not a discipline or an activity – it is everything a company is – at least if the company wants to be successful. B.L. Ochman – President, What’s Next
The modern definition of marketing is the practice of creating value for the mutual benefit of meeting consumer needs and business objectives. In action, that means knowing and meeting target audience/community information discovery, consumption and sharing behaviors with relevant and timely communications throughout the customer lifecycle. Those communications and relationships influence consumer behavior to drive revenue outcomes. Lee Odden – Chief Executive Officer, TopRank Online Marketing
Marketing is the ongoing process of engagement whereby strangers are nurtured into advocates. Trey Pennington
Marketing is all activities designed to attract and connect customers with the products and services they need. Includes inbound and outbound marketing tactics across all channels – one-to-one and one-to-many. Ideally, marketing fosters a long-term relationship, includes the entire customer brand experience – i.e. support and customer service. Marketing starts with the design of the product itself and extends through post purchase. Patrick Prothe – Marketing Communications Manager, Viewpoint Construction Software
Marketing strives to connect a product or service with a market for that product or service. Michael Puican – Associate Director of Corporate Training, DePaul University
Marketing is identifying the pain points of your customers, developing content and processes to best solve those pain points – which ultimately makes it easier for your customers to buy or stay customers. Joe Pulizzi – Founder, Content Marketing Institute (Disclaimer – I write for the Content Marketing Institute.)
Marketing is about focusing efforts to develop deep insights into customer behavior and overall market conditions to drive sustainable profitable growth for the company. Humphry Rolleston
Marketing is deciding how to offer something specific customers crave and then engaging customers and other stakeholders to create preference. Ken Rosen – Managing Partner, Performance Works
Marketing is the ability to communicate a message to your audience and soliciting a response from them. This response can take the form of a positive impression of your company brand, an urge to purchase an item, to reach out to your company for more information or even spread your message to others. And no matter what the desired response is, marketing should always map it back to your overall business objectives. Cece Salomon-Lee – PR Meets Marketing
Marketing is the combination of messages and programs (the 4 P’s–product/packaging, price, placement and promotion) that drive shoppers to choose your product or service over someone else’s. Charlene Samples – Director of Marketing, Heartland Sweeteners
Marketing is understanding your buyers really, really well. Then creating valuable products, services, and information especially for them to help solve their problems. David Meerman Scott – Bestselling author of Real-Time Marketing and PR
Marketing is influencing behavior to get more people to buy more stuff, more often, for more money. Mark W. Schaefer – Executive Director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. Author of The Tao of Twitter
Marketing, when done correctly, is creating such an amazing experience around your brand or product, that people with no other connection to it want to tell their friends about how amazing it is, and the cycle begins again. Peter Shankman – Founder of Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and Social Media Consultant. Author of Customer Service – New Rules for a Social Enabled World [Affiliate link]
Marketing is marshaling all available resources to deliver constantly on the fundamental principle that it’s not what you want to sell, but what customers are looking to buy. Successful marketers constantly think from the customer’s viewpoint and constantly ask, ‘What’s in it for them?.’ Successful marketers earn trust through every contact and transaction. Jim Siegel – Director of Marketing and Communications, HealthCare Chaplaincy
Marketing creates integrated campaigns to generate leads that positively influence sales, brand, value and vision. Jayme Soulati – Soulati Media
Marketing, in general, is the communication of information about a product or service to an audience. Effective marketing is a two-way communication that combines both art and science. It is a discipline with no end game that must be constantly honed, tweaked, and tested. Effective marketing builds relationships and inspires trust; it is not “push” or “pull”. The key to effective marketing is getting the communication mix correct for your brand, product or service, understanding how it best interacts with customers or users in the most conducive and accepting environment. Mike Sprouse – Chief Marketing Officer, Epic Media Group
Marketing is building an offer you believe and know in your bones you can deliver on consistently and elegantly to the people who will love it. And it’s constantly listening to polish, tweak, and refine that offer so that it’s irresistible by taking away whatever customers don’t need, adding more of what customers love, and building in some extraordinary value that only you can provide — an extraordinary surprise that makes customers fall in love. Liz Strauss – Founder, SOBCon, and Chief Executive Officer, Inside-Out Thinking
Marketing from a scope perspective is anything that modifies the perceived value and/or desirability of a product or service. From a function perspective is moving the demand curve to the right, reducing the elasticity of demand. Bill Tanner – Senior Director of Strategic Research, A. H. Belo
Marketing is inextricably linked to sales and unless it drives a trial or sale, the effort should not be labeled ‘marketing.’ The critical steps in marketing include defining what is currently known about a business (trends, regulations, target audience, competitors), who are the target users or buyers, what are the measurable business objectives in terms of where to take that business, what is the plan to get there and what are the measures of success of initiatives defined to reach those objectives. This marketing approach can be applied whether the objective is expanding a current business or entering new markets. Each step in the marketing process is meant to move the user or buyer closer to making a buy decision. Alexandra Tyler – Vice President of Branded and Social Media Marketing, Citi Global Transaction Services
Marketing builds relationships between consumers and brands. The many disciplines that go into the process, together create a brand personality designed to be compatible with the target. Marketing romances the consumer in the hopes of establishing a long term commitment. This takes persuasion and nothing moulds opinion like the third party endorsement power of PR. As Bill Gates says “If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on PR.” Deborah Weinstein – President, Strategic Objectives
- See more at: http://heidicohen.com/marketing-definition/#sthash.q1ffEKD6.dpuf
10
Business Administration / Create Loyalty by Sharing
« on: December 13, 2014, 09:57:27 PM »
Create Loyalty by Sharing
Consumers want solutions not products and marketers have to rise above the products to solve the consumer’s problems. A soap marketer can be a solution provider for hygiene /skin care related problems by sharing information about hygiene and skin care. A toothpaste marketer can be a solution provider of dental related issues and problems through information sharing. Colgate through its website is offering lot of information about dental care and dental hygiene.
In this era where competitors can copy every possible product/service features, after-marketing activities provide an opportunity to create a meaningful differentiation for the marketers. Although these activities require investment of resources , in the long term ,after-marketing activities will define the extent of consumer loyalty commanded by the brand.
Consumers want solutions not products and marketers have to rise above the products to solve the consumer’s problems. A soap marketer can be a solution provider for hygiene /skin care related problems by sharing information about hygiene and skin care. A toothpaste marketer can be a solution provider of dental related issues and problems through information sharing. Colgate through its website is offering lot of information about dental care and dental hygiene.
In this era where competitors can copy every possible product/service features, after-marketing activities provide an opportunity to create a meaningful differentiation for the marketers. Although these activities require investment of resources , in the long term ,after-marketing activities will define the extent of consumer loyalty commanded by the brand.
11
Business Administration / 22 Laws of Branding
« on: December 13, 2014, 09:55:23 PM »
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding
Al Ries and Laura Ries
Summary
1. The Law of Expansion: The power of the brand is inversely proportional to its scope
2. The Law of Contraction: A brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus
3. The Law of Publicity: The birth of a brand is achieved with publicity, not advertising
4. The Law of Advertising: Once born, a brand needs advertising to stay healthy
5. The Law of the Word: A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer
6. The Law of Credential: The crucial ingredient in the success of any brand is its claim to authenticity
7. The Law of Quality: Quality is important, but brands are not built by quality alone
8. The Law of the Category: A leading brand should promote the category, but not the brand
9. The Law of the Name: In the long run a brand is nothing more than a name
10. The Law of Extensions: The easiest way to destroy a brand is to put its name on everything
11. The Law of Fellowship: In order to build the category, a brand should welcome other brands
12. The Law of the Generic: One of the fastest routes to failure is giving a brand a generic name
13. The Law of the Company: Brands are brands. Companies are companies. There is a difference
14. The Law of Subbrands: What branding builds, subbranding can destroy
15. The Law of Siblings: There is a time and place to launch a second brand
16. The Law of Shape: A brand’s logo should be designed to fit the eyes. Both eyes.
17. The Law of Colour: A brand should use a colour that is the opposite of its major competitors
18. The Law of Borders: There are no barriers to global branding. A brand should know no borders
19. The Law of Consistency: A brand is not built overnight. Success is measured in decades, not years
20. The Law of Change: Brands can be changed, but only infrequently and only very carefully
21. The Law of Mortality: No brand will live forever. Euthanasia is often the best solution
22. The Law of Singularity: The most important aspect of a brand is its single-mindedness
Introduction
• Marketing is building a brand in the mind of the prospect: If you can build a powerful brand, you will have a powerful marketing program
• Marketing is branding: everything that a company does can contribute to the brand-building process
• Today most products are no longer bought and sold ie: in a supermarket there is no “selling” just buying. The consumer makes a choice based on the products available with minimal assistance or prompting from staff
• Branding is simply a more efficient way to sell things as it “pre-sells” the product or service to the consumer
• There is a seismic shift in the world of business from selling to buying
• A brand name is nothing more than a word in the mind, albeit a special kind of word
• A commodity purchase is when the consumer is willing to purchase any brand as long as it is the product that s/he is after (eg: milk and bread)
• A brand purchase is when the brand of the product is important to the consumer (eg: cigarettes and beer)
• Aim high, you can never achieve more than you aspire to
• A branding program should be used to differentiate your cow from all of the other cattle on the range. Even if all the cattle in the range look pretty much alike.
• Branding creates the perception in the mind of the consumer that there is no product on the market quite like your product
1) The Law of Expansion
• When you put your brand name on everything, that brand name loses its power
• The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope
• The question that has to be asked is: do you keep a narrow line in order to build the brand in the mind and increase sales in the future?
• Case study: American Express used to have a very strong brand and membership used to have its privileges, it used to be prestigious to own one etc. Then it broadened its product line with new products and services. The result was that its share of the card market fell from 27% to 18%
• Many companies try to justify the line extension by invoking the masterbrand, superbrand or megabrand concept
1. Chevrolet is the megabrand and Camaro, Caprice, Cavalier etc are the individual brands
2. Pontiac is the megabrand and Firebird, Grand Am etc are the individual brands
• Consumers want short and simple names that they can identify with the product. Marketers tend to go a bit far in the opposite direction and give products ling names that they think will make the consumers identify their brand as different
• If the competition is week, you can expand your product in the market and this may result in increased sales. But this only serves to show that the competition is weak, not that you are strong
• To build powerful brands, you have to contract it, not expand it
2) The Law of Contraction
• Narrowing ones focus is not the same as carrying a limited line. Starbucks offers thirty different types of coffee.
• Good things happen when you contract your brand rather than expand it – it is focused
• When you only make one thing, you get pretty good at making that thing
• The five step pattern
1. Narrow the focus. A powerful branding program always starts by contracting the category, not expanding it
2. Stock in depth: carry maybe one or two types of product, but lots of it
3. Buy cheap: buy in bulk to reduce overall costs
4. Sell cheap: when you buy cheap you can sell cheap and still maintain good margins
5. Dominate the category: this is the ultimate objective of a branding program
• When you dominate a category you become extremely powerful. In order to dominate your category you must narrow your brand focus
• If you want to become a successful company, do what the successful companies did before they became successful (buying private jets is what a successful company might do now, but if a start-up tries that it won’t help them at all)
3) The Law of Publicity
• With virtually no advertising, but with massive amounts of publicity, The Body Shop has become a powerful global brand – it was the endless torrent of newspaper and magazine articles, plus radio and television interviews that literally created The Body Shop
• Advertising generally won’t get a new brand off the ground
• A new brand must be capable of generating favourable publicity in the media or it won’t have a chance in the market place
• The best way to generate publicity is by being the first brand in a new category – media wants to report what is new, not what is best
• What others say about your brand is far more powerful that what you can say about it yourself
• Today’s brands are built with publicity maintained by advertising
• Companies such as Microsoft, Dell, Intel, Gateway, Oracle, Compaq etc are companies that were first created by the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes and Fortune Magazine – publicity, not advertising
• Strategy should be developed from a publicity point of view rather than from an advertising perspective
4) The Law of Advertising
• Publicity is an essential tool for a product in its initial stages, but the product will eventually outlive the publicity – you can’t rely on publicity forever
• After the product has been written about and spoken about in the media, get the media to concentrate on the company and how innovative the company is etc. Once that avenue of publicity has been exhausted, then you must turn to advertising
• ie: First publicity, then advertising
• You should look at your advertising budget as insurance that protects the brand against losses caused by competitive attacks
• A brand leader should advertise brand leadership eg: “Good Year, #1 in tyres”
• When you say that the product is “better” consumers think “that is what they all say”, but when you advertise that your product is “the leader”, they think that it must be better
• Most people buy the leading brand
• Advertising is useful to maintain brand leadership, but not to obtain it
5) The Law of the Word
• FedEx has become synonymous with “overnight delivery”
• To build a brand you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in the prospect’s mind. A word that nobody else owns (eg: Volvo owns the word “safety”)
• A common mistake in branding is when once the company “owns” a word it then moves on to broaden its base and enter into other markets
• In the same way that Kleenex owns tissue (“Can you pass me a Kleenex” really means, “can you pass me that box of tissues” even though it may not be Kleenex), Coca Cola owns cola, Band Aid owns adhesive bandages and Rollerblade owns in-line skates – you know when your brand owns the category name when people use your brand name generically
• You can only become a generic brand by being the first (Pepsi will never own the word “cola” even if it outsells Coke”
• If you were not the first in your category, you can become the first by creating a new category by narrowing your focus eg: FedEx overtook Emery because Emery offered all different types of services. FedEx concentrated only on overnight deliveries and soon became famous for being able to deliver packages overnight, while Emery was not seen to be able to deliver that quickly
• The product itself might have a visual reality, but it’s the brand name and its associations that give the product meaning in the mind of the consumers
• Don’t expand the brand, expand the market – make your product the “in-thing” in your industry eg: “Hey, this data must be important because it was analysed using ICRFS”
6) The Law of Credentials
• Credentials are the collateral that you put up to guarantee performance of your brand
• Leadership is the most direct way to guarantee credentials for your brand
• Everywhere that the brand name is used, so are the credentials (“The Real Thing” was used in the 70s every time Coca Cola was mentioned
• Credentials are important in the publicity process. Reporters and editors will not dismiss leadership and other aspects to a brand’s credentials as “puffery”
- If a reporter is doing a story on car rentals, they will call Hertz
- If a reporter is doing a story on cola, they will call Coca Cola
- If a reporter is doing a story on computer software, they will call Microsoft
• When the benefits of a product are structured around credentials, they carry much more weight
• Never assume that people know who the leader is in a category
• Most people would walk away from an empty restaurant and wait for a table at a busy one – because the food/service/ambiance must be better at the full one, otherwise there would be a line outside the door of the empty restaurant
7) The Law of Quality
• There is almost no correlation between the popularity of the product and the quality of the product (Coke outsells Pepsi, but taste tests prove that Pepsi’s taste is preferred by consumers over Coke)
• Quality or the perception of quality is in the mind – branding
• When you contract your lines and focus on one thing you become a specialist rather than a generalist – a specialist doctor is better qualified than a general practitioner
• Being a specialist and having a better name go hand-in-hand. Expanding a brand and being a generalist erodes your ability to have a powerful name eg: General Electric, General Motors might be well known but as brands they are weak – they can still be a sales success if they compete against other weak or weaker brands
• Most of GE’s competitors are also generalist: Westinghouse, General Motors and United Technologies
• Weak brands cannot successfully compete against strong brands: GE failed in its bid to enter into the mainframe market because IBM, a specialist, was much stronger
• Having a high price also gives consumers the impression of quality – can a Rolex keep better time than a Casio watch? No, but it is better quality because it is more expensive (does your waiter suggest a $20 bottle of wine when you ordered an $80 bottle, even if the cheaper one tastes better? No, because the price tag determines the quality)
• Brands are not built by quality alone
• When faced with a sea of similar products, a good strategy is often to inflate the price and ask yourself what you can put in it to justify the price increase eg: Chivas Regal allows the whiskey to age longer, Rolex makes watches bigger and heavier with unique wristbands etc
• Having a quality product will save you time and money on service costs later on, but quality alone will not build a brand
The Law of the Category
• When you narrow the focus to such a degree that there is no longer any market for the brand, create a new category
• Create a new category and become the first – and thus, the leading brand
• To build something out of nothing you have to launch the brand in such a way that there is a perception that you were the first and you have to promote the new category
• When Apple launched the Newton, they forgot to categorise it. They called it a PDA, but a notebook computer, mobile phone or electronic organisers can all be classified as Personal Digital Assistants. You knew that Apple was in trouble when they launched an advertising campaign “What is it?”
• EatZi’s decided to create a new category and focused on selling restaurant meals for takeout only ie: white tablecloth, restaurant quality take-away food. A new category, separate from pizza, burgers and sandwiches – they call the category the “meal-market”
• Once competition arrives, concentrate on promoting the category to increase the size of the pie, rather than increase their slice – competition can be good for publicity (see chapter 11)
9) The Law of the Name
• In the long run, a brand is nothing more than a name
• In the long term, the unique idea or concept disappears and what is left is the company name
• Xerox built the first plain paper copier. Today all copiers are plain paper, but what distinguishes Xerox from the rest of the market is their name
• What is important is the perception that the name creates (eg: A Rolls Royce may not really be a better car than a Jaguar or a Bentleigh, but the name suggests that it is – and you have to believe it because it is the “Rolls Royce of automobiles”
• The most valuable asset of the Xerox corporation is its name – it is short, unique and connotes high technology
• What is a Mitsubishi? Is it a car? A television? A semiconductor? It is all of these ie; generic. The only thing worse than a generic name is a line extended generic name eg: The Mitsubishi Fax Master (nobody can distinguish it from the other fax machines. It is not unique)
10) The Law of Extensions
• Line extension kills sales of the original brand.
• Product A is released and is doing well (Let’s call it Acme Beer) so then we extend the product line to attract more customers – Acme Light, Acme Bitter, Acme Extra Taste. You don’t attract more customers, but you shift customers from Acme Beer to the extended lines – isn’t an Acme Beer drinker more likely to try Acme Light than a Budweiser drinker?
• If you extend your product you may be suggesting that the original wasn’t the best. That is why “New Coke” failed – wasn’t the Real Thing really the Real Thing? “ Should Evian launch Sulfate Free Water – wasn’t the original water good for you?
• Management often measures the extension rather than the new product. So just because Kellogs Fruit Loops is successful, it doesn’t mean that Kellogs Healthy Style Fruit Loops will also do well –IT MAY ERODE YOUR ORIGINAL LINE but
• What will customers of the current brand think when they see your extended brand?
• If the market is moving out from under you, stay where you are and launch a completely second brand (ie: not ICRF-Plus2 but ABCDE brand)
11) The Law of Fellowship
• One of the best locations from a number two brand is right across the road from the leader – both brands will benefit
• Choice stimulates demand – the competition between Coke and Pepsi makes consumers more cola conscious (a monopoly makes consumers suspicious. Look at Microsoft)
• Competition broadens the category while allowing the brands to maintain focus
• But when there is too much choice, consumers get confused eg: in California there are 1,000 wineries and 5,000 brands but no brand leader
• Two major brands work well eg: Coke and Pepsi, Kodak and Fuji, Duracell and Energiser
• Often the law of Fellowship can be seen in Business Centres, Shopping Centres etc eg: the garment district on 7th Avenue or the diamond district on Forty Seventh Street or the financial centre of Wall Street
• It makes sense for similar businesses to be located near each other. Similar businesses in the same area attracts more customers who can comparison shop and have a choice. Businesses can also keep an eye on their competition
• No brand can ever own the entire market (except Windows!)
12) The Law of the Generic
• There are many successful companies that have generic names (eg: General motors, American Airlines, International Business Machines).
• The success of these companies are probably due to the fact that they were the first in the marketplace, not their names eg: National Biscuit Company was the first national biscuit company; General Electric was the first General Electric company etc
• The Generic names of these companies have transformed into specific names eg:
- National Biscuit Company now calls itself Nabisco (there are many biscuit companies, but only one Nabisco)
- General Electric now calls itself GE (There are many general electric companies, but only one GE)
- National Broadcasting Corporation calls itself NBC (There are many national broadcasting corporations, but only one NBC)
• Generic names don’t give the company the ability to distinguish themselves from the rest of the competition – you need Brand Identity (that is why ICRFS is better than Interactive Claims Reserving Forecasting System!)
• Try to find a regular word taken out of context and used to connote the primary attribute of the brand eg: Blockbuster for Blockbuster Video
• If you cut a generic name in half, you can come up with a good name eg: Intelligent Chip Company is too long and too generic – but everybody knows and remembers Intel – Intel is a powerful brand because it reminds consumers of the word “intelligent” without actually saying it
• Line extensions fare poorly. This is often caused by combining the brand name with the generic name eg: Fosters Light can be perceived in the mind as Fosters light – a watered down version of Fosters
• Sometimes the opposite is true eg: Vaseline Intensive Care is successful because people don’t say, “pass the Vaseline”, but they say “pass the Intensive Care” – “Intensive Care” has become a specific name, transformed from a generic name
13) The Law of the Company
• Should the brand name dominate the company name or should the company name dominate the brand name – should they be given equal weight.
• Brand names should almost always outweigh company names – consumers buy brands, not companies
• Unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise, the best branding strategy should be to use the company name as the brand name (eg: Coca Cola produces Coca Cola, WD40 produces WD40 etc)
• The brand name is the word that the customers use to describe the product eg: Do you want some Coca Cola? I bought a Cadillac today. Put it in an Excel Spreadsheet
• Microsoft Word – this is a generic name because there are other word processors that use “Word” as part of their name (Wordstar, WordPerfect etc) So consumers tend to refer to it as Microsoft Word (or MS Word). This can be bad for the company because the name is too long (eg: people don’t say, “Can I have the chunky soup?” they are forced to say, “Can I have the Campbell’s Chunky Soup”)
• Your company name should not dominate your brand – if you make the company name too small consumers might get suspicious that you are trying to hide something. If it is too large then the company overshadows the brand and CONSUMERS BUY BRANDS, NOT COMPANIES
• Use the company name in a secondary way
14) The Law of Subbrands
• Holiday Inn has many subbrands – Holiday Inn Express, Holiday Inn Select, Holiday Inn Sun Spree Resorts, Holiday Inn Garden Court. When you went into a Holiday Inn, you knew what to expect. Because of all of these subbrands, you don’t know what to expect
• Subbranding can erode the power of the core brand
• Market research at Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza produced the following response from guests, “It’s a nice hotel, but a bit expensive for a Holiday Inn”. From now on the hotels will be called Crowne Plaza (If I am forking out the big bucks, I want to stay at a big brand hotel)
• Subbranding tries to push the core brand into a new direction.
• Ford is not a brand. The brands are Laser, Falcon and Fairlane – Ford is a Megabrand, but consumers don’t understand this concept.
• Branding is all about creating perceptions in the mind of consumers. Subbranding creates confusion and this destroys the brand’s image
• A brand can be marketed in more than one model as long as those models don’t detract from the essence of the brand
15) The Law of Siblings
• There does come a time when there is a need to launch a second brand – but not so that it detracts from the original brand
• Sometimes it is good to create a family of brands – sibling brands
• Each brand has to be different and distinct in its own right
• Some managers want to take advantage of the equity that they have in their brand, but they are mistaken if they use the existing brand to support the new one as it could damage the original brand
• Time Inc is the world’s largest magazine publisher by launching totally separate publications ie: Time, Fortune (not Time for Business), Life (not Time for Pictures), Sports Illustrated (not Time for Sports), Money (not Time for Finances), People (not Time for celebrities)
• Siblings are not associated as being in the same category as the other members of the family
• The siblings can all be controlled by the same parent. Upper management has to be more involved to ensure that there is no mixing of the siblings so that they remain separate
• Do not tag the company name onto every sibling – do Lexus buyers buy a Lexus because it is made by Toyota? Or in spite of the fact that it is made by Toyota
• Keep the following siblings in mind:
- Focus on a common product area
- Select a single attribute to each segment (eg: distribution, age, flavours – but most commonly, price
- Set up rigid distinctions between brands
- Create different brand names for each sibling
- Create a new sibling only if you can create a new category
- Keep control of the siblings at the highest level – otherwise the effectiveness of the brands can degrade.
• A sibling strategy can be used to dominate a category over the long term
16) The Law of Shape
• A logo is a combination of a trademark and the name of the brand set in a distinctive type
• A logo:
- should be horizontal
- should be legible
- does not have to be accompanied by a symbol (but over time a symbol can come to represent the name of the brand – eg: the Nike swoosh) – the power of the brand name overrides logo recognition
17) The Law of Colour
• Colour can help to make a brand distinctive
• It is best to stick to the five basic colours of red, blue, green, yellow and orange rather than a mixed colour or combination of colours
- Red is the colour of energy and excitement (Coca Cola)
- Blue is a tranquil colour but also a corporate/leadership colour (IBM)
- Orange is an in-between colour which is like Red,
- Green is the colour of the environment (eg: Vitamins, Health Foods)
- Yellow is a neutral colour that also is associated with caution (road signs)
• There are other colours which can be used as well:
- White is the colour of purity (Weddings)
- Black is the colour of luxury (Johnnie Walker Black Label)
- Purple is the colour of royalty
• Focus on the identity that the brand should create, not just the mood
• Choose the best colour possible, but if there is another brand with that colour, choose the opposite colour
• The colours that you choose will determine whether consumers can visualise your logo or not – eg: Coke is easy to visualise (lots of red) but Pepsi has two colours and it is difficult to picture
• Line extensions destroy the impact of colour on the original brand
• Sometimes, but rarely, a case can be made for multiple colours eg: FedEx chose two colours that would be sure to stand out on someone’s desk – orange and purple
18) The Law of Borders
• Building a global brand means: keeping the brand’s narrow focus in its home country and going global
• The words “imported product” on a brand creates the perception of quality
• Heineken Beer is actually made in Holland but because of its geographical proximity to Germany and because of the perception that Germany produces very good beer, Heineken capitalised on that perception. They even distributed cardboard coasters that had written on them “Printed in Germany”
• There is no such thing as a global brand without a global perception (eg: Toyota, Honda and Nissan are Japanese, Compaq, Intel and Microsoft are American etc)
• Coca Cola is one of the only brands that can be classified as being the closest to a truly “International” brand – but it must stay with it’s American heritage because every brand must originate from somewhere
• It doesn’t matter where the brand originated, is produced etc, the name and the associated connotations determine its geographic perception eg: Häagen-Dazs ice cream sounds Scandinavian, but it was developed in New Jersey
• The use of English words in promoting a brand and in the brand name is important because English has become an international language (Red Bull energy drink is Austrian, but they don’t call it “Roter Stier”!)
• The name of your product doesn’t have to be an English word but must sound like one.
• Be careful with advertising slogans because sometimes they don’t translate well eg: “Come alive with the Pepsi generation” translates to Chinese as “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead”
19) The Law of Consistency
• A brand cannot get into the mind unless it stands for something. BMW has been the “ultimate driving machine” for 25 years
• Brands should never change – they can be bent slightly or given a new slant but not changed
• If the market moves, stick with the brand and the cycle will come back to you (just because the trend is towards white alcohol (gin, vodka etc) Jack Daniels would destroy its whiskey line if they introduced Jack Daniels Vodka)
• Limiting the brand is the essence of branding. Limiting the brand and being consistent (over decades) is the key to successful branding
20) The Law of Change
• Brand changing occurs in the mind of the consumer, not inside the company
• There are 3 feasible situations for changing a brand:
1. Your brand is weak or non-existent in the mind of consumers (eg: not many realised that Intel was originally a producer of RAM but moved into processors – nobody but those directly involved even noticed! – If they were to try to move back to manufacturing RAM, they would fail because their product is strong in the minds of consumers)
2. You want to move the brand down the food chain. Lower the price of your product over time and make it cheaper. This often helps a company to gain market share (Marlborough did it). Moving up is far more difficult
3. The brand is in a slow moving field and change will take place over a period of time. Eg: Citicorp is slowly changing its brand’s focus from corporate business to consumer business
• Customer perceptions of brands don’t go away so quickly eg: Kentucky Fried Chicken wanted to move away from “Fried” so it called itself KFC and offered healthier style chicken, but people still went to them for fried chicken.
21) The Law of Mortality
• Brands have a life cycle – they are born, prosper and die.
• Companies spend millions trying to change an old brand (Kodak uses the Kodak name on all digital products to try to change with the market)
• Opportunities for new markets are always being created with the birth of new categories
• Many managers make poor financial decisions because they fail to distinguish between the two aspects of a brand’s value: How well known it is and what the brand stands for
• A well known brand that doesn’t stand for anything has no value and a brand that stands for something but is not well known has value – because there is the opportunity to create a powerful brand
• Brand new brands make the impact, not rehashed old brands (eg: Blockbuster video became a market leader in video rentals even though it was up against established companies who were too generic and not exciting enough in the new category
22) The Law of Singularity
• Your brand must be a single idea or concept that you own inside of a prospect – if it is too many things at once, it is confusing and becomes worthless
• What is an Atari? It used to be the most popular games console but then it became a computer and now it is nothing – because it lost its singularity
• Volvo sells more cars in the US than BMW or Mercedes because over 35 years it has stuck to its concept of burning into the minds of consumers that it is the safest car on the road
Al Ries and Laura Ries
Summary
1. The Law of Expansion: The power of the brand is inversely proportional to its scope
2. The Law of Contraction: A brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus
3. The Law of Publicity: The birth of a brand is achieved with publicity, not advertising
4. The Law of Advertising: Once born, a brand needs advertising to stay healthy
5. The Law of the Word: A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer
6. The Law of Credential: The crucial ingredient in the success of any brand is its claim to authenticity
7. The Law of Quality: Quality is important, but brands are not built by quality alone
8. The Law of the Category: A leading brand should promote the category, but not the brand
9. The Law of the Name: In the long run a brand is nothing more than a name
10. The Law of Extensions: The easiest way to destroy a brand is to put its name on everything
11. The Law of Fellowship: In order to build the category, a brand should welcome other brands
12. The Law of the Generic: One of the fastest routes to failure is giving a brand a generic name
13. The Law of the Company: Brands are brands. Companies are companies. There is a difference
14. The Law of Subbrands: What branding builds, subbranding can destroy
15. The Law of Siblings: There is a time and place to launch a second brand
16. The Law of Shape: A brand’s logo should be designed to fit the eyes. Both eyes.
17. The Law of Colour: A brand should use a colour that is the opposite of its major competitors
18. The Law of Borders: There are no barriers to global branding. A brand should know no borders
19. The Law of Consistency: A brand is not built overnight. Success is measured in decades, not years
20. The Law of Change: Brands can be changed, but only infrequently and only very carefully
21. The Law of Mortality: No brand will live forever. Euthanasia is often the best solution
22. The Law of Singularity: The most important aspect of a brand is its single-mindedness
Introduction
• Marketing is building a brand in the mind of the prospect: If you can build a powerful brand, you will have a powerful marketing program
• Marketing is branding: everything that a company does can contribute to the brand-building process
• Today most products are no longer bought and sold ie: in a supermarket there is no “selling” just buying. The consumer makes a choice based on the products available with minimal assistance or prompting from staff
• Branding is simply a more efficient way to sell things as it “pre-sells” the product or service to the consumer
• There is a seismic shift in the world of business from selling to buying
• A brand name is nothing more than a word in the mind, albeit a special kind of word
• A commodity purchase is when the consumer is willing to purchase any brand as long as it is the product that s/he is after (eg: milk and bread)
• A brand purchase is when the brand of the product is important to the consumer (eg: cigarettes and beer)
• Aim high, you can never achieve more than you aspire to
• A branding program should be used to differentiate your cow from all of the other cattle on the range. Even if all the cattle in the range look pretty much alike.
• Branding creates the perception in the mind of the consumer that there is no product on the market quite like your product
1) The Law of Expansion
• When you put your brand name on everything, that brand name loses its power
• The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope
• The question that has to be asked is: do you keep a narrow line in order to build the brand in the mind and increase sales in the future?
• Case study: American Express used to have a very strong brand and membership used to have its privileges, it used to be prestigious to own one etc. Then it broadened its product line with new products and services. The result was that its share of the card market fell from 27% to 18%
• Many companies try to justify the line extension by invoking the masterbrand, superbrand or megabrand concept
1. Chevrolet is the megabrand and Camaro, Caprice, Cavalier etc are the individual brands
2. Pontiac is the megabrand and Firebird, Grand Am etc are the individual brands
• Consumers want short and simple names that they can identify with the product. Marketers tend to go a bit far in the opposite direction and give products ling names that they think will make the consumers identify their brand as different
• If the competition is week, you can expand your product in the market and this may result in increased sales. But this only serves to show that the competition is weak, not that you are strong
• To build powerful brands, you have to contract it, not expand it
2) The Law of Contraction
• Narrowing ones focus is not the same as carrying a limited line. Starbucks offers thirty different types of coffee.
• Good things happen when you contract your brand rather than expand it – it is focused
• When you only make one thing, you get pretty good at making that thing
• The five step pattern
1. Narrow the focus. A powerful branding program always starts by contracting the category, not expanding it
2. Stock in depth: carry maybe one or two types of product, but lots of it
3. Buy cheap: buy in bulk to reduce overall costs
4. Sell cheap: when you buy cheap you can sell cheap and still maintain good margins
5. Dominate the category: this is the ultimate objective of a branding program
• When you dominate a category you become extremely powerful. In order to dominate your category you must narrow your brand focus
• If you want to become a successful company, do what the successful companies did before they became successful (buying private jets is what a successful company might do now, but if a start-up tries that it won’t help them at all)
3) The Law of Publicity
• With virtually no advertising, but with massive amounts of publicity, The Body Shop has become a powerful global brand – it was the endless torrent of newspaper and magazine articles, plus radio and television interviews that literally created The Body Shop
• Advertising generally won’t get a new brand off the ground
• A new brand must be capable of generating favourable publicity in the media or it won’t have a chance in the market place
• The best way to generate publicity is by being the first brand in a new category – media wants to report what is new, not what is best
• What others say about your brand is far more powerful that what you can say about it yourself
• Today’s brands are built with publicity maintained by advertising
• Companies such as Microsoft, Dell, Intel, Gateway, Oracle, Compaq etc are companies that were first created by the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes and Fortune Magazine – publicity, not advertising
• Strategy should be developed from a publicity point of view rather than from an advertising perspective
4) The Law of Advertising
• Publicity is an essential tool for a product in its initial stages, but the product will eventually outlive the publicity – you can’t rely on publicity forever
• After the product has been written about and spoken about in the media, get the media to concentrate on the company and how innovative the company is etc. Once that avenue of publicity has been exhausted, then you must turn to advertising
• ie: First publicity, then advertising
• You should look at your advertising budget as insurance that protects the brand against losses caused by competitive attacks
• A brand leader should advertise brand leadership eg: “Good Year, #1 in tyres”
• When you say that the product is “better” consumers think “that is what they all say”, but when you advertise that your product is “the leader”, they think that it must be better
• Most people buy the leading brand
• Advertising is useful to maintain brand leadership, but not to obtain it
5) The Law of the Word
• FedEx has become synonymous with “overnight delivery”
• To build a brand you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in the prospect’s mind. A word that nobody else owns (eg: Volvo owns the word “safety”)
• A common mistake in branding is when once the company “owns” a word it then moves on to broaden its base and enter into other markets
• In the same way that Kleenex owns tissue (“Can you pass me a Kleenex” really means, “can you pass me that box of tissues” even though it may not be Kleenex), Coca Cola owns cola, Band Aid owns adhesive bandages and Rollerblade owns in-line skates – you know when your brand owns the category name when people use your brand name generically
• You can only become a generic brand by being the first (Pepsi will never own the word “cola” even if it outsells Coke”
• If you were not the first in your category, you can become the first by creating a new category by narrowing your focus eg: FedEx overtook Emery because Emery offered all different types of services. FedEx concentrated only on overnight deliveries and soon became famous for being able to deliver packages overnight, while Emery was not seen to be able to deliver that quickly
• The product itself might have a visual reality, but it’s the brand name and its associations that give the product meaning in the mind of the consumers
• Don’t expand the brand, expand the market – make your product the “in-thing” in your industry eg: “Hey, this data must be important because it was analysed using ICRFS”
6) The Law of Credentials
• Credentials are the collateral that you put up to guarantee performance of your brand
• Leadership is the most direct way to guarantee credentials for your brand
• Everywhere that the brand name is used, so are the credentials (“The Real Thing” was used in the 70s every time Coca Cola was mentioned
• Credentials are important in the publicity process. Reporters and editors will not dismiss leadership and other aspects to a brand’s credentials as “puffery”
- If a reporter is doing a story on car rentals, they will call Hertz
- If a reporter is doing a story on cola, they will call Coca Cola
- If a reporter is doing a story on computer software, they will call Microsoft
• When the benefits of a product are structured around credentials, they carry much more weight
• Never assume that people know who the leader is in a category
• Most people would walk away from an empty restaurant and wait for a table at a busy one – because the food/service/ambiance must be better at the full one, otherwise there would be a line outside the door of the empty restaurant
7) The Law of Quality
• There is almost no correlation between the popularity of the product and the quality of the product (Coke outsells Pepsi, but taste tests prove that Pepsi’s taste is preferred by consumers over Coke)
• Quality or the perception of quality is in the mind – branding
• When you contract your lines and focus on one thing you become a specialist rather than a generalist – a specialist doctor is better qualified than a general practitioner
• Being a specialist and having a better name go hand-in-hand. Expanding a brand and being a generalist erodes your ability to have a powerful name eg: General Electric, General Motors might be well known but as brands they are weak – they can still be a sales success if they compete against other weak or weaker brands
• Most of GE’s competitors are also generalist: Westinghouse, General Motors and United Technologies
• Weak brands cannot successfully compete against strong brands: GE failed in its bid to enter into the mainframe market because IBM, a specialist, was much stronger
• Having a high price also gives consumers the impression of quality – can a Rolex keep better time than a Casio watch? No, but it is better quality because it is more expensive (does your waiter suggest a $20 bottle of wine when you ordered an $80 bottle, even if the cheaper one tastes better? No, because the price tag determines the quality)
• Brands are not built by quality alone
• When faced with a sea of similar products, a good strategy is often to inflate the price and ask yourself what you can put in it to justify the price increase eg: Chivas Regal allows the whiskey to age longer, Rolex makes watches bigger and heavier with unique wristbands etc
• Having a quality product will save you time and money on service costs later on, but quality alone will not build a brand
The Law of the Category• When you narrow the focus to such a degree that there is no longer any market for the brand, create a new category
• Create a new category and become the first – and thus, the leading brand
• To build something out of nothing you have to launch the brand in such a way that there is a perception that you were the first and you have to promote the new category
• When Apple launched the Newton, they forgot to categorise it. They called it a PDA, but a notebook computer, mobile phone or electronic organisers can all be classified as Personal Digital Assistants. You knew that Apple was in trouble when they launched an advertising campaign “What is it?”
• EatZi’s decided to create a new category and focused on selling restaurant meals for takeout only ie: white tablecloth, restaurant quality take-away food. A new category, separate from pizza, burgers and sandwiches – they call the category the “meal-market”
• Once competition arrives, concentrate on promoting the category to increase the size of the pie, rather than increase their slice – competition can be good for publicity (see chapter 11)
9) The Law of the Name
• In the long run, a brand is nothing more than a name
• In the long term, the unique idea or concept disappears and what is left is the company name
• Xerox built the first plain paper copier. Today all copiers are plain paper, but what distinguishes Xerox from the rest of the market is their name
• What is important is the perception that the name creates (eg: A Rolls Royce may not really be a better car than a Jaguar or a Bentleigh, but the name suggests that it is – and you have to believe it because it is the “Rolls Royce of automobiles”
• The most valuable asset of the Xerox corporation is its name – it is short, unique and connotes high technology
• What is a Mitsubishi? Is it a car? A television? A semiconductor? It is all of these ie; generic. The only thing worse than a generic name is a line extended generic name eg: The Mitsubishi Fax Master (nobody can distinguish it from the other fax machines. It is not unique)
10) The Law of Extensions
• Line extension kills sales of the original brand.
• Product A is released and is doing well (Let’s call it Acme Beer) so then we extend the product line to attract more customers – Acme Light, Acme Bitter, Acme Extra Taste. You don’t attract more customers, but you shift customers from Acme Beer to the extended lines – isn’t an Acme Beer drinker more likely to try Acme Light than a Budweiser drinker?
• If you extend your product you may be suggesting that the original wasn’t the best. That is why “New Coke” failed – wasn’t the Real Thing really the Real Thing? “ Should Evian launch Sulfate Free Water – wasn’t the original water good for you?
• Management often measures the extension rather than the new product. So just because Kellogs Fruit Loops is successful, it doesn’t mean that Kellogs Healthy Style Fruit Loops will also do well –IT MAY ERODE YOUR ORIGINAL LINE but
• What will customers of the current brand think when they see your extended brand?
• If the market is moving out from under you, stay where you are and launch a completely second brand (ie: not ICRF-Plus2 but ABCDE brand)
11) The Law of Fellowship
• One of the best locations from a number two brand is right across the road from the leader – both brands will benefit
• Choice stimulates demand – the competition between Coke and Pepsi makes consumers more cola conscious (a monopoly makes consumers suspicious. Look at Microsoft)
• Competition broadens the category while allowing the brands to maintain focus
• But when there is too much choice, consumers get confused eg: in California there are 1,000 wineries and 5,000 brands but no brand leader
• Two major brands work well eg: Coke and Pepsi, Kodak and Fuji, Duracell and Energiser
• Often the law of Fellowship can be seen in Business Centres, Shopping Centres etc eg: the garment district on 7th Avenue or the diamond district on Forty Seventh Street or the financial centre of Wall Street
• It makes sense for similar businesses to be located near each other. Similar businesses in the same area attracts more customers who can comparison shop and have a choice. Businesses can also keep an eye on their competition
• No brand can ever own the entire market (except Windows!)
12) The Law of the Generic
• There are many successful companies that have generic names (eg: General motors, American Airlines, International Business Machines).
• The success of these companies are probably due to the fact that they were the first in the marketplace, not their names eg: National Biscuit Company was the first national biscuit company; General Electric was the first General Electric company etc
• The Generic names of these companies have transformed into specific names eg:
- National Biscuit Company now calls itself Nabisco (there are many biscuit companies, but only one Nabisco)
- General Electric now calls itself GE (There are many general electric companies, but only one GE)
- National Broadcasting Corporation calls itself NBC (There are many national broadcasting corporations, but only one NBC)
• Generic names don’t give the company the ability to distinguish themselves from the rest of the competition – you need Brand Identity (that is why ICRFS is better than Interactive Claims Reserving Forecasting System!)
• Try to find a regular word taken out of context and used to connote the primary attribute of the brand eg: Blockbuster for Blockbuster Video
• If you cut a generic name in half, you can come up with a good name eg: Intelligent Chip Company is too long and too generic – but everybody knows and remembers Intel – Intel is a powerful brand because it reminds consumers of the word “intelligent” without actually saying it
• Line extensions fare poorly. This is often caused by combining the brand name with the generic name eg: Fosters Light can be perceived in the mind as Fosters light – a watered down version of Fosters
• Sometimes the opposite is true eg: Vaseline Intensive Care is successful because people don’t say, “pass the Vaseline”, but they say “pass the Intensive Care” – “Intensive Care” has become a specific name, transformed from a generic name
13) The Law of the Company
• Should the brand name dominate the company name or should the company name dominate the brand name – should they be given equal weight.
• Brand names should almost always outweigh company names – consumers buy brands, not companies
• Unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise, the best branding strategy should be to use the company name as the brand name (eg: Coca Cola produces Coca Cola, WD40 produces WD40 etc)
• The brand name is the word that the customers use to describe the product eg: Do you want some Coca Cola? I bought a Cadillac today. Put it in an Excel Spreadsheet
• Microsoft Word – this is a generic name because there are other word processors that use “Word” as part of their name (Wordstar, WordPerfect etc) So consumers tend to refer to it as Microsoft Word (or MS Word). This can be bad for the company because the name is too long (eg: people don’t say, “Can I have the chunky soup?” they are forced to say, “Can I have the Campbell’s Chunky Soup”)
• Your company name should not dominate your brand – if you make the company name too small consumers might get suspicious that you are trying to hide something. If it is too large then the company overshadows the brand and CONSUMERS BUY BRANDS, NOT COMPANIES
• Use the company name in a secondary way
14) The Law of Subbrands
• Holiday Inn has many subbrands – Holiday Inn Express, Holiday Inn Select, Holiday Inn Sun Spree Resorts, Holiday Inn Garden Court. When you went into a Holiday Inn, you knew what to expect. Because of all of these subbrands, you don’t know what to expect
• Subbranding can erode the power of the core brand
• Market research at Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza produced the following response from guests, “It’s a nice hotel, but a bit expensive for a Holiday Inn”. From now on the hotels will be called Crowne Plaza (If I am forking out the big bucks, I want to stay at a big brand hotel)
• Subbranding tries to push the core brand into a new direction.
• Ford is not a brand. The brands are Laser, Falcon and Fairlane – Ford is a Megabrand, but consumers don’t understand this concept.
• Branding is all about creating perceptions in the mind of consumers. Subbranding creates confusion and this destroys the brand’s image
• A brand can be marketed in more than one model as long as those models don’t detract from the essence of the brand
15) The Law of Siblings
• There does come a time when there is a need to launch a second brand – but not so that it detracts from the original brand
• Sometimes it is good to create a family of brands – sibling brands
• Each brand has to be different and distinct in its own right
• Some managers want to take advantage of the equity that they have in their brand, but they are mistaken if they use the existing brand to support the new one as it could damage the original brand
• Time Inc is the world’s largest magazine publisher by launching totally separate publications ie: Time, Fortune (not Time for Business), Life (not Time for Pictures), Sports Illustrated (not Time for Sports), Money (not Time for Finances), People (not Time for celebrities)
• Siblings are not associated as being in the same category as the other members of the family
• The siblings can all be controlled by the same parent. Upper management has to be more involved to ensure that there is no mixing of the siblings so that they remain separate
• Do not tag the company name onto every sibling – do Lexus buyers buy a Lexus because it is made by Toyota? Or in spite of the fact that it is made by Toyota
• Keep the following siblings in mind:
- Focus on a common product area
- Select a single attribute to each segment (eg: distribution, age, flavours – but most commonly, price
- Set up rigid distinctions between brands
- Create different brand names for each sibling
- Create a new sibling only if you can create a new category
- Keep control of the siblings at the highest level – otherwise the effectiveness of the brands can degrade.
• A sibling strategy can be used to dominate a category over the long term
16) The Law of Shape
• A logo is a combination of a trademark and the name of the brand set in a distinctive type
• A logo:
- should be horizontal
- should be legible
- does not have to be accompanied by a symbol (but over time a symbol can come to represent the name of the brand – eg: the Nike swoosh) – the power of the brand name overrides logo recognition
17) The Law of Colour
• Colour can help to make a brand distinctive
• It is best to stick to the five basic colours of red, blue, green, yellow and orange rather than a mixed colour or combination of colours
- Red is the colour of energy and excitement (Coca Cola)
- Blue is a tranquil colour but also a corporate/leadership colour (IBM)
- Orange is an in-between colour which is like Red,
- Green is the colour of the environment (eg: Vitamins, Health Foods)
- Yellow is a neutral colour that also is associated with caution (road signs)
• There are other colours which can be used as well:
- White is the colour of purity (Weddings)
- Black is the colour of luxury (Johnnie Walker Black Label)
- Purple is the colour of royalty
• Focus on the identity that the brand should create, not just the mood
• Choose the best colour possible, but if there is another brand with that colour, choose the opposite colour
• The colours that you choose will determine whether consumers can visualise your logo or not – eg: Coke is easy to visualise (lots of red) but Pepsi has two colours and it is difficult to picture
• Line extensions destroy the impact of colour on the original brand
• Sometimes, but rarely, a case can be made for multiple colours eg: FedEx chose two colours that would be sure to stand out on someone’s desk – orange and purple
18) The Law of Borders
• Building a global brand means: keeping the brand’s narrow focus in its home country and going global
• The words “imported product” on a brand creates the perception of quality
• Heineken Beer is actually made in Holland but because of its geographical proximity to Germany and because of the perception that Germany produces very good beer, Heineken capitalised on that perception. They even distributed cardboard coasters that had written on them “Printed in Germany”
• There is no such thing as a global brand without a global perception (eg: Toyota, Honda and Nissan are Japanese, Compaq, Intel and Microsoft are American etc)
• Coca Cola is one of the only brands that can be classified as being the closest to a truly “International” brand – but it must stay with it’s American heritage because every brand must originate from somewhere
• It doesn’t matter where the brand originated, is produced etc, the name and the associated connotations determine its geographic perception eg: Häagen-Dazs ice cream sounds Scandinavian, but it was developed in New Jersey
• The use of English words in promoting a brand and in the brand name is important because English has become an international language (Red Bull energy drink is Austrian, but they don’t call it “Roter Stier”!)
• The name of your product doesn’t have to be an English word but must sound like one.
• Be careful with advertising slogans because sometimes they don’t translate well eg: “Come alive with the Pepsi generation” translates to Chinese as “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead”
19) The Law of Consistency
• A brand cannot get into the mind unless it stands for something. BMW has been the “ultimate driving machine” for 25 years
• Brands should never change – they can be bent slightly or given a new slant but not changed
• If the market moves, stick with the brand and the cycle will come back to you (just because the trend is towards white alcohol (gin, vodka etc) Jack Daniels would destroy its whiskey line if they introduced Jack Daniels Vodka)
• Limiting the brand is the essence of branding. Limiting the brand and being consistent (over decades) is the key to successful branding
20) The Law of Change
• Brand changing occurs in the mind of the consumer, not inside the company
• There are 3 feasible situations for changing a brand:
1. Your brand is weak or non-existent in the mind of consumers (eg: not many realised that Intel was originally a producer of RAM but moved into processors – nobody but those directly involved even noticed! – If they were to try to move back to manufacturing RAM, they would fail because their product is strong in the minds of consumers)
2. You want to move the brand down the food chain. Lower the price of your product over time and make it cheaper. This often helps a company to gain market share (Marlborough did it). Moving up is far more difficult
3. The brand is in a slow moving field and change will take place over a period of time. Eg: Citicorp is slowly changing its brand’s focus from corporate business to consumer business
• Customer perceptions of brands don’t go away so quickly eg: Kentucky Fried Chicken wanted to move away from “Fried” so it called itself KFC and offered healthier style chicken, but people still went to them for fried chicken.
21) The Law of Mortality
• Brands have a life cycle – they are born, prosper and die.
• Companies spend millions trying to change an old brand (Kodak uses the Kodak name on all digital products to try to change with the market)
• Opportunities for new markets are always being created with the birth of new categories
• Many managers make poor financial decisions because they fail to distinguish between the two aspects of a brand’s value: How well known it is and what the brand stands for
• A well known brand that doesn’t stand for anything has no value and a brand that stands for something but is not well known has value – because there is the opportunity to create a powerful brand
• Brand new brands make the impact, not rehashed old brands (eg: Blockbuster video became a market leader in video rentals even though it was up against established companies who were too generic and not exciting enough in the new category
22) The Law of Singularity
• Your brand must be a single idea or concept that you own inside of a prospect – if it is too many things at once, it is confusing and becomes worthless
• What is an Atari? It used to be the most popular games console but then it became a computer and now it is nothing – because it lost its singularity
• Volvo sells more cars in the US than BMW or Mercedes because over 35 years it has stuck to its concept of burning into the minds of consumers that it is the safest car on the road
12
Business Administration / After Marketing
« on: December 13, 2014, 09:54:55 PM »
Define the After-Marketing Activities
The first step in After-Marketing is the recognition of the fact that sale is not the end of the relationship but a beginning of a relationship. And relationship is more than repeat purchases. In the case of business to business relationship, the after-marketing activities are marked by continuous follow-up by the sales department. In the case of a consumer product which requires service support like a TV or an automobile, the after-marketing activities include the product service support given by the company. In these cases, after –marketing activities are clearly defined and obvious.
For a product like soap or a shampoo, there is no scope for after-sales support. Hence the marketer has to define the concept of after-marketing. This includes what the brand should do after the selling is done and also what it expects the consumer to do after he has bought the product.
Sunsilk expects its consumers to visit their website and participate in discussions and exchange their ideas with the company. The brand has a clear understanding about what it expects the consumers to do after they have used /interacted with the brand. Sunsilk through its website also offers much information to the consumers about hair-care and solving hair-related problems. Thus there is a continuous connection with consumers over and above the transaction of buying a shampoo. This is a planned process that includes investment of resources on the part of the brand to connect with the consumers.
After Marketing
The first step in After-Marketing is the recognition of the fact that sale is not the end of the relationship but a beginning of a relationship. And relationship is more than repeat purchases. In the case of business to business relationship, the after-marketing activities are marked by continuous follow-up by the sales department. In the case of a consumer product which requires service support like a TV or an automobile, the after-marketing activities include the product service support given by the company. In these cases, after –marketing activities are clearly defined and obvious.
For a product like soap or a shampoo, there is no scope for after-sales support. Hence the marketer has to define the concept of after-marketing. This includes what the brand should do after the selling is done and also what it expects the consumer to do after he has bought the product.
Sunsilk expects its consumers to visit their website and participate in discussions and exchange their ideas with the company. The brand has a clear understanding about what it expects the consumers to do after they have used /interacted with the brand. Sunsilk through its website also offers much information to the consumers about hair-care and solving hair-related problems. Thus there is a continuous connection with consumers over and above the transaction of buying a shampoo. This is a planned process that includes investment of resources on the part of the brand to connect with the consumers.
After Marketing
13
Business & Entrepreneurship / Re: 14 Qualities of Exceptional Entrepreneurs
« on: December 02, 2014, 10:17:22 AM »
nice one
14
Business Administration / Neuro-marketing
« on: October 22, 2014, 10:50:00 AM »
this article is all about neuro-marketing.
15
Business & Entrepreneurship / Challenges of Branding
« on: September 27, 2014, 12:05:36 PM »
This article is all about the challenges and opportunities of branding
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