Apple Unveils Ad Platform and Phone Software

To better cultivate its apps ecosystem, Apple demonstrated its iAd which places ads on applications so that the third-party apps developers do not have to worry about building advertising components in their applications and placing ads themselves. Mr. Jobs says. “We have figured out how to do interactive video content without ever taking you out of the app… We think people are going to be a lot more interested in clicking on these things.” Apple will host the ads and give developers 60 percent of the ad revenues, keeping 40 percent…


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Developing a Social Media Strategy: 6 Lessons from Kodak

Consumers are talking about your brand in social media channels, and you need a strategy to engage in these conversations. Ignoring them – or jumping in without a plan – is a missed opportunity. Kodak, whose direct sales and online share-of-voice are on an upward trend, learnt 6 lessons: 1) listen before you speak; 2) add value when joining the conversations; 3) don’t be intrusive; 4) use real people behind the brand; 5) treat consumer and business customers differently; 6) transparency is paramount…


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Peering Clearly at the Future

Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are in the business of predicting the future. In order for young companies to grow and thrive, they must develop the products and services that meet the needs of future customers in markets that change over time. While some entrepreneurs are enormously successful based on luck, starting the perfect product at the right time based on a hunch, others are more scientific about how they predict market dynamics and plan new product offerings. For venture capitalists, whose objective is to regularly finance successful emerging businesses and to minimize business failures, a thorough and replicable forecasting methodology is a powerful tool…


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The Key Pillars of Business Model

All successful business ventures need a clear business model and experienced investors will want to see it before making an investment. Business model tells us how a business makes money. The key pillars of business model are 1) customer value proposition – how your product or service helps to solve a problem or provide a benefit; 2) a foothold – where is the niche customer segment of early adopters; 3) differentiation – how your customers view your offers as meaningfully different; 4) pricing…


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Why Internet Retailers Should Pay Attention to Where Potential Customers Live

While the Internet holds immense promise for reaching retail customers far beyond traditional trading areas, new Wharton research indicates that customers discover online retailers by offline word-of-mouth, online word-of-mouth, online search and magazine advertising. Old world dynamics, such as neighbors sharing word-of-mouth recommendations, therefore, can still have powerful effects on Internet sales. In another case, researchers investigate people whose shopping needs might be different than most of the people in their geographic area – preference minority. For example, young parents living in a zip code populated mostly by elderly people would find fewer offerings in local stores because the retailers need to devote the bulk of their shelf space and inventory to meeting the demands of the majority of their customers. Preference minority customers are more likely to purchase online for niche brands and less price sensitive…


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CVS Goes Upmarket

As businesses reach a plateau, firms often conduct out-of-box thinking and look for more growth opportunities. One of the common choices is switch to more profitable market segments. By moving from “Always Low Price” to “Save Money Live Better,” Walmart Stores, Inc. seems to have difficulties in its journey for its upmarket repositioning and the company has a lot to learn from Target Corp. Incidentally, drug store CVS was also on the journey to go upmarket. After failed to lure the makers of pricey cosmetics, skin care, and fragrances to offer their products to the drugstore giant, CVS decided to create a brand new retail environment that would be adjacent to its core pharmacies yet offer a totally different shopping experience - Dubbed Beauty 360…


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Microsoft Office for Free?

Two years ago, I wrote to a Microsoft executive, urging the company to offer Microsoft Office for free. The idea is to deliver an online version of Office and provide links to highly relevant online information on the interface using user’s context for automatic search. Given customers’ concern with privacy, the most likely early adopters would be enterprise users who need to gather information from intranet. According to an IDC report, Microsoft has made a progress in this regard and the company is going to offer to corporate customers web-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint for free early this year...


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Wal-Mart, Deviating from Its Fundamental Strategy, Suffered Negative Same-Store Growth

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has seen better days. Yes, profits rose 22%, to $4.63 billion, in the fourth quarter of '09. Even coming out of the Great Recession, many consumers are trading down to shop at the discount superstore. However, for the third straight quarter the store saw negative same-store sales growth; during the last three months of 2009, same-store sales dropped 2%. Overall traffic in Wal-Mart stores was down too…


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iPad for Enterprise?

My students at University of Washington are fascinated by customer perception. If customer perception is more or less mysterious to you as well, take a look at that of iPad. It is supposed to be about web surfing, email and photo and movie watching experience for consumers, according to Apple’s promotion campaign. Customers, however, want a stretch – taking it into an enterprise product category. With over 150,000 applications already produced and much more on the way, customers’ “wrong” perception has a pretty good chance to be proven right…


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The Devil Is in the Detailing

Executives who strive to improve the effectiveness and lower the costs of their businesses are often frustrated by the fact that they have run out of ideas. In fact, opportunities can often be uncovered by diving down to the details. In pharmaceutical industry, for instance, marketing efforts usually focus on physicians who prescribe higher volumes of drugs. However, an analysis of prescription data suggests pharmaceutical companies should focus on a more refined target: heavy prescribers who treat higher percentages of new patients, since patients are seldom switched to a different drug within a specific drug class, even if they switch doctors and the likelihood that a physician will choose the last drug prescribed for a patient is greater than 90%...


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Trading Places: A Smart Way to Change Your Mind

Placing ourselves in other’s shoes is an approach which smart professionals often take in their business practice. The common problem, however, is that we often got it wrong when it comes to take others’ perspectives. Maxine Clark, founder and CEO of Build-a-Bear Workshop, switched companies for a day with Kip Tindell, cofounder and CEO of the Container Store. Both outfits are big, fast-growing, passion brands in the ultra-competitive world of retail — although they have little in common in terms of target customers, in-store zeitgeist, or corporate missions. Take a look at what they had gained from the switch…


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Choosing a Marketing Plan: Traditional or Social Media?

Social media has been increasingly considered as a media for marketing promotion. Marketers are eager to learn whether it actually works. EPC Cigar Company decided to promote its brand using social media, which allow the company to communicate directly with cigar buyers, retailers, tobacco growers and others with whom it does business. “To have a lot of people talk about the limited-edition cigar after only a few months, in a market that’s challenged, in an industry that’s not really growing, is very exciting,” The head of the ad agency said…


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The Art of Persuasion - Aligning Consumer Goals with Level of Abstraction

Marketing professionals understand the roles of selective exposure, comprehension and retention in marketing communications. They are interested in finding out the most persuasive types of messages. For example, would you be more likely to buy a TiVo if an ad described it as offering you freedom or if it explained how you could replay sports events? Research indicates that the key to an effective message is finding the fit between the consumers’ goals and the level of abstraction…


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Is Nexus One's Rocky Start a Product of Google's New Approach?

Initial sales figure of Google’s Next One was not impressive. It was significantly lower than that of iPhone 3GS, Droid, and My Touch 3G. But Nexus One definitively is trying to be a different method of distribution, one done only by Google and directly to end users…


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Windows Phone 7 Spurs Microsoft's Mobile Strategy

Microsoft recently announced the new version of its phone operating system, Windows Phone 7. It’s a sweeping redesign, coupled with an aggressive new partnership with handset makers and mobile carriers. Initial reviews are not only positive but actually excited…


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Top 10 Tools to Measure User Experience

Pragmatic Marketing proposes 10 tools for user experience improvements: 1) heuristics; 2) expert review; 3) web hits/usage; 4) user testing; 5) session analysis; 6) online surveys; 7) A/B and multivariate testing; 8) eye tracking; 9) emotion/trust measurement; 10) neuro-marketing…


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Targeted Ads in the Works

Marketers have long dreamed of a day when they can stop blasting ads out to the world at large, and instead send TV commercials for Pampers, Chevrolet and Barbie dolls only to those people in the market for diapers, a new car or a child's toy. Comcast Spotlight, the ad-sales unit owned by Comcast Corp., and Starcom MediaVest Group, the media-buying unit of France's Publicis Groupe, have completed a second test of technology that delivers different ads to different households, and they say the ads in both cases have proved to be about one-third more effective in keeping audiences from tuning them out. They also believe the time is drawing nigh for discussions about creating a business model around the new ad format…


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Marketing In a Weak Economy

Experts' views from the Wharton Marketing Conference: 1) recent research shows that 80% to 90% of people are willing to trade off or trade down when it comes to shopping and many of those customers might not bounce back with the economy; 2) trading off and trading down is not happening across the board - the middle range of products has suffered far more than the top-of-the-line items; 3)general consumer pullback masks some interesting dynamics that marketers could benefit from. People are starting to change what they're doing with their time and that's where opportunites emerge. The experts discussed about the issues of high consumer anxiety, threat of private labels, and keeping up with consumers...


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Why Be an Ethical Company? They're Stronger and Last Longer?

A focus on short-term profits to the exclusion of all else led to the current financial crisis. And guess what? Companies with the steadiest moral compasses have sailed through it…


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Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?

It’s a dirty little secret: Most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. If they can’t, neither can anyone else…


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Can Apple Stay Ahead of Google?

Competition between Apple and Google has arrived at a more adversarial phase marked by Nexus One’s entrance into mobile phone market. Apple has a substantial lead in establishing this ecosystem. Developers have created more than 125,000 mobile applications for Apple devices—seven times as many as exist on Android—and the endless diversity of apps has helped the iPhone quickly pick up 14% of smartphone share. However, it is yet to figure out strategy to help app developers make money and attract large number of mobile advertisers to complete the ecosystem and create a bandwagon effect…

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Customers Are Not Always Right

V Henry Ford once said: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.” Even though voice of the customer is a critical element of product development process and they do know what could be improved in terms of existing products, they are not in the position of anticipating disruptive innovation or synthesis of incremental innovation that can offer something that they never see before…

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Is It Safe to Follow Market Leaders?

Psychological studies have shown that people confronted with uncertainty tend to look to others for cues on how to behave. The psychologist Robert Cialdini calls this phenomenon "social proof." Social proof helps to explain some of the most startling paradoxes in human behavior. Managers try to figure out how to deal with discontinuous changes in market, they tend to follow their most successful peers , who have repeatedly proved their ability to make the right decisions in the past. In other words, they engage in benchmarking. Usually this is wise. When fundamental changes occur, however, looking to others within one's industry, especially market leaders, can be a recipe for the demise of everyone in the industry...

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How Can a Business Achieve Both High Quality and Low Cost?

High quality at a low price? While the key elements here – quality and cost—seems to be conflicting factors from classic teachings of corporate strategy, businesses strive for that combination. Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Wash. provides us an interesting case of how a business can be creative in achieving both high quality and lower costs…

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