Most major firms have online brand communities to reinforce their connections with customers and increase their reputation, brand patronage and customer spending. These online communities offer satisfied customers the ability to easily and widely spread positive word of mouth about the company. However, online brand communities offer dissatisfied customers the same ability to spread negative […]
Subject: Branding
Engineer Your Social Media Content to Engage Your Customers
From General Motors to the local hair salon, every company, business and organization knows that marketing today inevitably includes social media marketing. Visibility is important: marketers will exert great effort (e.g. through search engine optimizing) to attract greater numbers of prospects and customers to their site. But what happens when customers arrive? Are they engaged […]
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When Customer Referral Programs Backfire
The typical customer referral program offers a monetary reward for customers of a product or service who find other customers to buy that product or service. In most cases, the referral program is public: that is, the recipient of the referral knows that the person who recommended the product is being compensated for the referral. […]
Existing Customers and Home Markets Drive Growth
Growth is a top imperative for marketers, according to the latest CMO biannual survey conducted by Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in collaboration with Deloitte LLP and the American Marketing Association. Nearly 40% of the 323 CMO respondents to the survey put growth as their number one imperative, and another 30% of respondents put it […]
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The Relationship of Brand Equity to Behavioural Loyalty
For many brand managers, the link between brand equity — the knowledge of and trust in the brand that for consumers differentiates that brand from its competitors — and brand loyalty is unquestioned. The higher your brand equity, it is assumed, the more likely you will be able to attract and keep loyal customers. Brand […]
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Is Paid Search Advertising Worth the Money?
Companies have two options for the acquisition of customers through customer online searches. The first is to pay for search ads — those links that appear at the top of the search and are clearly marked ‘ad.’ Thus, the owner of a business selling vintage Indian motorcycles might pay to have his business appear at […]
The Good, Bad and Ugly of Covert Marketing
The steadily declining effectiveness of traditional marketing approaches — from advertising to direct mail in the mailbox to email blasts — has been well-documented. Traditional marketing is too often equated with ‘junk mail’ or ‘spam,’ or annoyingly long commercial breaks that take you away from your favourite TV program. As explained in a recent article […]
Why Promotions Work Better for Luxury and Hedonic Purchases
Many consumers find it more difficult to justify buying frivolous, hedonic purchases — in other words, purchases from fine chocolates and DVDs to vacations that are motivated by fun and are often frivolous or luxurious — than to spend money on utilitarian purchases, such as food or gas. New research from Columbia University and Tsinghua […]
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How User Reviews Replace Advertising
The popularity of customer review sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor have turned these sites into an important element of a service company’s marketing package. According to the results of an in-depth research project exploring the correlation between hotel advertising spending and TripAdvisor reviews and user ratings, many hotels are using positive reviews as a […]
Who’s Influencing Your Stakeholders?
Traditionally, according to Tony Dyson of Tessera Consulting and Kevin Money of Henley Business School, companies and organizations engage in what they call ‘silo communication.” Different parts of the organization communicate with different stakeholders. Thus, for example, the Investor Relations department communicates with the financial community, Government Relations communicates with Government, Media Relations communicates with […]