Employees can impact a company’s brand equity. A friendly clerk in a store or an effective IT project team that delivers to the satisfaction of the customer are two positive examples. Employees, of course, can also impact a brand’s equity negatively. In the age of social media, for example, companies have had to quickly fire […]
Read More… from How to Build Brand Equity Through Employee Engagement
For most consumers, waiting in a long queue is a frustrating experience. There is nothing to be gained from standing in a slow line at the grocery store or waiting endlessly on the phone as a call centre automated voice intones again and again that “your call is important to us.” Most consumers don’t realize, […]
Read More… from The Surprising Benefit of Long Queues for Customers and Business
As more and more people prefer to shop online, an online presence is almost a requirement for just about any kind of bricks-and-mortar company from any kind of industry. Some online companies, however, are discovering the surprising benefits of traveling in the other direction: opening up bricks-and-mortar showrooms, allowing customers to feel and try on […]
Read More… from When Showrooms Help Online Companies
When marketing their brands, companies will use image attributes, which are the impressions that the brand makes on the mind of consumers. For a car brand, for example, marketers might position their brand on the image of being ‘safe and dependable’ or ‘exciting’ or ‘tough.’ Brand consistency — using the same image or positioning in […]
Read More… from Building a Brand Image Across Multiple Countries
The ‘2D:4D’ ratio — the ratio of the length of the index (2D) and the ring finger (4D) — is an established biomarker for the level of testosterone to which individuals were exposed before birth. It reliably differs by sex: on average, males have a lower digit ratio than females. (Their third finger tends to […]
Read More… from Digit Ratio Predicts Men’s Product Choices
Previous academic studies have connected how people feel about an ad to how they feel about the brand, but the validity of these results in the real world marketplace was of some concern. These studies only involved small groups of participants, often students, answering questions about a small sample of ads. A new study that […]
Read More… from How Advert-Evoked Feelings Sway Attitudes to Brands
Many Internet retailers give customers the opportunity to review their products on their site, and some Internet companies even specialize in reviews only (e.g. Yelp and TripAdvisor). Given, as research shows, the impact that online customer reviews can have on the success of a product or service, it is no wonder that special attention is […]
Read More… from Online Customers Reviews: Loyalty and Deception
In a classic episode from the old American TV show The Odd Couple, the main character Felix replaces all of the traditional furniture in his apartment with new furniture featuring radical designs (e.g. the chairs are in the shape of huge hands). While his roommate Oscar figures out how to use the ‘hands’, he’s astonished […]
Read More… from Great Innovation! But What’s it for? Marketers Beware
In the real world, brands are rarely seen alone. Whether on television, radio, or in print, brands are usually surrounded by other brands — numerous advertisements fill the pages of a magazine, or a seemingly endless block of commercials interrupts our favourite TV program. In academic terms, these other brands are called ‘context’ brands, and […]
Read More… from Brand Placement on TV: The Positive Impact of Fast-forwarding
Outsourcing is no longer just an operational issue. As globalization takes hold and more companies shift more activities to suppliers in emerging economies, outsourcing is now a strategic concern. Slowly, a question began to emerge in the consciousness of major manufacturers: were suppliers learning too much? In other words, was it possible that by ‘learning […]
Read More… from When Supply Chain Partners Move Up the Value Chain