Marketing luxury products requires connecting with consumers’ often emotion-driven desires, aspirations, and/or fantasies. However, many consumers cannot put aside their ‘rational’ mindset, and as a result feel guilty when purchasing purely hedonistic products. How can luxury companies appeal to the pleasure-seeker in their consumers while reducing the guilt from such pleasure-seeking? The answer, according to […]
Subject: Marketing Communication
Brain Drain: How Cell Phones Distract Customer Attention
Cell phones can be distracting when you’re trying to work. If the phone rings, you’ll stop what you’re doing to answer it. If you hear the ping of a new email, you’ll check the message. Academic research has confirmed that having and attending to a cell phone during the completion of a task reduces productivity. […]
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What ‘First Impression’ Data Reveals About Customers
Acquiring customer data at the point of purchase, including from first-time customers, is not new. However, much of that data for first-time customers often focuses on where the customers came from (e.g., how did you hear about us?). New research by Nicolas Padilla and Eva Ascarza of Columbia Business School reveal that customer behaviour related […]
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The Competitive Implications of Customer Expectation
Products and services fit into certain categories. For example, circuses, theatres and sporting events are all sources of live entertainment, yet they each fit their own category. Categories are defined by the attributes that customers expect from those categories. The circus category involves a traveling show with animals and clowns; the attributes of the theatre […]
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Why Great New Products Fail
Customers make a decision about which product to buy in two ways. The first method is to search for information about the product. For example, a customer might read online reviews of restaurants or hotels. The second method is to infer information they don’t have from information they do have. Litter in a parking lot […]
Varied Effectiveness of Paid Endorsements on Social Media
One of the fastest growing facets of social media marketing is the use of paid endorsers — a fashion blogger, for example, paid by a fashion designer to post a picture of herself wearing one of the designer’s pairs of earrings. Two researchers from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania conducted a field […]
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How a Marketing Doctrine Overcomes the Flexibility Vs Consistency Conundrum
If you’re a national or international company with marketing authority and practices spread across various locations, or if you have a diversified group of products or businesses that call for different marketing approaches, how can you maintain a consistent marketing strategy that is aligned with the company’s overall priorities while still giving local functions the […]
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Why Anthropomorphism Works In Marketing
As reported in a 2013 Advertising Age article, Geico Insurance’s ubiquitous talking Gecko was launched as a trial balloon. There had been no prior marketing research, and certainly no intention of creating a long-running marketing character who now has a book and appears in life-size form at sporting events. However, As Geico CMO Ted Ward […]
Six Disruptive Demographic Trends and What They Mean for the Workplace
According to Jim Johnson of University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, the major demographic trends transforming America today are unprecedented — so unprecedented that he calls these trends “disruptive demographics.” Based on on-going analyses of statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor, Internal Revenue Service and other governmental agencies, Johnson, who is […]
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What Influences Our Choices? What Others Prefer or What They Actually Consume
Through a series of experiments, two researchers from the University of Chicago (PhD candidate Yanping Tu, now at the University of Florida, and professor Ayelet Fishbach) revealed that the old saying of “actions speaking louder than words” might not always hold true. The experiments had participants receiving information on whether others preferred a product or had consumed […]
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