Companies spend 12% of their marketing budget on social media, which is three times more than in 2009. And this trend is only going to accelerate: marketing leaders expect that in the next five years, companies will increase social media’s slice of their marketing budgets to 20% — representing an increase of more than 70%. […]
Read More… from CMO Survey: Value of Company Spending on Social Media
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 […]
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 […]
Read More… from Why Promotions Work Better for Luxury and Hedonic Purchases
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 […]
Bundling products and services together impacts the perceived value of the individual items in that bundle in surprising ways. Recent research from professor Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, working in collaboration with doctoral student Franklin Shaddy, shows an asymmetry in the valuation of individual items depending on whether the […]
Read More… from Contradictory Attitudes of Consumers to Bundling
Many companies develop their relationship marketing strategies based on the assumption that their customers are unerringly cold and calculating, and driven by one question: what kind of a financial deal can you give me? While discounts, for example, can be effective, this is a short-term and hard-to-sustain relationship marketing approach to customer relationship. A team […]
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 […]
When it comes to business – and most areas of life – we tend to think in straight lines. For example, if one shelf holds 50 books, two shelves will hold 100 books and three shelves will hold 150 books. Graph the number of shelves on an x-axis and number of books on a y-axis […]
Read More… from How Linear Thinking in a Non-Linear World Leads to Wrong Decisions
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. […]
Read More… from Brain Drain: How Cell Phones Distract Customer Attention
The results of the study showed a 35% increase in usage by the targeted customers and a 10% increase in usage by the connections of the targeted customers. In addition, suspensions decreased for both target customers and their connections, and churn decreased for the connections (the study did not include the targets’ pre-paid churn, because the six-month process […]
