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| Causes and Effects of Cause Branding Branding is essential for companies to survive in the changing global market. This has caused many to join the philanthropic strategy of brand enhancement through cause branding. Cause branding is attaching your brand name to a cause such as breast cancer research, make a wish foundation, muscular dystrophy, etc. The business objective can be anything from increasing sales, forging new business relationships, improving customer loyalty to something as broad as enhancing overall reputation. There are some sound principles to follow when entering the cause branding campaigns. The first thing to do is find a cause that is worthwhile to the company’s image. There are many charitable organizations out there, so this can be difficult. Since you do not want to look like you are grandstanding, the next step is to pick your partners. Remember, the primary role of charities in any cause-branding effort should be to channel resources to people in need, not to shape the corporate brand. Even though this is the principle, corporate brand enhancement will still occur. Finally, your employees need to be involved. This will not be hard because statistics show that 62% of company’s employees volunteer for these programs. When I had my businesses in the past, the one I choose to do this type of branding was with the “Make a Wish” foundation. This was a publicity bonanza for me because it is a very popular foundation and I could direct all the money raised to be used locally. For more information fill out form below or email me at pagedesigner@alexgilmore.com |
| Product Development Managing for the Next Big Thing. Data storage for many years was noted as being a conspicuously unglamorous business. However, with each online mouse click information was gathered and stored. This is how EMC became on of the four horsemen of the Internet. Their successful strategies can be summed up into five ways to exploit the next big thing. EMC has adopted several managerial practices that have helped the company to anticipate and capitalize on opportunities that will generate profit before their competitors. They are: Concurrent Product Development – Ensuring the next generation product is ready for trial as the current on ships and the previous one peaks has helped EMC to maintain its momentum when introducing new technologies. Customer Councils – By having an intensive two-day gathering of top EMC engineers and 50 to 60 technology savvy customers, allows the company to pinpoint products and features that will address future customer priorities. Aggressive Customer Service – Vigorous response to customer problems and needs provides insight into latent needs, while diagnostic software- embedded in each product and linked to EMC’s customer service center. This allows for real time information about product use and potential problems. Quarterly Goal-Setting and Bonuses – By compressing the usual yearly bonus cycles to quarterly, fosters a sense of urgency that encourages EMC employees to focus on future challenges rather than dwell on current success. Frequent Forecasting – Monthly business review meetings and a six quarter rolling budgeting process allows EMC to get early glimpses of changes in the market and respond to them quickly. EMC recognizes the need to not get to far ahead of their customers. Getting to far ahead can cause them to not anticipate their needs of their customers. This would impede the acceptance of new products diffusion. For more information pagedesigner@alexgilmore.com or fill out the form on this page and submit. |
| Customer Oriented Benefits By organizing the business around the customers needs, instead of the product, can help businesses to maximize customers’ total value and identify their best customers. To accomplish this, the organizational culture needs to be overhauled because the majority of businesses are product oriented. Organizational change can be very difficult, but it is necessary to remain competitive. To accomplish this they need to: understand their customers needs and wants sooner and better than the competition, act rapidly on the individual understanding of the customer, organize their products and business processes around the customer, and demand accountability from key executives for building the value of major customer segments. Businesses, which put customer focus in action, will succeed because they serve customers more cost effectively than their traditional competitors by: understanding their most profitable customers’ preferences, avoiding wasteful and self congratulatory images of themselves, focusing marketing expenditures in the best channels, and targeting sales and service resources, on customer prospects they want to attract and retain. Transforming from a successful product oriented company to a customer oriented organization can be a daunting prospect. It requires the reshaping of organizational structure, business culture, processes, and priorities. However, this will put them on the road to success in the changing market place. For more information pagedesigner@alexgilmore.com or fill out the form on this page and submit. |
| Personal Selling and Sales management in the Internet Environment. The Internet has caused researchers to suggest that businesses are undergoing a paradigm shift on this unambiguous platform. This has changed how a customer is acquired and how much it cost to acquire them. For the sake of this discussion we are just going to examine the business to consumer market. There are many advantages to the Internet in personal selling. For starters, it creates a more efficient process. This is due to the functions within the major business processes of receipts, processing, storing, and delivery of digital information. It also provides for reduction of acquisition cost that is associated with the acquiring new customer. The last good reason is that first mover’s advantages do not last. Which it makes it easier for new ones to enter since the advantage of pioneering the market only helps for a brief period since switching costs are low. In summary, the Internet has the potential for dramatically lowering costs associated with customer acquisition, retention and transaction. However, the Internet is not a miracle cure for these areas because there are still significant problems associated with the Internet. To overcome these problems better business processes based on new business models need to be developed. For more information pagedesigner@alexgilmore.com or fill out the form on this page and submit. |
| Pricing Approximately 1 billion tires are sold every year and this market is dominated by three big firms: Michelin, Goodyear, and Bridgestone (owner of Firestone). Within the United States these firms are even more dominant, controlling approximately 70% of the 300 million annual domestic tire sales. The demand for tires is relatively stable, being about 2% growth annually. In the summer of 2000, Firestone was hit with a massive recall of 6.5 million tires due to tread separation. The article “When Marketing Efforts Go Flat” discusses what the other companies did to try to secure the now open market that Firestone was in. Amazingly, during this time Goodyear’s market share diminished even more than Firestone. How did this happen since Firestone had basically shot themselves in the foot. Early in the year of 2001 Goodyear raised their prices on some products as much as seven percent. The rationale behind these hefty prices was buyer’s perception of Goodyear’s tires would significantly higher and would be willing to pay a premium. The problem with this was Goodyear thought since Firestone’s failure would automatically cause consumers to think Goodyear’s are better now. At the time, the public believed that Michelins tires were the safest and paid a premium for them at $73.17 a tire on average. Goodyear’s tires were selling $56.95 on average per tire. Goodyear’s attempt to raise their prices and reposition its products to bring them closer to Michelin was a critical mistake. The lesson here to learn is just because your competitor is having serious problems it does not automatically translate into profits for you by raising prices. For more information pagedesigner@alexgilmore.com or fill out the form on this page and submit. |
| Services Selling In the 1990s and into 2000 the demand for Cisco’s hardware products soared through the roof. Their stock split nine times between March 1991 and March 2000. Services marketing were not a big factor with them during that decade of success. By March 2000 most of their service business was in maintenance and technical support. Gradually, their customer needs changed and Cisco began to adopt a proactive, instead of a reactive, approach to their customers. Cisco’s services sales force faced a daunting obstacle as their portfolio migrated from a maintenance type of approach to a consultative-level support. To accomplish this, the sales force needed to begin selling products and services based on value. It was decided that marketing could one of two things: (1) add value and help the sales force beat ever increasing goals set by management in a difficult market or (2) not add value and risk taking the blame if sale’s efforts fell short. Obviously they adopted the first one. A new sales approach was needed: addressing specific customer needs well before a sales call is made or marketing collateral was created and transform the culture of the services sales force from a mentality of renewing maintenance contracts to acting as business consultants. For more information pagedesigner@alexgilmore.com or fill out the form on this page and submit. |
| Global Branding Because of a number of companies trimming their brands to a more manageable portfolio, emphasis is being placed more on global branding than ever before. Global brands are supposed to benefit from the scale and the scope that having a presence in multiple markets brings. Many argue that global brands, are perceived to be more value added for the consumer. This is achieved by a perception of better quality which enhances the consumer’s self perception as being cosmopolitan, sophisticate, and modern. This is the very reason why global brands have more success in high profile, high involvement categories. Global branding faces several challenges. Certain categories, like automobiles and computers, are deemed more global in terms of the similarity in consumer preferences. In other categories marketers need to be careful and not tread on a well established brand name. Having different brand names for different areas is a must much like “Diet Pepsi” here in the US and “Pepsi Lite” in Mexico. But to be the best of global while being best of local, the same marketers need to factor in uniqueness and relevance of a local brand as well as the level of globalness in the product category. For more information pagedesigner@alexgilmore.com or fill out the form on this page and submit |
| How Worldwide is Marketing Communication on the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is here to stay and marketing communication will take on a more important role as it evolves. This will require web sites to be in many languages and not just English. The fastest growing geographic market for web users is Asia. In 2001 China had surpassed Taiwan in the number of internet users and has the greatest potential for sheer numbers on the web. English is the accepted business language around the world but this creates some problems. While some of the Asians are proficient in English they have many limitations. To address these issues, web sites need to be in simple English that is easily understood. Web sites would also require mirror sites in the language of the target market such as Mandarin Chinese. When a web site is only in English it can gain what is called the halo effect. This happens when a end user comes to a site that is only in English. The end user assumes that this web site is from the United States when in fact it could be from Germany. Therefore, there is some positive effects from having an English only website, however, in the future research shows this will not always be here and so to start our websites in other languages. For more information pagedesigner@alexgilmore.com or fill out the form on this page and submit |