Price is the ultimate marketing mix weapon a manager can wield: it directly affects profits and touches both consumer thoughts and feelings. Pricing psychology is especially interesting – my very first marketing term paper back in 1991 discussed reference prices, and many of my early publications expanded our understanding of price effects and when they…

In my 2 previous blogs, I summarized the top 10 actionable insights from ‘How Brands Grow Part 2 Revised Ebook’ (HBG) for established and new brands. But if your main thought was ‘How does this differ from advice other smart people give in marketing?, this blog’s for you. I focus on four points that have…

Continuing our yesterday’s top actionable insights in ‘How Brands Grow Part 2 revised E-book’, today’s lessons focus on how to jumpstart your new brand and keep its momentum going. Start with Point of Parity instead of Point of Difference ‘Buying a brand for the first time does not require a major conversion, just a bit…

This week I had the pleasure to buy and read ‘How Brands Grow Part 2 Revised E-book’ on my Kindle. Despite its 254 pages, it reads like a breeze – the only reasons I did not finish it in a day were other commitments and taking notes…for your benefit. Brand growth is a key business…

A new paper in Journal of Advertising Research investigates what happens to alcohol brands when they shut down mass media advertising for a year. Thanks Nicole Hartnett and Byron Sharp for this wonderful new research. Stopping mass advertising is followed on average by a 16% sales decline in the following year, 25% in the second…

Back in 2003, Reichheld proposed the Net Promotor Score as the “one number you need to grow”. Two decades later, we know it is a bad measure of customer loyalty. However, a just published paper by Sven, Michele, Lisa and Nick Lee shows it is a good measure of brand health, and that improvements in…

How relevant are specific marketing topics to practitioners and academia? A recent Journal of Marketing paper proposes the Relevance to Marketing (R2M) index, combining topical relevance with timely relevance. Practitioners were ahead of academics in discussing topics such as Innovation and Financial Impact. I fondly remember the MSI/JM Special Issue and Conference in the early…

Lots has been written about the impending loss of cookies and how to thrive in a cookie-less future. But how important are cookies to the revenue of publishers? That’s the question addressed by Rene Laub, Klaus Miller and Bernd Skiera (Goethe University Frankfurt) in their presentation ‘The Economic Value of User-Tracking for Publishers’ on June…

How do crises and their impact on society evolve and how does it differ across individuals, companies and governments? Our framework comes from both theories across a wide variety of disciplines (psychology, management and strategy, and public policy), and from in-depth interviews of senior executives from a variety of industries: First, an emerging crisis produces…

Joint post with Kevin Gray, President of Cannon Gray, a marketing science and analytics consultancy. He has more than 30 years’ experience in marketing research with Nielsen, Kantar, McCann and TIAA-CREF.  We’ve heard it claimed that the 4Ps are dead because (1) Product, Price, Place and Promotion are no longer an issue in today’s world and (2)…