Posts

Are You Ready to Declare War?

/in /by

There are millions of companies in the world.

Most fail far short of the owners’ ambitions. You would think they fail or frustrate for millions of reasons.

But there are really only four.

How can that be? Only four? Yes and I will explain.

Let me start with the first:

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!


 

About the Author

Mark Stevens is the author of Your Company Sucks: It’s Time to Declare War on Yourself (BenBella Books, August 2011) and CEO of MSCO, a results-driven management and marketing firm, and a popular media commentator on business matters, including marketing, branding, management and sales. To read Mark Stevens’ full biography, click here.

How to Speak American: Building Brands in the New Heartland

/in /by

“I think the Heartland is a nice place to raise children. People are nice, but they’re dumb, overweight and gullible. They wear tacky clothing and jewelry. They’re racist, unworldly and dumb.”

Marketing executive in New York City

If you are reading this column, you most likely play a role in building brands. You may even share the views of the marketing executive that I quoted above. If either is true, you need to take a deeper look into this massive segment of America.

From what I’ve seen, many marketers don’t understand the New Heartland. At all. They have wasted time and resources, and the results delivered, no matter how strong, are only a fraction of what they could have been. The Heartland consumer is a unique segment that is ever evolving and requires constant attention for brands to remain relevant.

This segment is underestimated, underserved and misunderstood, and that presents a huge opportunity for brands who become Heartland savvy. It is my mission to make sure that your brand will be among them.

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!


 

About the Author

A brand strategist for more than 20 years, Paul Jankowski has created and executed consumer promotions for some of the world’s largest and most successful companies, including Pepsi, Ford, FedEx, and Beyonce. His experiences targeting the “typical American consumer” on the East and West Coasts coupled with several long drives within America’s interior in his Ford F150 provided fertile ground for his study of an often-overlooked segment of the population, what Paul calls “America’s New Heartland.” As Author of How to Speak American: Building Brands in the New Heartland, Paul shares his groundbreaking insights and has emerged as one of the most respected voices in marketing today. To read Paul Jankowski’s full biography, click here.

Pricing Strategy: Pricking the Veil of Value Exchange

/in /by

Our understanding of pricing has come a long way since 1890 when Alfred Marshall published his treatise on the economic scissors of supply and demand. Pricing is no longer a purely economic challenge to be addressed through studies of market elasticity. It can’t be solved by lowering prices until customers’ purchases improve factory utilization rates. And, it can’t be solved by allocating costs and adding markups. Rather, pricing today must be focused on value exchange.

While experts and executives agree that price should reflect value, the pricing to value mantra fails to clarify the decisions executives must make. That is, what is the value that price should reflect? Whose perception of value should determine price? And, how can value be modeled and quantified? In other words, pricing decisions today requires actionable insights.

These insights must derive from a marketing orientation of the firm with a clear economic understanding of value exchange. The marketing orientation focuses the purpose of the firm towards serving customer needs profitably – an orientation supported by the late greats Peter Drucker and Theodore Levitt. The economic understanding of value exchange reminds us that customers will purchase when the product delivers value in excess of its price after adjusting for alternatives, and the firm must deliver products at a price in excess of their cost. These are two very simple concepts.

Combined, the marketing orientation of the firm, and the economic understanding of value exchange, provides the foundation for developing insights required for executive decision making in pricing strategy.

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!


 

About the Author

Tim J. Smith is the founder and Managing Principal of Wiglaf Pricing and an Adjunct Professor of marketing and economics at DePaul University. Well-known in the industry as a thought leader in pricing, Dr. Smith has presented seminars on pricing to professional audiences around the globe. With hard-hitting, focused messages for executives, Tim encourages actions that lead to dynamic results. To read Tim’s complete biography, click here.

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 59 – An Interview with David Aaker, author of Brand Relevance

/in , /by

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 59 – An Interview with David Aaker, author of Brand Relevance explores the creation of offerings so different that they create unique categories within which customers perceive no other product or service alternatives. During our discussion, David Aaker, author of Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant, shares with us his insights and experiences regarding:

  • the difference between brand relevance and brand preference
  • advantages of achieving brand relevance over brand preference
  • several key factors needed to gain brand relevance
  • how a company establishes and manages a new category or sub-category
  • how a company maintains brand relevance over time
  • key characteristics and competencies an organization must have to successfully pursue a brand relevance strategy

Additional Information

In addition to the outstanding insights David shares in Brand Relevance and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from his website, www.Prophet.com.   David’s book, Brand Relevance, can be purchased by clicking here.

Final Request…

The strength of our community grows with the additional insights brought by our expanding member base. Please consider rating us on iTunes by clicking here. Rating the StrategyDriven Podcast and providing your comments online improves our ranking and helps us attract new listeners which, in turn, helps us grow our community.

Thank you again for listening to the StrategyDriven Podcast!

About the Author

David Aaker, author of Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant, is Vice-Chairman of Prophet, a marketing consultancy that helps senior executives balance their organization’s short-term business needs against their long-term growth goals, and Professor Emeritus of Marketing Strategy at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. One of the world’s leading experts on branding and the winner of three awards for lifetime contributions to the science of marketing, David has published over 100 articles and fourteen books; including Strategic Market Management that has been translated into eighteen languages. To read David’s complete biography, click here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:45 — 45.0MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Winning Time-Starved Customers

/in /by

Adrian Ott, author of The 24-Hour Customer, was a recent guest on Fox Business Live; sharing her insights on:

  • how to win the business of time-starved customers
  • aligning products and services to meet customer’s needs and time availability constraints
  • synchronizing with the customer so to be positioned to serve them when they are ready to buy

Adrian Ott on the StrategyDriven Podcast

Last month, we were privileged to talk with Adrian about her new book, The 24-Hour Customer, on the StrategyDriven Podcast. Listen as we explore the impact of time on customers’ buying decisions; how to identify the time-value impacts associated with a product or service, the market opportunities created by the impact, and then how to formulate and position one’s offerings to create increased time-value and earn more sales.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:57 — 42.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS