Sales and marketing

Using the results of a survey of 380 companies in 34 industries, this author examines three basic types of compensation plans: salary, commission, and combination (salary plus commission). Most companies in the study favored a combination plan, but such plans have some disadvantages to offset their obvious attractiveness. The author sets out the possible reasons […]

The best stay attuned to their customers’ signals in the social graph.

Normally, the Olympic Games are a positive force in marketing. Worldwide marketing expenditures increase as official sponsors and unofficial free-riders attach themselves to the Olympic logo, to particular sports, national teams or individual athletes. Global brands, in particular, see the Olympics and World Cup soccer as the two most important international sporting events; brand linkage […]

Career-oriented women are increasingly flexing their spending muscle. Here’s how companies can reach these “Golden Misses.”

The Internet promises to give marketing the same boost in productivity that new operational strategies have given to manufacturing.

While management skills can improve service systems, a manager is better off if he or she first has a clear understanding of the operating characteristics that set one service system apart from another. This author offers one view of services, which, if followed, results in a “rational approach to the rationalization” of services. His view, […]

New research from Bain shows what the most productive companies do differently.

A little TLC could yield big results.

You can learn a lot about consumer marketing in the developing world by looking at how retailers engage with shoppers.

Brands are not just names slapped on products by the marketing department; they embody the value those products have for your customers. That may be more true for high-tech products than it is for soap.

When a customer buys a product he or she goes through a complex process of balancing the price of the product against the perceived benefits, costs, risks, and value in use of the product. If the customer thinks this way when analyzing a purchase, say these authors, it makes great sense for marketers to set […]

When an established consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) company introduces a new product, it faces a potentially make-or-break decision: how to brand it. Tying...

Is your company unintentionally keeping your most senior people from getting the feedback they most need? It can easily happen as an unintended consequence of success. Consider these situations: Senior executives at car companies drive only the newest models: For decades, the top executives at America’s leading automobile manufacturers always drove models fresh from the […]

This item also appears in the April, 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review. The internet is widely considered the most measurable of advertising media, but those easily tracked click-throughs and e-commerce sales don’t tell the whole story. Far from it. Internet advertising stimulates off-line sales, too — in most cases, our firm finds that online […]

Marketers must claim the broader growth agenda, connecting the dots across data, digital, and the full customer journey.

In this era of globalization, countries find themselves increasingly competing with each other for a share of trade, investment, and tourism. Country brands provide an opportunity for creativity and differentiation: Spain, India and New Zealand, for example, all successfully built brands that greatly boosted local tourism. Moving forward, country brands — just like corporate brands […]

Nearly 90% of subscription businesses are stable or growing right now.

New technologies can be dazzling. But do they represent the future of retailing? Have the fundamentals really changed?

The author of this article says he would be the last one to argue that the approach described here is a complete view of marketing. Then again, he is convinced that the approach enables marketers to achieve three important objectives. First, it enables them to identify the markets in which their companies have the best […]

It’s fashionable today to enthuse over globalized markets and cite glowing examples of standardized marketing winners around the world. True, some markets are globalizing, and more companies are taking advantage of them with signal success. But the rosy reports of these triumphs usually neglect to mention the complexities and risks involved; for every victory in […]