Reading history gives you an understanding that things change. (Often for the better, see here and here, but that isn’t the point of today’s post). Here I just want to note how business ideas change. This is important to remember. What we advocate now might be thought weird, quaint, or barbaric in the future. The…
Management Accounting For Marketers
Marketers often want to make the case that accounting does not treat marketing well. I have good news for marketers, there is a major group of accountants who (should) agree with you. There are accountants who feel that financial accounting standards have subverted their discipline. Managerial accountants, whose job it is to deal with internal…
A New Marketing Metric, Earned Growth
Fred Reichheld brought us the Net Promoter System/Score. As such, he certainly knows how to popularize marketing metrics. He has now introduced a new marketing metric, earned growth. I need to think about it more but it seems to have some potential. Plus, the introduction seems to have avoided some of the problems of NPS…
Points Pressure Versus Rewarded Behavior
There are various different ways that loyalty programs can be effective. We looked at how a specific program, Air Miles Cash in Canada, impacted the behavior of its collectors. We compared points pressure versus rewarded behavior to see which drove most of the collector activity. This allowed us to suggest how to increase the program’s…
A Business Case For Marketing Budgets
Christine Moorman and Jennifer Veenstra have a piece in the Harvard Business Review explaining how to make a business case for marketing budgets. It contains very sensible advice that CMOs and other senior marketers should heed. Working With Finance Perhaps one of the most important themes in this work is the idea that marketers need…
Marketing Should Matter To Finance People
Chris Burggraeve shares his experience of the marketing finance interface in his new book Marketing is not a black hole. (Why black hole? There are a lot of science fiction references. I must say that I appreciate that even if the rocket ship veers towards cheesy). His main point is a good one, that marketing…
The Future Is Abundance
Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler’s book Abundance is a great read. It argues that the future is abundance. The world will be able to produce what we need to give everyone in it a decent life. The book is a valuable antidote to pessimism. The Future Is Abundance, Innovation, And Progress Whenever they see discussions…
Comparing Text Classification Methods
Marketing research, especially academic research, now assesses a lot of unstructured text data. (Unstructured data is that which does not come in neat database/spreadsheet form of rows and columns). Classifying such text is a task that computers excel at. So, how do we go about comparing text classification methods to find which one best fits…
Sage Advice On Positioning
Kim Whitler, author of Positioning for Advantage, has had a fascinating career. This has taken her through senior marketing roles at some notable companies. She is now at Darden, the University of Virginia (my MBA alma mater). Her book brought back a lot of memories. She has managed to distill the spirit of academic advice,…
Internal Measurement Of Brand Value
As regular readers will know I do a lot of work with MASB (the marketing Accountability Standards Board). Some of my colleagues at MASB wrote a paper about brand valuation. I want to highlight and reinforce their message. A key part of this is that the internal measurement of brand value is crucial to bringing…