For several reasons I have spent a lot of time in the last few months thinking about loyalty points. There is one puzzle that has been noted by a number of scholars and practitioners. People often keep hold of their loyalty points; not using them when they could have used them to save money. A…
Category: Management Theory
Finding The Right Marketing Metrics
It is extremely challenging to get marketing metrics pieces published at top marketing journals. Indeed, a piece on finding the right marketing metrics isn’t a typical article. One challenge is that often journals want something “new”. Investigating what managers do doesn’t seem new enough. This is a real shame. I worry editorial decisions encourage the…
Improving Political Management; Some Of It Is A Bit Dark Ages
A co-author of mine, Jennifer Lees-Marshment, is a world expert on political marketing, (crudely put winning elections). In recent years she has turned her attention to improving political management. E.g., what politicians and their staffs have to do after they have won. Her new book, Political Management, is the result of years of painstaking work…
Improving Stakeholder Involvement In Government Decision Making
In this blog post I discuss our work on improving stakeholder involvement in government decision making. The Journal of Business Ethics published this in July 2020. Understanding The Views of Stakeholders A major problem in government is understanding the views of its stakeholders. A stakeholder is those who are impacted by, or can impact, the…
Regulation for Conservatives
How much the government should involve themselves in the lives of the public? This was been the theme of 2020 and the Covid crisis. Whatever your views it is unlikely you were totally happy. Die hard libertarians were not happy. Even in the most conservative of jurisdictions they could object. They could point to plenty…
Creating Stories With Data Visualizations
Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic has a useful book — Storytelling with Data. This contains lots of good advice on Creating Stories With Data Visualizations and generally improving data visualization. She tries to ensure the reader does not lazily follow the first thing a software (e.g., Excel) recommends. This is important, she gives many examples in the…
Artificial Intelligence And Its Challenges
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has thrown up all sorts of questions for business and society. What then of artificial intelligence and its challenges? What To Do With It One of the first problems was recognizing what to do with it. Nowadays we can see AI making considerable impacts on the world but that this would happen…
Two-Part Tariffs and Disneyland
Interesting questions often precipitate (good) academic research. A great question is “why does Disneyland not make you pay for each ride”. This is the setup for Walter Oi’s examination of pricing back in 1971. Oi asks “If you were the owner of Disneyland, should you charge high lump sum admission fees and give the rides…
The Practitioner-Research Divide Beyond Marketing
Neil Anderson and his colleagues have given a lot of thought to the divide between research and practice. They focus on this in Industrial, Work and Organizational (IWO) Psychology. I don’t know much about this discipline. Still, a lot of the problems seem quite familiar. As such, they highlight the practitioner-research divide beyond marketing. In…
Marketing And A (Very Old) New Technology
Technology changes constantly. In recent centuries, at least, people have become used to marvels appearing that they couldn’t imagine when they were growing up. People encounter new technology. How do they react? How did they react to (very old) new technology? Early Movies: A Major Innovation I read an interesting paper on reactions to early…
