The first person who came up with the idea of selling solutions hit on a great idea. Rather than sell their products they would sell what their clients needed. Selling Solutions Can Be A Bit Of A Meaningless Term Unfortunately, it may now be a cliche. Selling solutions is a bit too generic. What was…
Category: Marketing Metrics
Marketing Response To Stock Market Pressure
What is the marketing response to stock market pressure? Myopic Management Myopic management/marketing is the tendency to focus on short-term gains at the expense of long-term profits. It can occur for a number of reasons. Yet, at its heart, pressure from Wall Street appears to drive myopia for public companies. Certainly, many scholars subscribe to…
The Benefits And Challenges Of Customer Valuation
V. Kumar is probably the most published author in marketing (strategy). (2021 update, he is in the premier journals see here). He was editor of the Journal of Marketing (JM) until recently and is best known for his work in customer-based marketing analysis. In a piece in JM he outlines a number of ideas and…
Successfully Managing At The Marketing Finance Interface
Keith Ward in his great book Marketing Finance addressees success factors in managing at the marketing finance interface. The Future Is What Matters Ward starts by noting that historical analysis can’t change the past. Okay, that is pretty obvious. The implication is important, however. Historical analysis is mostly only useful if it “can be applied to…
Classifying Marketing Investments As Expenses
For this week and next I will look at an excellent book – Marketing Finance – by Keith Ward. He has taught at Cranfield amongst other places. (There are later editions with new co-authors — but reading different editions of the same book too close to each other is a bit too much even for…
Faulty Sums and Accounting
I enjoy a good polemic and Keron Bhattacharya’s book on Accountancy is certainly that. A generation old now but many of the points remain. (Although the acronyms for the UK accounting standards and accounting bodies have all changed). As an accountant himself (member of CIMA) he isn’t very happy with the way accountants were doing…
Marketing, Cash Flow and Shareholder Wealth
Marketers have traditionally been pretty poor at showing why marketing matters to shareholders. In my experience marketers often just assume that marketing is important. They then just expect everyone else to believe it. Instead we really need to consider marketing, cash flow and shareholder wealth and how these fit together. Marketing Impact On The Firm…
The Right Metric Depends Upon Its Planned Use
Sometimes I worry that marketing academics have a bit of an inferiority complex. We seem to have an aversion to anything developed in marketing. Instead, we look back to psychology (if we are consumer behavior scholars). Or we look to economics (for more quantitative scholars). This means that we often see citations to other disciplines…
Proving The Value Of Marketing
Over the next couple of weeks I will consider ideas from a paper coming out in Marketing Science. [This post was written in 2018]. I wrote the paper with a former PhD student, Moeen Butt. This looks at the use of a metric called Tobin’s q. This has been used in papers claiming to be…
Why Are Intangible Investments Different To Tangible Investments?
Haskel and Westlake’s main point in Capitalism without Capital is that the world is changing and that the predominant form of investment nowadays (investments in intangibles) is different from investment in tangible assets. Why are intangible investments different to tangible investments? The Four Ss of Intangibles The authors, in making the case for intangible investments…
