One of the big challenges of running an organization is managing across business disciplines. That is one of the many insights shared in Stephen Diorio and Chris Hummel’s book Revenue Operations. Managing Across Business Disciplines The book I wrote with Shane (Xin) Wang — The Customer Asset — looked at the problem of customer valuation….
Category: Revenue
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…
Word Of Mouth And Movie Piracy
Marketers are confident that word of mouth helps stimulate demand. This perhaps isn’t too shocking. It seems reasonable that recommendations can encourage people to purchase. One area where this is likely to be the case is in movies. Reviewers pick over movies and give their thoughts. Normal people often are happy to share their views…
Fixing Marketing’s Perception Problem
Thomas Barta discusses marketing’s perception problem. He is interested in fixing marketing’s perception problem. Unaccountable Not Sleazy By the problem, Barta means more an internal perception problem within firms than an external view (of marketers as sleazy). Internally marketing is seen as unaccountable, it is a bit of a black hole for funds. As marketers,…
Value of a Like
Valuing social media likes is an enormous challenge. We should be somewhat forgiving of problems in the methods. It is surely better to be addressing difficult challenges than ignoring them entirely. It is, however, also important to be explicit about what we are claiming and not claiming. This is a problem with Value of a…
Marketing ROI, Heartbeats And Breaths
Clarity is important to effective language use. If our words all mean different things it is hard to communicate. It is often surprising that marketers, who often claim to be communication experts, are sometimes terribly imprecise about what they mean. We need to be clear about marketing ROI, heartbeats, and breaths. Marketing ROI James Lenskold…
Revenue And Valuing Likes
Dan Zarrella, from HubSpot, has given a formula for valuing social media “likes”. There are several interesting parts. For instance, he has tried to incorporate churn. Compared to most pieces of advice in the social media marketing world it is transparent. You can see what he was trying to do. His formula (although it looks…
The Top and Bottom Line
Preparing for class recently I came across a media report which illustrates the confusion and sloppiness that surrounds marketing metrics. I realized the problem we often have talking about the top and bottom line. Impact Of Social Media An important question is the bottom line impact of social media. How can you persuade the CFO…
