Category: Understanding Marketing

  • Evaluating Evaluations Of Evaluations

    Stark and Freishat (2014) are pretty negative about student evaluations of teaching. To be fair the more you study evaluations the more problems you see. I agree that we have a problem with bias in student evaluations of teaching. Still many of the criticisms of evaluations, however, seem to be about the general problems of…

  • The Flutie Effect

    Brand building advertising invests money into creating goodwill with a customer. Without further spending such goodwill declines. There are other ways to create goodwill. For example, US universities do so through the funding of sports. Such funding has its payoff through things like the Flutie effect. The Flutie Effect Doug Chung looked at the impact…

  • A Call to Action

    Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith (with Carlye Adler) have a new book, The Dragonfly Effect. This is an interesting short book that is an easy read. The book is a practical guidebook to using social media to enact change. It contains lots of useful how-to lists. For instance, they highlight the need for a call…

  • Value-Based Marketing

    In 2000 Peter Doyle started the abstract of his paper, Value-Based Marketing with the sentence. “Marketing has not had the impact on the boardroom that its importance justifies” (Doyle, 2000, page 299.) Doyle made a fair point. Marketing’s Lack Of Influence It is very common for academic marketers to bemoan marketing’s lack of influence. Many firms…

  • Canada’s Top Brands

    Like a doughnut the survey in Canadian Business magazine that placed Tim Hortons as Canada’s Top Brand is enjoyable. That said, it is not necessarily the most nutritious thing in the world. What do we know about Canada’s Top Brands In 2014? Loving Tim Hortons We find out that Canadian’s love Tim Hortons’ coffee and…

  • Survey Methodology And The Future Of West Ham United

    West Ham United, the English football (soccer) club I support, hasn’t seen much recent success. (Written in 2014, as I revise this in 2021 things are better). The fans, in a fine example of optimism bias, expect the team to win while playing with a certain élan. In 2011, after a disastrous few years, Sam Allardyce was…

  • Measuring Marketing In The Age Of Absolute Value

    Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen suggest that with greater access to information consumers can (and do) make much better purchasing decisions. They are, in effect, arguing that much academic work in marketing is too artificial when it shows decision-making problems. In the real-world consumers can solve problems that confound students in the laboratory. Too much choice can paralyze but this…

  • The Deadweight Loss Of Christmas

    In a holiday theme I’m discussing the Deadweight Loss of christmas. The basic idea is that gift-giving destroys value for society. The Deadweight Loss Of Christmas When buying for myself I get what I most value with the money. When you buy something for me you don’t know what I want so probably buy something…

  • Shopping For Votes

    Susan Delacourt’s Shopping For Votes is an enjoyable read. Lots of nice detail helps illustrate some interesting events in Canadian politics. The Political Marketing Literature I, of course, have a couple of quibbles. 1) Firstly I feel that her main thesis wasn’t well developed or supported. She has clearly become familiar with the political marketing…

  • 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…

Verified by MonsterInsights