I want to do a long piece on marketing in the movies – the good, the bad and the silly – but today isn’t the day. For now I’ll note that Jason Squire has compiled an extensive review of the movie business in his book with the ‘does what it says on the tin’ title…
The Politics of Accounting
Tony Tollington’s book on Brand Assets is fascinating (although accounting rules have changed a bit, meaning the acronyms and rule numbers aren’t what are used nowadays). Tollington notes the problems with the way accounting policy treated intangible assets. Some changes have occurred since but a lot of the points remain valid. The fascinating thing to…
Bias And Algorithms
As algorithms play greater and greater roles in our lives a reasonable question is: “are they fair?” The answer is often; “no, not really”. To be clear that doesn’t necessarily mean algorithms are making the world worse. If things were unfair before (and they were) then just knowing that things are unfair now can’t tell…
Don’t Use One Industry To Create Examples For CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)
Lloyd Melnick has a short and snappy book on customer lifetime value (which he terms LTV). At its best this is a useful insight into the games industry. There is a lot of detail there in a very easy to read form. For example, you will learn about ARPU (Average Revenue per User) and ARPDAU…
Corporate Political Advocacy
A fascinating question for corporations is how much they should get involved in politics. What is the role for Corporate Political Advocacy? Sometimes Politics Just Comes For You It can be hard to avoid politics sometimes; it just involves some companies by accident. I have no inside knowledge but I doubt Delta really had an…
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…
Political Candidate Brand Strength
Beth Fossen, David Schweidel and Michael Lewis published a recent paper on candidate brand strength in Customer Needs and Solutions. They used inspiration from the idea of performance premium measures of brand strength. In essence, these measure consider how a brand should be doing given certain important features, look at how it is really doing,…
Marketing Strategy and Electoral Politics
As part of our special issue on political marketing, Sridhar Moorthy wrote a piece explaining electoral strategy. This uses ideas from competition theory and analytical models – models based upon mathematical theory. (Empirical models are based upon observed data). Moorthy starts with the observation that advertising spend does not necessarily deliver elections. Hillary Clinton’s team…
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 has given a lot of thought to the divide between research and practice in Industrial, Work and Organizational (IWO) Psychology. While I don’t know much about this discipline a lot of the problems seem quite familiar. They note problems within psychology with a trend towards parts of the discipline with…