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'M'에 해당되는 글 10건

  1. 2008/02/11 Marketing: Democracy
  2. 2008/02/11 Expand your brand community online
  3. 2008/02/04 Focusing solely on ROI is dangerous and naïve.
  4. 2008/02/04 Stop watch marketing
  5. 2008/02/01 바세린의 아성은 무너질 것인가?
  6. 2008/01/31 Brands are more than checkboos for content
  7. 2008/01/28 Colt 45
  8. 2008/01/22 Nothing Is Insignificant When It Comes to Brand Fulfillment
  9. 2007/12/11 The decesive moment
  10. 2007/12/06 세번째 여자

Marketing: Democracy

Marketing, Much Like Democracy, Is Good for You (Yes, Really)

Think About It: Politicians Should Treat Citizens the Way Marketers Do

By John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz

Published: February 11, 2008

Marketing is much maligned. Consumer advocates say it's deceptive and intrusive. Sociologists contend it encourages self-centered materialism. Cultural critics argue that it saps civic spirit and political involvement.

Marketers, preoccupied with individual campaigns, have done a poor job of rebutting these critiques.
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Equally beneficial
The six benefits that marketing and democracy deliver to society are very similar.
What do you say to the cynics who claim that marketing is bad for society? Is it enough to try to distinguish good marketing from bad? Or to point out that you have to search hard to find individuals who think they consume too much or would prefer fewer choices?

These are weak, defensive responses. To answer the question with positive arguments, we investigated the broad impact of marketing in modern, industrialized societies. In a new book, we compare the consumer marketplace with our political marketplace. Turns out the benefits that marketing and democracy deliver to society are remarkably similar.

Improving quality of life
Marketers give consumers information. They offer consumers choice. They want to engage consumers, to earn their interest and loyalty. Most marketers seek to be inclusive, to bring quality and innovation to the masses. A marketer's success depends on an exchange with a customer and subsequent consumption of goods and services that satisfy needs and improve quality of life.

These six benefits are equally relevant in democracies. Democracies depend on informed citizens participating in the political process and making choices among political alternatives. Democracies promote the welfare of all citizens and enable them to be included in political decision making. Indeed, it can be argued that the practice we get as consumers each day in the commercial marketplace makes us better, smarter citizens.

The marketing mix encompasses all of these benefits. Marketing communications accelerate information sharing and new-product adoption. Information makes consumers aware of the choices that suit their needs and thereby stimulates consumption.

Pricing is a key determinant of exchange value. Marketers ensure that products and services are priced at levels that provide value to target consumers as well as profit to producers.

Wal-Mart democracy
Efficient distribution and logistics systems enable exchange. Products reach broad audiences of customers faster and more cheaply than ever. Wal-Mart may be disparaged, but its mission of bringing low prices to everyone is democratic and inclusive.

Product diversity provides freedom of choice and allows consumers to express individuality.

Marketing inherently engages consumers. The creativity in marketing communications, good product design and enjoyable retail experiences all bring fun to our lives. A world without marketing would be a world of sameness, commoditization and inertia.

Bad marketing engages customers as well, with resulting negative word-of-mouth. That's one of the democratic niceties of marketing. Everyone can have an opinion about the latest product or this year's Super Bowl ads. Marketers welcome the risks inherent in being part of the conversation. After all, nothing worries marketers more than when no one is interested in discussing what they have to offer.

Of course, marketing can be abused. But sensible marketers, the vast majority, know that respecting the customer is key to a profitable long-term relationship.

Responding to desires
The scope and impact of aggregate marketing activity cannot be underestimated. It contributes enormously to economic development. In the United States alone, 17 million people hold marketing, sales and customer-service jobs. Marketing's customer focus directs economic activity such as product development toward value-adding innovations that respond to individual desires and improve our quality of life.

Marketing supports the pillars of democratic society. Advertising funds our diverse media, including the internet. These advertising-supported media give citizens access to information about political figures, policies and programs. Marketing know-how helps public policy-makers change citizen behaviors by, for example, encouraging seat-belt usage or good nutrition.

Moreover, the billions of mutually satisfying exchanges that occur daily in the commercial marketplace are part of the glue that builds the trust and respect that hold society together. The top national brands and global brands offer a consistent level of functional product quality and innovation combined with emotional appeal. They adapt where needed to local preferences, but they attract the loyalty of millions of consumers because they deliver the same good customer experience to all.

Starbucks more rewarding
It may even be argued that the commercial marketplace is more attentive to diversity and more democratic than the political marketplace. For the 80% of American adults who are not political junkies, relationships with brands such as Starbucks (the "third place") and BMW (the "ultimate driving machine") are more rewarding than associations with political parties.

Instead of treating citizens merely as taxpayers, donors and voters, politicians ought to treat citizens as well as marketers treat their customers by focusing on how they can better deliver the six benefits common to both marketing and democracy.

Check it out: 'Greater Good'

Excerpts from "Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy," by John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz, Harvard Business Press, 2008.


"We believe that marketing itself is marketed poorly and that the social value created by the 17 million Americans who are employed in marketing deserves more credit. The fault is largely with marketers themselves. They should be more conscious of the social importance of their work and of the moral principles that underpin their daily decisions. Marketers are most comfortable judging marketing as a business practice, where the issue is how well a particular marketing tool, technique, or process helps a business meet its objectives. But marketers also need to consider the impact of marketing on individual consumers, the marketplace and society."

"Politicians constantly sell themselves to raise money to fund campaigns, and their marketing efforts diminish rather than enhance marketing's reputation. This is especially true of politicians who harness marketing tactics such as negative advertising to achieve short-term results at the polls. In contrast, commercial marketers must earn the consumer's vote at the cash register every day. With decades of experience, they therefore view marketing as a long-term investment to boost their brands' reputations. They rarely indulge in negative comparison advertising with their direct competitors, knowing that consumers respect brands that offer positive reasons to buy them. What is needed in the political marketplace is not less marketing but better marketing. Politicians need to understand that marketing, practiced properly, is grounded in the concept of a fair exchange that builds trust."
Posted by Troy Shin
M l 2008/02/11 12:14
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Expand your brand community online

Expand Your Brand Community Online

Join the Dialogue: Social Media Provides a New Opportunity for Sparking Excitement About Products and Services

By Patrick Hanlon and Josh Hawkins

Published: January 07, 2008

These days, consumers self-select into a media environment of trusted, on-demand sources. Traditional 30-second TV spots, viral stunts and PR campaigns are subject to rerouting through a milieu of online communities that repackage, edit and mash up intended messages for distribution through social networks, search engines, e-mails and word-of-mouth. It's within that mix that today's real marketing opportunities lie.
Social turn: For its latest annual ice-cream-flavor search, Haagen-Dazs recruited video submissions from ice-cream enthusiasts demonstrating recipes for new flavors. An online video channel encouraged word-of-mouth promotion.
Social turn: For its latest annual ice-cream-flavor search, Haagen-Dazs recruited video submissions from ice-cream enthusiasts demonstrating recipes for new flavors. An online video channel encouraged word-of-mouth promotion.


Rather than spending resources on 30-second spots consumers avoid, savvy marketers develop new strategies and investments to engage consumers in active conversations that invite participation in their brands. Traditional media offer monologues. New social media prompt dialogue. Successfully engaging in this dialogue across the great internet divide becomes the new challenge.

When you build a community of passionate advocates who share your beliefs, the dialogue becomes a natural evolution of your customer-relationship practices, inspiring trust, relevance and renewed energy around your brand.

Bridge building
The opportunity to build an online community is reinforced by making sure you have created the belief system to support it. Then your online community becomes talk among people who believe in the same things, speak your language, and enthusiastically bridge the gap between manufacturer and consumer.

"Stop preaching and start conversing" is the message to marketers. Social media is exactly that: social. A dialogue, which may seem daunting at first, is actually a more positive way to persuade people to become advocates for your products or services. You don't have to be Aristotle to figure out that dialogue offers the opportunity to persuade, something traditional advertising increasingly fails to accomplish.

There are plenty of examples of how marketers have chosen to influence, engage and excite the online communities that surround their brands.

Social-media outlets provide a powerful new opportunity for companies to revisit their origins, their reasons for being, to expand brand communities. One such company is DuPont. It launched a social-media campaign to communicate its heritage of scientific discovery, innovation and progress to a younger, online audience. DuPont enlisted Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom to create a series of videos called "Science Stories." Each video highlighted a compelling product innovation (such as Kevlar bulletproof vests or Nomex fire-resistant clothing).

DuPont made the videos available online at stories.dupont.com and distributed video clips through blogs, science-related sites and video portals. The result: fresh brand buzz and spontaneous in-market awareness for DuPont.

Loosening reins
Successful social-media campaigns often require brand managers to give up some control. Be not afraid. The DuPont video clips, for example, were embedded in blogs and wrapped with commentary posted by blog owners and readers, creating an authentic dialogue and communal understanding of DuPont, prompting future interactions with its growing online community.

Increasing numbers of people in the 13-to-30 age group (a consumer demographic for which marketers grapple) can be found on the internet. These self-made media producers ritually scroll through articles on their RSS readers; chat with friends on instant-messaging services; send and receive SMS messages; download tracks from iTunes; update blogs, MySpace pages and social-network profiles; monitor responses to updates; post notes on friends' Facebook profiles and "walls"; and grab video clips from TV programs.

Blogs and forums are addicting. The opportunity to put your words and ideas online for others to praise and challenge is social media's drug of choice. The instant exchange and reshaping of ideas from random and omniscient onliners can be a powerful intoxicant.

The blog ring of fashion sites is so large it's almost a movement. Head for StyleMob, Iamfashion, FabSugar, Stylehive, Go Fug Yourself or the focused Purse Blog and you'll find primarily women gathering to list their favorite jeans, talk about an upcoming sale, or rant about a new designer.

Peer pressure
Peer opinion is the most powerful recommender for the wired generation. A recent Nielsen survey shows that 78% of consumers trust the opinions of peers over all other information sources and advertising. The hair straightener that receives the best reviews is the next one the consumer buys.

Checking prices and styles online has become a ritual for many savvy shoppers. Some buy online, some pre-shop before heading to stores. But that white space between the idea of buying an item and the purchase itself is fertile territory for marketers -- if they can join the conversation or locate those who drive it.

The site where the conversation happens between consumer and marketer is the iconic hunting ground and presents the most opportunities for marketers in this consumer-generated space. Social-media outlets enable you to steer the dialogue toward your reason for being and offer the opportunity to weave new consumer benefits, new promotions, line extensions and other marketing efforts into your story.

Front and center
Stop & Shop Supermarket Co. recently launched a consumer media campaign with a new slogan, "Stop & Shop works for me." The campaign centered on videos with stories from real customers. Stop & Shop also used an internet TV microsite to solicit additional customer video submissions that will be programmed into the marketing mix.
Stop and share: Stop & Shop used an internet TV microsite to solicit customer video submissions.
Stop and share: Stop & Shop used an internet TV microsite to solicit customer video submissions.


As a result, the retail chain was able to place core consumers front and center -- real-world stories told by real people about how and why the brand is relevant in their lives.

Judi Palmer, senior director of marketing and communications for the company, was recently quoted in the Waltham, Mass., Daily News Tribune as saying, "For the first time, we're actually letting real customers talk about us rather than us constructing a message."

A common frustration for marketing executives is that it's nearly impossible to control what people write about a brand online. Innovators see social media as a new avenue of communication. After all, the benefit of having a brand community is that you can talk with one another. It's daunting, but what better way to engage people in your message and the language surrounding your brand than to engage them in a dialogue about it?

Public follow through
The Consumerist is a corporate-watchdog site with more than 620,000 visitors per month that solicits stories from consumers -- with preference given to negative experiences. And that's OK. The opportunity for companies on sites such as the Consumerist is to directly address issues of customer dissatisfaction. The Consumerist tends to post follow-up stories, so what begins as a warning against a certain company can reveal the care and concern by that same company reaching out to invest itself in customer concerns.

Opportunities to reach out even to those who don't like your brand can have powerful positive consequences. Reaching out conveys confidence, accessibility, respect and authenticity to people both inside and outside of the brand community. Steve Jobs' prescient rebate to iPhone owners earlier this year gained huge credibility and empathy in response to one of the simplest of merchandising techniques: a price cut.

The news of the price cut set the blogosphere on fire with commentary. Regardless of where consumers landed on the issue, the result was a general perception that Apple was responsive and engaged with their community.

Even if you can't always control the conversation, you can join it. That lets you project an image of authenticity and transparency.

Pick a flavor
The annual Häagen-Dazs ice-cream-flavor search, Scoop, has taken a decidedly social turn in an attempt to grow the brand's community. Häagen-Dazs recruited video submissions from ice-cream enthusiasts demonstrating recipes for new flavors. An online video channel encouraged word-of-mouth promotion by online foodies through e-mail features, link sharing and RSS feeds for consumer videos.
From thousands of submissions, the online community voted to select finalists. The winning flavor, caramelized pear and toasted pecan, just hit grocery stores.
From thousands of submissions, the online community voted to select finalists. The winning flavor, caramelized pear and toasted pecan, just hit grocery stores.


From thousands of submissions, the online community voted to select finalists. The winning flavor, caramelized pear and toasted pecan, just hit grocery stores.

Leaders and senior management can relate with their brand communities by writing about their companies' culture, plans and concerns -- and field comments from the customer side.

Corporate blogs often have direct C-level involvement with high-level industry perspectives, PR announcements and thought leadership. Sometimes these sites have PR or legal oversight. Other times, blog mavericks such as GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, who writes on GM's FastLane blog, have a slightly more direct flow of communication. (Social personal finance site Wesabe lets customers call their CEO four hours a day, seven days a week in their "Talk To Jason" program.) A corporate blog can provide a useful platform to quickly address issues and respond to consumer concerns.

Lasting conversations
Social media, whether it is executed in the form of blogs or the mobile web, treats marketers with a new opportunity to engage and excite the communities that surround their brands with people who care. In today's commoditized world, where apathy and skepticism run wild, social media are one more opportunity to become a part of the conversation and keep consumer loyalists talking about you through product iterations and company life cycles and link them with others who feel just as passionate about you.

The brands that leapfrog into the future will be those enabled with a community that feverishly praises them and pummels their competition. Embrace this brave new dialogue, and your brand zealots (sometimes even your detractors) will reward you for it.
Posted by Troy Shin
M l 2008/02/11 11:04
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Focusing solely on ROI is dangerous and naïve.

Don't Overemphasize ROI as Single Measure of Success

Variety Counts: It Takes More Than One Benchmark to Assess Overall Effectiveness

By Tim Calkins and Derek D. Rucker

Published: February 04, 2008

Everyone loves to talk about ROI. The benchmark has firmly planted itself in the soil of marketing doctrine, widely accepted as a measure that makes it simple to evaluate marketing programs and gauge spending levels. Return on investment enables financial types to evaluate marketing initiatives with the same approach they use to evaluate capital expenditures and acquisitions.
One-track mind: Year after year, Budweiser advertises in the Super Bowl. The cost is known -- but at what benefit?
One-track mind: Year after year, Budweiser advertises in the Super Bowl. The cost is known -- but at what benefit?

For senior management, ROI makes marketing less subjective. For marketers, ROI makes decisions fairly simple; it removes the appearance of subjectivity from the debate. Perhaps more important, a good return makes it easier to defend marketing initiatives and to justify existing and future spending.

But to us, there is a fundamental problem with overemphasizing ROI as the single measure of marketing success: It is often impossible to accurately quantify the impact. Although the world of marketing has come a long way in terms of analytic capabilities, applying financial numbers to the marketing equation is not always possible or preferable. That's why using ROI to evaluate the overall effectiveness can be a problem.

Take branding, for example. For many companies, brands are their most valuable assets. Determining the precise value of a brand at any given moment, however, is near impossible. Many companies do attempt to value brands. Interbrand and BusinessWeek, for example, produce a ranking of global brands each year based on brand value. Yet these brand valuation calculations generally rely on an assumption, built on an assumption, built on another assumption, built on, yes, another assumption. That means that trying to determine the impact of a TV spot on a brand's value or equity might produce numbers that are directionally right but certainly not precise.

Assuming brand impact
If the value of a brand cannot be precisely calculated, and thus known, then it would appear impossible to use solely ROI to evaluate the decisions that impact the brand. Either the impact on the brand has to be ignored, which seems incorrect, or it has to be put in as an assumption, which makes the analysis suspect.

That creates the potential for suboptimal decision making. Consider, for example, a company evaluating a cost-reduction idea. The capital cost is known, and the savings are known. The exact impact on the brand, however, cannot be determined quantitatively. Will anyone notice the change? Will it affect how they feel about the brand? How will sales and profit be affected? When will all this occur? All these questions can be hard to answer.

So on one side of the debate are certain, quantifiable savings. On the other side of the debate are qualitative concerns that the brand might suffer. A sharp finance executive could simply ask, "Well, what is the impact on the brand? Let's just factor that into the ROI calculation." The problem is that factoring this in with any precision is difficult, making the results of any analysis incomplete at best and misleading at worst.

Branding isn't the only area where returns are hard to evaluate. Customer satisfaction, loyalty, employee morale and differentiation are all important but generally impossible to put into hard financial numbers that can be used on a day-to-day basis when calculating ROI.

Super Bowl impact
Given these observations, it would seem that attempting to calculate the precise ROI on a Super Bowl spot, for example, would be a futile task. Certainly the cost is known, and it is rather substantial. But the returns are impossible to fully quantify. Consider Budweiser's recurring and considerable commitment to the Super Bowl. What is the net impact of Budweiser's appearance on consumers' affinity for the brand, the morale of employees, the motivation of distributors and the differentiation of the brand? While all of these elements are important to building a brand, they are generally impossible to put into hard figures that can be used to calculate an accurate amount.

Some marketing initiatives are easier to quantitatively measure than others. For example, a short-term price promotion generally has a substantial and immediate impact on sales. That makes calculating the return a fairly straightforward process. Similarly, online-advertising initiatives and coupons are often easier to evaluate with ROI. New-product initiatives may also be easier to evaluate using ROI, though as Clay Christensen, Stephen Kaufman and Willy Shih warn in their recent Harvard Business Review article, the calculation is often misused.

But here's the danger: A company that uses ROI to guide marketing decisions might focus only on initiatives that come with strong, quantifiable returns. The company might then reduce spending on programs that build the brand, increase customer loyalty and strengthen differentiation. That can be dangerous in that it increases the focus on short-term initiatives at the potential expense of more-valuable long-term gains.

'McStarbucks'
There's no clearer example of this than Starbucks. Over the past several years, the ubiquitous coffee chain has rolled out a series of initiatives to boost short-term profits at the risk of potentially damaging the brand. The ROI on each decision was probably very positive. But as CEO Howard Schultz admitted, the initiatives have hurt the brand and weakened the company overall. The new breakfast sandwiches, for example, might generate incremental revenue, but leave the stores smelling like cheese factories and make the baristas feel like they are working at McDonald's. As one rather frustrated barista noted on a recent visit, "Welcome to McStarbucks."

This is not to suggest that marketing should be a black box, where money is spent in a haphazard manner on programs that may or may not make any sense at all. Marketing decisions do need to be made strategically, and a marketing executive should manage and be evaluated on the overall financial performance of a business. But rather than focus on ROI, executives need to use a variety of measures to evaluate marketing programs' success. Those measures should be grounded in the objectives for a particular initiative. For example, if the goal is to strengthen customer loyalty, then loyalty should be measured and tracked. Anyone advertising in the Super Bowl needs to have clear objectives and a clear strategy, along with some way to evaluate success with respect to these strategies.

So what should managers do when asked to produce the ROI for a marketing initiative? Take a more open-minded approach to measurement, first focusing on a company's objectives and strategies and then identifying measures that can best work for them. Focusing solely on ROI is dangerous and naïve.
Posted by Troy Shin
M l 2008/02/04 12:03
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Stop watch marketing

It's Time to Understand Consumers

Ticking Away: Get a Handle on Your Target's Internal Stopwatch and Your Window of Opportunity for Selling Big

By John Rosen and AnnaMaria Turano

Published: February 04, 2008

All CMOs engage in a time-driven bargain: exchanging their time -- the time they've invested in market research, marketing plans, strategy development and advertising -- in return for a few minutes, hours or days of their consumers' time. But how can you know whether consumers are willing to trade their time for yours? To take the time to listen to your pitch, to be "sold"? More important, how much time will they give you to make your pitch? Leveraging the answers to those "how much time" questions to increase volume and profit is a key challenge.
'Stopwatch Marketing' is on shelves today.
'Stopwatch Marketing' is on shelves today.


Imagine that all potential consumers have internal stopwatches ticking away until their buying decision is finalized. It is, therefore, the key objective of the marketing effort to either slow down that ticking long enough to get the message across or to stop the ticking and close the sale right then and there. The fascinating part of all this is that each consumer's clock is unique -- some decisions take months or years, some days, minutes or even seconds -- and is ticking at a different speed. Adding to the complexity is that for any given consumer and any given buying decision, the size and speed of the stopwatch will change depending on the specific occasion: buying a bottle of wine for a hot date (a risky endeavor) might be a very different process than buying a bottle for a brother-in-law you don't like very much (not very risky; just get it over with).

In fact, the riskiness of the purchase, from the consumer's standpoint, often helps define the consumer's stopwatch. Consider a risky consumer decision -- one you'll have to live with for a long time and that's fraught with many negative consequences, such as the purchase of a very-big-screen HDTV. If you screw this up, you're stuck with it for several years. In this situation, you have a big and slowly ticking stopwatch, because you are spending much time and energy consulting magazines and relatives, checking prices, and comparing brands and stores. This risk aversion tends to drive the way marketers address these consumers: High risk leads to slowly ticking stopwatches, allowing for multiple marketing touch points.

This interplay of risk vs. time -- the shopper's stopwatch -- defines four different shopping behaviors: impatient, recreational, reluctant and painstaking.

1. Impatient shopping
For almost everyone, buying replacement tires is the very definition of an impatient purchase: No one seeks them in advance, but the purchase can't be put off once the need appears. When a mechanic tells a consumer her tires are worn out, he doesn't say, "Drive them for a few weeks while you think about it."

There are few touch points in this impatient process where a manufacturer such as Goodyear can influence a decision; then the consumer's stopwatch starts ticking quickly. And Goodyear has to be certain no consumer is swayed by a salesperson's claim, such as: "I've got something just as good for $15 less from Toyo."

Besides such dealer recommendations, consumers respond most readily to visual cues, such as sidewall images and tread design.

The key moment in the success of the Goodyear Assurance with TripleTred -- Goodyear's most successful product launch -- occurred when buyers were able to see the tire itself: what the company called its "long, sculpted, sensual shapes that draw the customer's attention ... [an] aggressive appearance that helps the dealer explain the tire's benefits and technology to customers." The icon on the tire's sidewall -- a sun, three raindrops and a snowflake -- crisply communicated the tire's appeal.

And it worked. As Andy Traicoff, Goodyear's director-consumer development recalls, "We knew we had a winner the first time a consumer told us, 'It looks like it does what you say it does.'" And the dealers put it more simply: "Assurance sells itself."

2. Recreational shopping
Consumers refer to the typical supermarket shopping experience with troubling words such as "time-consuming," "dread," stupid, "disgust," and even "hate." Many consumers come away from a retail experience feeling defeated and deflated and can't wait to get out of most supermarkets.

Whole Foods Market, however, doesn't try to speed up the consumer's passage through its stores. The brilliance of Whole Foods' strategy is its recognition that some consumers would rather spend one hour roaming the aisles of a delightful supermarket -- one with beautifully displayed produce, samples in every aisle, gourmet food and chocolate-enrobing stations -- than 10 minutes pushing a cart through one that isn't. This amounts to the transformation of a supermarket into theater -- a stupendous slowing of consumers' stopwatches.

How stupendous? Most midsize cities have only one or two Whole Foods but hundreds of traditional supermarkets. So a significant number of Whole Foods shoppers are, quite literally, driving past 50 supermarkets for a once-a-month, uplifting experience at which they happily spend hours.

3. Reluctant shopping
Reluctant shoppers, like the impatient ones, simply can't wait for shopping to end. Reluctant shoppers, however, may not actually start shopping for years after they recognize a need. Shopping for tires may be distasteful, but it is seldom delayed. Bank accounts, however, are seldom acquired under conditions of urgency.

The opportunities to take advantage of reluctant shopping behavior are richest wherever consumers have a continuing relationship with a business, not because they enjoy shopping there but because, having embraced a bank, the costs of leaving it are just too high.

Commerce Bank has been much benchmarked for perfecting a strategy that combines consumer friendliness (grand openings, friendly and welcoming staff, staying open late and on weekends, and traditional advertising) with a fearfully consistent, pleasant and inviting in-branch experience, backed up by the feedback of 200 mystery shoppers per branch per year. Such perfection at the retail level simply makes consumers reluctant to take their accounts elsewhere.

4. Painstaking shopping
Painstaking shoppers differ from reluctant shoppers in the way they measure the downside of a particular consumer choice. Reluctant shopping is characterized by fear of making any decision; painstaking shopping is characterized by fear of making the wrong decision.

Consider cars. For decades, research has shown that buyers frequently leave the dealership feeling they have, indeed, made the wrong decision and that someone else got a better deal. Lexus overcomes this by showing dealers a better way to deliver the highest profitability in the industry. Lexus' dealer qualification, training and recognition process is legendary and assures that painstaking consumers actually get to participate in the selling process. This dominance of the last ticks of the stopwatch enables Lexus to spend half as much per car as most other manufacturers on the earliest ticks in the consumer's stopwatch: brand building. Lexus's commitment to dealer performance outweighs its competitors' reliance on dealer incentives. And Lexus consumers rarely leave feeling they've made the wrong decision.

Marketers have largely solved their problems targeting the right demographic segments. Now they need to focus on consumers' time imperatives -- the continuous altering of their shopping stopwatches. Properly executed market research will identify those stopwatches. And effective marketers will build strategies to leverage the unique characteristics of each target consumer's stopwatch: What works for consumers on impatient days will not work on days they spend two hours browsing at Whole Foods. But if you understand that stopwatch, consumers will be happy to give you their time -- and money.
John Rosen is co-author of 'Stopwatch Marketing: Take Charge of the Time When Your Customer Decides to Buy.' He is an executive director at Marketing Consulting Services. Previously he worked at Coors and Mattel.
AnnaMaria Turano is co-author of 'Stopwatch Marketing' and an executive director at Marketing Consulting Associates. She is also an adjunct professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business.
Posted by Troy Shin
M l 2008/02/04 11:40
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바세린의 아성은 무너질 것인가?

락스 브랜드가 피부 미용 제품을 출시한다는 결정이 쉽진 않았을 텐데
브랜드 갭에서 걱정했던 방만한 라인확장이 일단 벌어지고 말았다.
도브의 리얼 뷰티 캠페인 이후 인공적인 느낌보다 진솔한 아름다움을 강조하는 것이
업계의 추세인 듯 싶은데 중요한건 바세린의 아성을 비즈왁스가 무너뜨릴 수 있을까라는
석유 미용 제품과 천연 미연 제품의  대결 구도 정도?


Burt's Puts Bee in Bonnet of Skin-Care Marketers

First National Effort by Clorox Brand Bashes Ingredients in Beauty Products

By Jack Neff

Published: January 31, 2008

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- In its first major national ad campaign under new owner Clorox, countercultural brand Burt's Bees criticizes industrial-strength ingredients long found in conventional beauty brands.
사용자 삽입 이미지





Among the first of six ads from agency Pool, New York, to appear in issues of magazines such as People, Oprah, Allure, Real Simple and Natural Health starting Feb. 5, is one that in classic package-goods mode compares the beeswax in Burt's to the petrolatum found in other products.

Beeswax is a "naturally replenishing moisturizer made by bees," while petrolatum, Burt's says, is a "non-renewable hydrocarbon made from crude oil" that leaves a "greasy film that could contain contaminants."

Mike Indursky, the chief marketing and strategic officer at Burt's Bees, knows his beeswax, but he's no stranger to petrolatum. He's a veteran of Unilever skin care (think Vaseline petroleum jelly) and L'Oreal (with petrolatum currently in HIP eye shadow).

Not attack ads
"You see brands attack other brands," Mr. Indursky said. "We'd never want to do that. What we want to do is show one ingredient vs. another ingredient."

The other half of the strategy, he said, is to build a reputation for efficacy by showing natural ingredients that do the same jobs as chemical additives and define the squishy notion of "natural" in the process. The campaign, he said, "really helps show the difference between natural and not natural in a very provocative way."

The conventional personal-care industry is among those likely to be provoked, but representatives of Unilever, L'Oreal and the Personal Care Products Council, which represents the industry on safety issues, either didn't return calls or couldn't reach executives for comment by deadline. The PCPC website notes that petrolatum is approved by the Food and Drug Administration as safe to use not only in cosmetics, but even as a food additive.

At least some people doubt Burt's has much room to bash others about ingredients now that it's owned by a bleach marketer. "If they make a face cream we may all come out looking like Michael Jackson," chided a poster on Consumerist.com.

But Mr. Indursky believes the critics are few. Both he and CEO John Replogle, another Unilever alum, have been responding to as many critics as they can. "Our standards are only going to rise," he said. "Our product is only going to get better."

Unconventional beauty message
By putting an unconventional beauty message in a familiar beauty context, he believes the ads will make the brand stronger, too. "Once you understand [the rules of beauty ads]," he said, "you can ignore some, follow others."

Burt's marketing had focused mainly on events, public relations and store displays. A much smaller and short-lived magazine campaign in late 2005 also focused on ingredients but had less of a beauty angle. For example, one for Lemon Butter Cuticle Cream showed no women, but did show the package, two lemons and two bees with the copy: "What do you do when life gives you lemons? You rub them into your cuticles. Duh." It also listed other natural ingredients, which it said give "instant results."

"We don't believe we were sending the right brand message," Mr. Indursky said. The new effort, he said, also links better with the company's effort to establish a standard definition for natural products -- and differentiate them from products labeled "natural" but which have synthetic chemical ingredients.

Like 'Real Beauty'
In the new ads, the models never show their faces and, though they're naked, not much of their bodies are seen, either. In the tradition of Dove's "Real Beauty," they're not typical models, but still attractive. "That juxtaposition of hard-core message and real, beautiful image is very different," he said.

"They're very dramatic, exciting ads," said beauty consultant Suzanne Grayson, who believes they'll get women to think about cosmetic ingredients. But she believes a standard headline across all ads would work better, particularly her favorite so far: "How do you get the soft without the suspicious?"
Posted by Troy Shin
M l 2008/02/01 10:05
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