Top 6 – August 2012

According to Young & Rubicam’s BAV measures, the four pillars of brand value are Knowledge, Relevance, Esteem, and Differentiation. On which of these is your firm underperforming? Knowledgeable consumers armed with information from product reviews, existing customer’s opinions, and trial offers are eliminating asymmetric information between buyers and sellers found in the traditional markets and…

Read More

Doing Good May Yield Bad Results

The conventional wisdom in the public relations business is that being a good corporate citizen is “good business.” Companies that invest in socially responsible activities are believed to receive some payback in the form of goodwill or good publicity. Remarkably this may not be the case.

Read More

Trust and Business Relationships

Trust is central to business relationships, that most everyone would agree.  But what exactly does trust mean?  What are the dimensions of trust?  How related are trust and decisions?  And, more to the point for this journal, how does trust affect customer purchase decisions?

Read More

Hoodie Billionaires: 3 Lessons We Learned from Zuckerberg’s ‘Hoodiegate’

When Mark Zuckerberg showed up to a meeting with potential Wall Street investors wearing a hoodie sweatshirt, just before Facebook’s initial public offering in May, analysts derided the young CEO for his lack of maturity.  Andrew Mason faced similar criticism for sipping a beer during a major employee meeting. With Zuckerberg as a cornerstone example, here are a few lessons we’ve learned from the minor ‘scandal’ analysts dubbed ‘Hoodiegate.’

Read More

Setting the Price in the Face of Competitive Substitutes – An Economics Approach

Economic consumer theory represents how a demander allocates consumption behavior between two goods to maximize utility under constraints such as prices, time, and income. Consumer theory rests on the simple foundation that individuals are utility maximizing entities with the driven purpose to make tradeoffs depending on preferences and constraints. In this article, Curry Hilton examines price behavior for two substitutable goods.

Read More