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Why Relationship Marketing Has Never Worked for the New Car Purchase

By James T. Berger June 7, 2016

That structural problem is the “deep divide” between manufacturers and dealers. While manufacturers spend millions of dollars on image advertising to promote the brands, the dealers care little about the long-term brand value and instead put their emphasis on the transaction.

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Trends Observed at the 2016 International Home and Housewares Show

By David Dalka June 7, 2016

One of the most interesting booth visits I had was with Starfrit. Founder Jacques Gatien started selling kitchen gadgets at trade fairs in 1965. Over the past several decades, they’ve created many new categories. They showed me The Rock, a frying pan with a unique non-stick surface using what they call RockTec. It comes with a generous 10-year warranty.

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Creative Destruction Strikes Again

By Tim J. Smith, PhD May 9, 2016

To embrace creative destruction is a choice. We can either lament that we fell on the destruction side of market forces, or we can throw ourselves into the creative side of market forces. When market forces destroy your industry, embrace it as the opportunity to create a new path — don’t wait for some third party to have pity on you and fix it for you. Fix it yourself.

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Middlemen In the New Economy

By Kyle T. Westra May 9, 2016

Marina Krakovsky argues in a compelling new book that conventional wisdom was wrong. The Middleman Economy argues that, while transaction costs have decreased for everyone, they have decreased at an even faster rate for professional middlemen, leading to have an even larger role in today’s economy.

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Free Trade, Protectionism and Marketing

By James T. Berger May 9, 2016

Keeping less-productive Americans in their factory jobs means the U.S. government has to impose tariffs or quotas on the more efficiently produced foreign products. This will force the prices of those off shore goods to go up in order to match what it costs to produce them less efficiently in America. So the consumer has to pay, out of his/her own pocket, what it cost to keep a less productive American worker employed.

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Hearsay When Proof is Illegal: A Legal and Ethical Pricing Challenge in Business Markets

By Tim J. Smith, PhD April 4, 2016

Agreed, the signal may not be exact when using publically available information to benchmark competitive prices. It may not be exactly precise even when found from market research. But it will generally suffice for most pricing questions. In many cases, it must suffice.

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Why is Gas Priced by Fractions of a Cent?

By Kyle T. Westra April 4, 2016

The fact that consumers buy gas on a continuum rather than in discrete gallons (unless you’re a wizard with the gas nozzle handle) likely makes it easier for both sides to live with the current arrangement. The pump price and volume numbers go along until the tank is full or you release the handle, and there perhaps isn’t much analytical thought put into the final ratio that appears.

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McDonald’s Feasts on All-Day Breakfast, But Causes Indigestion for Some Franchisees

By James T. Berger April 4, 2016

According to Bloomberg Business, the all-day breakfast has created some meaningful initial problems for franchisees. Soon after the all-day breakfast policy was initiated, Bloomberg Business pointed out “Four Reasons McDonald’s All-Day Breakfast is a Headache for Franchisees.”

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Are Drug Companies Ripping Us Off?

By Tim J. Smith, PhD March 4, 2016

Pharmaceutical formularies, like other medical solutions, are best priced according to the value they deliver relative to the alternative treatment for the target disease. If the new solution provides more value, it should have a proportionately higher price. If it provides less value, it should have a proportionately lower price. This is the concept behind value-based price: price to reflect the prices of alternatives adjusted for their differential value for the target customer.

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Designing a Product Roadmap-II

By Anirban Sengupta March 4, 2016

It is not expected that all the dates mentioned in the product roadmaps are hard deadlines. An audience is cognizant of the fact that sometimes product launches can get delayed due to unforeseen reasons. Yet consistently not sticking to the roadmap may lead the audience to question a firm’s credibility. A great idea would be to backdate the roadmap, to some extent, to demonstrate the compliance so far and then to open up the future.

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