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Who should oversee pricing decisions? Marketing? Sales? Finance? Research by Homburg, Jensen, and Hahn showed it was none of them, all of them, and it depends.
More Like many marketing professionals, I was highly skeptical when Facebook did its Initial Public Offering about a year ago. My feeling was that Facebook had no clear-cut business model that would lead to sustainable profits and earnings. How wrong one can be!
More When selling things that go together, should the company offer discounts on the individual parts or the whole shebang? Sourav Ray, Charles A. Wood, and Paul R. Messinger examined these questions across 650,000 daily price listings and through customer and manager surveys in a recent Journal of Marketing article. Their results have broad price-management implications.
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Which of the following is most critical for a successful entrepreneur to have? An Idea Money Employees Customers Which one? Customers, you…
More Future entrepreneurs, there are four essential questions that must be asked and answered: (1) Who is your target market? (2) What are the needs of the target market? (3) What is your distinctive competency is satisfying those needs? (4) How do you intend to communicate that distinctive competency?
More Kimberly-Clark Corp. (KMB) is “desheeting” its products to improve profitability. Weber Stephen Products LLC avoids price promotions and markdowns on their grills, and yet maintains a dominant market position. These are two rather disjointed activities but they both appear to fall afoul of the suggestions given in a recent Wall Street Journal article by Professor Ailawadi of Tuck and Professor Farris of Darden. Are Ailawad and Farris wrong, are the companies wrong, or can both pairs be right?
More Over the last few years, communication service providers as well as cable operators have been pioneering the concept of a “smart home” as a one-stop solution that satisfies their customers’ needs for safety, security, convenience, et cetera. Does this offering have a market?
More How do publishers successfully market to librarians? David Dalka explores this issue from direct research and interactions at the 2013 American Library Association Conference.
More Having a long list of prospective buyers may be comforting for a salesperson, but a highly applied sales methodology for business markets suggests salespeople should only pursue prospects that fall within two out of four response modes. What are these response modes? How do they affect price performance? And why should salespeople only pursue two of them?
More Probably the most important task of a sales manager is the development of meaningful and accurate sales forecasts. Amazingly, many sales managers simply look at historical numbers and don’t even bother to try to predict the future. Why and how should they?
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