Managing Customers:

Small Firms' Big Customers Are Slow to Pay (Wall Street Journal) Getting to the point where a marketer convinces a buyer to make a purchase is often an exhausting experience. This is especially the case ...

7-Eleven Finds a Niche by Adapting to Indonesian Ways (New York Times) One of the underlying tenets of marketing states that marketers must fully understand that success will only be realized if an organization ...

How Companies Learn Your Secrets (New York Times) This is a fascinating story of how marketers learn about the needs of their customers and then use marketing approaches to target these needs.  What ...

As a follow-up to our last post that suggested how some retailers are rethinking customer self-service options, it seems appropriate to take a look at the self-service concept in greater detail.   In some ...

Major Grocer Getting Rid of Self-Checkout Lanes (MSNBC) Giving customers what they want is the mantra of nearly all marketers, and for the last 50-plus years has been arguably the most fundamental ...

The Just-in-Time Consumer (Wall Street Journal) With the U.S. economy showing only slight signs of moving out of the doldrums, many consumer products companies selling in the U.S. are still reeling and ...

The Internet's dramatic impact on business is causing some to conclude that, in the long term, marketing success for many companies may be hard to sustain.  In particular, the speed at which information ...

Capturing Hearts, One Upgrade at a Time (New York Times) Marketers face a difficult task when introducing products that are considered upgrades of existing products.  The key decision confronting these ...

Cold-Calling 101 (Inc. Magazine) How to Close a Sale (Inc. Magazine) As we discuss in our tutorial on The Selling Process, selling can be looked at as a series of activities salespeople undertake as ...

Consumer Groups Say Proposed Privacy Bill Is Flawed (New York Times) As many seasoned marketers will readily admit, in just a short time span the Internet has transformed all areas of marketing.  Its ...

Airport Kiosks Do Nearly Everything but Check Luggage (Los Angeles Times) The mantra of many companies over the last 20 or so years has been “customers are our number one concern.”  To show they mean ...

Maclaren's Stroller Recall: A Stumbling Response Online (Time) When managing marketing decisions there is always the risk that something unforeseen can damage the reputation a company has spent years ...

The Promise of Self-Segmentation (Strategy+Business) Defining a target market is often viewed as the first step in building a successful marketing strategy and nearly all marketers find the best approach ...