Marketing

Effective social media measurement turns the traditional ROI approach on its head and measures investments made by customers in social media.

Organizations need to value the "soft side" of customer management: emotions, trust and control.

Too many companies do not effectively target growing ethnic and immigrant markets within the U.S.

Are your customers in a concrete or abstract mindset as they think about purchasing your product? The answer can affect how much they buy.

What's smarter: To charge separately for extras -- or to combine all charges into one total price?

Many companies see customers’ product returns as a major inconvenience and an eroder of profits. But recent studies have begun illuminating the potential benefits of allowing customers to return products with impunity. This research finds that when a company has a lenient product-return policy, which allows customers to return almost any product at any time, customers are more willing to make other purchases, thereby raising the company’s revenues from sales. The authors’ own research extended these studies by exploring the trade-offs between the costs of product returns–particularly when customers deem such experiences satisfactory–and their long-term benefits to the company. Analyzing six years of purchase, product-return and marketing-communications data from “Company 1?–a large national catalog retailer that sells apparel and accessories–they confirmed that ignoring product return behavior, or even trying to discourage it directly by not marketing to customers who return products (such as by not sending them catalogs), would be a mistake. In fact, managers should embrace customers’ product-return behavior and offer them a satisfactory experience. In a field experiment with a second catalog retailer, “Company 2,” which sells footwear, apparel and other accessories through the Internet and mail-order catalogs, the authors found that under a lenient product-return policy, customers’ purchases, induced profits and referrals were greater than under a strict policy (which discourages and limits product returns). These measures could be raised even further through a catalog-mailing strategy that takes into account the expected future profits from each customer and the relationship between purchases and product-return behavior–i.e., through an optimal allocation strategy.

Research suggests that people will spend more freely if you first help them feel more virtuous.

Managers can gauge their company's customer focus by posing a set of five specific questions.

Customer-centricity may sound like a good idea. But a new breed of companies focuses instead on getting the customer to comply with a company's systems.

Ads that complement online content can be effective — but not if they rouse consumers' privacy concerns.