How the Internet Can Jeopardize Competitive Advantage

Several years ago when the Internet had exploded on the scene, Michael Porter, the famous Harvard University professor and business strategist, developed an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled “Strategy and the Internet.” While everybody else was extolling the virtues of the Internet as the great communications breakthrough and facilitator of marketing communications and…

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Web 2.0: Hype or Imperative?

With every boom in the business cycle, strategists popularize new paradigms and associated terminology. Currently, as we emerge from the bust of the early zero’s and prepare for the potentially blossoming boom to appear in the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century, strategists are quick to proffer the new “new paradigm”…

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The Wide Gap Between Concept and Commercialization

As an entrepreneur who interacts with other entrepreneurs, we live in a world of concepts – and they are a dime a dozen. A concept is an idea or rationale that assumes a need in the marketplace for some product or service and usually follows a thought track based on “if” and “then.” “IF such…

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Nations and Cities as “Brands”

Prof. Sid Levy of Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management was the first to develop the “broadening concept” of marketing. Levy saw a relationship between the marketing of commercial goods and services to the non-profit world. Heretofore marketing was considered a discipline only for companies and organizations that were trying to appeal to potential…

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Underdogs Achieve When Strategy Aligns with Market Needs

It is natural to expect that those who won in prior battles will continue to win in future ones, but underdogs can upset the structure when they focus on the right strategy. In 2005, Boeing, Motorola, and AMD each reversed their downward decline or questionable market position to achieve strong performance. How they achieved their…

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Creating “Monopolies” from Customer Value Propositions

I have always believed that essence of creativity is the ability to see relationships. As a student of today’s super-competitive marketing environment, I have recently come across two relatively disjoint scholarly theoretical observations that I believe provide great insight for companies seeking to better compete in the business-to-business environment. Miland Lele’s ‘Monopoly Rules’ I learned…

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Why waste time with your Corporate Background?

The time that salespeople spend with prospects is a valuable and precious commodity. Who wants to waste it with a corporate backgrounder? Really, on the priority list of things to communicate during a prospect interaction, the corporate background is pretty low. Many salespeople would rather spend their time discussing the features and benefits of the…

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Peeling the Customer Loyalty Onion

As marketers seek to develop lasting relationships with customers and clients, the conventional wisdom focuses on developing these relationships through loyalty programs. The rationale is that marketers who invest in loyalty programs obtain their payback through repeat business. However, there is another theory that says customer loyalty programs are hardly the be all and end…

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