Archive for 2019
Strategic Movements: December 2019
Elon Musk Delivers Pleasant Surprise Tesla Inc. had record deliveries in Q3 2019 resulting in overall profits. Anticipated 2019 production is currently at 360,000 – 400,000 units. Profits had previously been suppressed at Tesla due to low production volumes (incapable of hitting targets) and the lowering of prices. Elon’s price targets for Tesla only work…
Read MoreHow Wayfair Blossomed into a Furniture Behemoth
Amazon is not the only internet giant that has dealt a severe blow to brick-and-mortar retailing. Another Internet retailer, Wayfair, Inc., has also thrust a sword into conventional retailing. Like Amazon, which began simply as a book retailer, Wayfair has also evolved from an early e-commerce start-up concept into a behemoth. The Wayfair story began…
Read MorePlaybook for Competitive Price Engagement
Sun Tzu wrote that “The best victory is when the opponent surrenders of its own accord before there are any actual hostilities… It is best to win without fighting.” As it is with international engagements, so it is with company-competitive engagements. Civilization Structures Anthropologists have identified a relatively consistent pattern in the structure of ancient…
Read MoreIn Defense of Meetings
The forward-thinking business world is united in the belief that meetings, by and large, are simply bad ideas. Bad meetings are the subject of popular TED talks. An Amazon search for business books on bad meetings returns over 250 results with titles like “Meetings Suck” and “Death By Meeting”. And, perhaps most tellingly, there are…
Read MoreHow to Avoid Misleading Your Audience with Statistics
I recently picked up a copy of Darrell Huff’s 1954 classic How to Lie with Statistics. Although Huff’s background was not in statistics, his experience as a writer exposed him to the use (and misuse) of statistics. This book is a small volume that packs quite a punch, pointing out numerous examples of how readers…
Read MoreBrick and Mortar Retailing Basing Comeback on Generational Marketing
Rumors of the demise of retailing are highly exaggerated. In the article “Brick-and-Mortar Stores Are Making a Comeback,” author Jon McFarland Flint interviews two Harvard Business School faculty: Antonio Moreno, associate professor, and Jill J. Avery, senior lecturer. In this Q&A, they discuss the problems retail stores have encountered in recent years and provide some…
Read MoreStrategic Movements: October 2019
Market Share? Meh. Customer Satisfaction and Brand Equity? YES, Please! Managers care a lot about market share, but should they? Meta-research by Alexander Edeling and Alexander Himme in the Journal of Marketing entitled “When Does Market Share Matter” shows that market share does, on average, have a small positive impact on company value, but that…
Read MoreIs That Membership Paying Off?
My wife’s favorite holiday is Halloween. As such, we were in the market for a life-sized skeleton for the house. We also recently became Costco members, so that seemed the natural place to get some discount decorations. We purchased some (I mean a lot) of Halloween candy there, but didn’t pull the trigger on Costco’s…
Read MoreSupreme Court Ruling Sparks Explosion in Sports Betting
As expected, last spring’s Supreme Court ruling, which struck down the 1992 law that banned commercial sports betting in most states, has created an explosion in legalized sports betting. According to Casino Connections magazine (September 19, 2019 issue), sportsbooks in the United States are reporting brisk business as the National Football League (NFL) season kicks…
Read MoreThe Many Flavors of Price Variance
One of the most insightful steps of any pricing project is identifying and investigating price variances. Price variances are price differences that exist between customers for the same offering. There are two essential price variance questions to answer: Do price variances exist in the dataset, and Which factor (or factors) is driving the variance? Generally,…
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