Boosting Returns on Marketing Investment
The golden age of advertising is over, so marketers must now work harder to reach buyers. Distracted consumers and the proliferation of media and distribution channels are also undermining the traditional approach: set objectives, develop messaging, and measure results. While some marketers have responded by turning to quantitative solutions such as marketing-mix models, today's challenges call for more.
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Making Brand Portfolios Work
Brands are proliferating at a breakneck pace. Marketers know that steering a number of them individually often leads to overlapping investments, confused customers, and outright cannibalization, but many resist the centralization and tactics that aggressive portfolio management requires. Companies can overcome this reluctance by appointing a portfolio manager to establish clear roles, relationships, and boundaries for their brands and then, within these guidelines, giving individual brand managers a long lease.
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Building Retail Brands
Establishing and communicating a brand may be harder for multibrand retailers than for their single-brand counterparts, but brand building is essential for both. Senior managers must make building the brand an integral part of how they think about the business, from identifying target customers to creating the in-store experience.
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Customer Retention is not Enough
Every company knows that it costs far less to hold on to a customer than to acquire a new one. That's why customer retention has become the Holy Grail in industries from retail to airlines. Yet defecting customers are far less of a problem than customers who change their buying patterns. Today's typical metrics of customer satisfaction and defection don't tell a company how susceptible its customers are to changing their spending patterns.
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Smart data, smart decisions, smart profits – the retailer's advantage
As retailers face tougher competition across channels, they need to improve their ability to use in-depth customer data as a strategic tool to influence customer behavior and optimize basic business decisions.
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The Power of Brand Delivery
Strong brands create value for shareholders by building emotional bonds with customers. McKinsey has identified a series of related actions that are required for a successful brand strategy and delivery plan. In order for these actions to be effective, senior executives need to focus on mobilizing their organizations to deliver brands distinctively and in a manner that is consistent with the brand promise.
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The Power of Loyalty: Creating Winning Retail Loyalty Programs
To reach beyond people who are already loyal customers, a retail loyalty program must be easy to join and use. Its benefits must be well communicated to customers and staff alike. And it must let customers earn their rewards quickly, often through partnerships with other companies.
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