Category: Marketing

Employees first: Strategies for service

The customer is king, an old service mantra says. But today a few industry leaders argue the employee, not the customer, is most important. "Take great care of your employees and they will take great care of your customers," said Mike Jannini, Executive Vice President of Marriott International, at the "Creating Value Through Service" symposium. The event was organized by the W. P. Carey School’s Center for Services Leadership and the Center of Service Marketing and Management at Fudan University.

Economic impact study: Phoenix scores big with Super Bowl XLII

Arizona brought its "A" game to the Super Bowl — both on the field and off — with a winning coordination of events at Glendale’s University of Phoenix Stadium. A memorable week of Super Bowl festivities generated a record $500.6 million in direct and indirect spending by visiting fans and organizations, according to the newly released Super Bowl impact study produced by the W. P. Carey MBA Sports Business program.

Stickiness is powerful: Making your message count

Books touting ways to improve business communication skills command acres of shelf space in local bookstores, mostly in the Bargain Bin section. They’re literally "a dime a dozen." Then there are the true classics that take pride of place in front of the store, year after year. "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" is destined to be one of the latter. Chip and Dan Heath have taken an old topic which has vexed generations of communicators and given it new energy and ease of application.

What’s eating you? 100-calorie mini-pack snacks might be diet disrupters

For those of us who diet — counting our cookies, watching our calories and paying more per mouthful for chow that we perceive as "diet food" — researchers from the W. P. Carey School of Business offer a bitter insight to swallow. Rather than serving up pre-packaged willpower, those 100-calorie snack packs often boost consumption. Or, at least, small morsels of food — in smaller-than-normal packages — increased the calories consumed by just the type of people likely to buy such treats as weight-loss aids.

Hispanics seen as key players in expanding Diamondbacks fan base

The Boston Red Sox played Oakland in Japan this week — an unusual opening day for Major League Baseball. As the season starts, Knowledge@W. P. Carey sat in on a discussion of the sports business between three Diamondbacks front office officials who visited the W. P. Carey School of Business recently.In 2004, the Arizona Diamondbacks were picked by some media outlets to win the National League West division; instead they lost 111 games, the most by a National League team in 39 years. The team has bounced back from 2004, both on and off the field, but they are still attracting fewer fans. The Diamondbacks have focused their attention on several areas to solidify and broaden the fan base, and one of the key areas is tapping into the Hispanic market, which is growing even faster than the population as a whole in Arizona.

Taking a cue from the business world: What the public sector could learn about influencing behavior

What’s the best way to convince a 40-year-old to stop smoking? Tell him that he’ll get lung cancer and die? Not necessarily. Economics Professor Kerry Smith of the W. P. Carey School of Business says that the best quit-smoking message comes out of an understanding of the reasons why people smoke in the first place. John Lastovicka, a professor of marketing at the W. P. Carey School, agrees. He says that understanding why people make certain decisions, and then testing messages designed to influence those decisions, is typical in the for-profit world but less common in the public arena.