Category: Marketing

Selling services to ‘pet parents’ fetches comeback for PetSmart

PetSmart was designed to be a category killer with dominant prices and dominant variety when it was founded in the late 1980s, and the concept worked well for the company’s first decade. But by the late 1990s the company was losing steam. Its turnaround was the result of a shift in focus to services that capitalizes on the deepening affection people have for their pets. CEO Philip L. Francis briefed an audience at the W. P. Carey School’s Economic Club of Phoenix on PetSmart’s strategies, including its smart deployment of a rewards card program.

Podcast: A company’s road to success, building trust, ‘fessing up’ and listening to customers

Creating a great product or service is just the first step on a company’s road to success. It’s also necessary for your potential customers to know about that great product or service. So how does a company go about developing a successful customer focus strategy? According to Nancy Stephens, an associate professor of marketing at the W. P. Carey School, it’s a matter of creating a trustworthy brand, choosing the right type of marketing media and — most importantly — listening to your customers.

The customer: An overlooked component of the innovation process

Where would YouTube be today if not for its millions of users? What good would Wikipedia be without all of those contributors? And how successful could IKEA possibly be if its customers weren’t willing to assemble their own furniture? Stephen Brown, a professor of marketing at the W. P. Carey School of Business, says the answer is simple: If not for the contributions of their customers, all three of those remarkable business successes would be anything but successful. And there’s a lesson in that, says Brown, for companies of all kinds.

Podcast: Michael Vick, celebrity endorsements, and the fallout when an icon stumbles

Michael Vick’s apparent involvement in the brutal "sport" of dog fighting is the latest incident to focus attention on celebrity endorsements. Companies that use sports stars to endorse their products are aware that the public attaches meaning to athletic performance — an emotional tie that can propel marketing messages. But when an athlete gets in trouble, do the companies pay a price too? Given the risk that the human icon will fall down, what are the factors that make some of these potentially risky relationships more valuable to companies than others? Ray Artigue, faculty director of the W. P. Carey MBA Sports Business Program, and John Eaton, clinical faculty in marketing at the W. P. Carey School, discuss the Vick case and its ripple effects.

Reduce risk by building a diversified ‘portfolio’ of customers

Companies typically try to acquire the kind of customers that are immediately profitable, or show the most potential for long term value. Ruth Bolton, Michael Hutt and Beth Walker — marketing researchers at the W. P. Carey School of Business — have learned that companies would be wise to apply portfolio theory in their quest for customers. Firms that identify the risk-return characteristics of all of their potential customers, then build a "customer portfolio" that can reap returns in both good times and bad, are shielded against tough times in the marketplace.

No phone for you! Sprint-Nextel cuts off high-maintenance customers

Telecom giant Sprint-Nextel recently decided about a thousand of its customers were just a little bit too demanding, so it went ahead and fired them. The remarkable move made headlines nationwide and since has left business analysts to ponder two questions. First, was Sprint justified? Second, is Sprint’s bold, controversial move a sign of things to come? The answer to the first question, say experts from the W. P. Carey School of Business, isn’t so easy. As for the second? That’s a resounding "Yes."