Rethinking Business Segmentation: A New Conceptual Model and Perspective

Segmenting business markets is challenging but potentially highly rewarding. An in-depth understanding of how to segment markets is necessary to guide the best decisions leading to profitable targeting. Business markets are changing rapidly due to new technology and a more complex business environment. Current segmentation frameworks are not sufficient to guide business-to-business (B2B), business-to-business-to-business (B2B2B) and business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) marketing analyses and decisions. This paper introduces a new six-cell business market segmentation conceptual model building on two key dimensions – product use by intermediaries in their marketing to their customers (B2B2B and B2B2C) and product standardization. Examples are developed showing how this new typology is used by current marketers and a research agenda is called for to fill the gap in the academic and practitioner literature understanding the new model and business segmentation criteria

Psychographic Segmentation of the Self-employed: An Exploratory Study

Although it is well established in the academic literature that entrepreneurs share common traits, there has been limited research dedicated to evaluating psychographic profiles of the self-employed. Using the Nominal Group Technique, the authors gleaned insight from a panel of experts in an effort to segment the self-employed based on personality traits and the benefits they receive from an entrepreneurial career. The findings show that self-employed individuals can be classified into four distinct segments: Exemplars, Generals, Moms and Dads, and Altruists. Each group derives different benefits from self-employment. Understanding these benefits can greatly assist entrepreneurship educators and marketers of small business oriented products and services

Using a Marketing Faculty Blog as an Image Differentiator and Learning Resource to Enhance MBA Student Engagement and Loyalty

Universities should strive to emotionally connect with their current students, alumni, and the business community. As learning has morphed into e-learning, higher education marketers must turn to new online approaches to communicate effectively with key stakeholders. A blog can be used to share the latest thinking in marketing, respond to changing customer demands, build brand awareness, and maximize opportunities for user involvement. Using web metrics and strategic insights, the authors demonstrate how a blog can be a powerful digital tool to enhance MBA student involvement and retention. Keywords: Blogging, teaching innovation, integrated marketing communications (IMC), student engagement, value creation, MBA program

One is Not Enough: The Need for Multiple Respondents in Survey Research of Organizations

The need for multiple respondents per organization in organizational survey research is supported. Leadership teams’ ratings of their implementations of market orientation are examined, along with learning orientation, entrepreneurial management, and organizational flexibility. Sixty diverse organizations, including not-for-profit organizations in education and healthcare as well as manufacturing and service businesses, were included. The major finding was the large rating variance within the leadership teams of each organization. The results are enlightening and have definite implications for improved design of survey research on organizations

How Arrogant are Sales and Marketing Professionals: Perceptions of Business Students

Arrogance is a problem in business and other sectors of American society. This multi-university study assessed more than 500 business students’ perceptions of arrogance in sales and marketing environments. It also probed the arrogance issue in 12 other professions (five business-related and seven non-business occupations). Sales professionals were perceived as being more arrogant than marketers. Gender, ethnicity, and school type were found to be predictors of arrogance in marketing positions. Overall, sales were in the middle-of-thepack with respect to perceived arrogance (several professions were more arrogant and several professions were less arrogant), while marketers were considered relatively nonarrogant. Implications of this research are threefold: 1) rethinking the sales and marketing interface in organizations, 2) understanding perceptions of arrogance by future business leaders and 3) training sales and marketing professionals to be perceived as less arrogant by their internal and external customers

Building and evaluating a customer value blog

Organizations often use blogs as a promotional vehicle to create superior value for their stakeholders. While blogs are one of the most utilized digital marketing tools, there has been limited academic research and in-depth applications on how to successfully design and execute such initiatives. This article fills that gap by providing a sound and systematic approach for implementing and improving this marketing communications priority. The case study explains how to launch, assess, and enhance a customer value blog to inform and engage readers. Using blogging and customer value literature as well as qualitative and quantitative metrics, research and strategic marketing insights are offered. Data are presented and analyzed from the Customer Value blog on viewership, comments, popular topics, categories of interest, and usage by geography, technology, and traffic sources. Recommendations to generate strong content, adapt and promote the blog, and teaching ideas are offered. Students, marketers, and businesspersons gain real world knowledge on the latest customer value topics from thought leaders. The process described in this article is readily adaptable by marketing educators and businesses interested in creating a blog to strengthen relationships with their target audiences

Superior Customer Value: Strategies for Winning and Retaining Customers

A customer-centric culture provides focus and direction for the organization, ensuring that exceptional value will be offered to customers ― this, in turn, results in enhanced market performance. Unfortunately, caught up in the daily economic and competitive pressures of running complex and fast-changing businesses, managers may lose sight of customers’ desires. And, consequently, customer experiences often fall far short of expectations. Written by an expert with more than fifteen years of experience, Superior Customer Value: Strategies for Winning and Retaining Customers, Third Edition benchmarks the best companies and shows you what it truly means to create world-class value for customers. The book is a state-of-the-art guide to designing, implementing, and evaluating a customer value strategy in service, technology, and information-based organizations. It explores key marketing planning issues that emphasize relationship management strategies to keep customers happy. See What’s New in the Third Edition: New topics include: Business models Co-creation of value Corporate entrepreneurship Customer experience management Customer value metrics Net promoter score Image Innovation Social media Expanded coverage of: Customer relationship management E-business opportunities Written as an academic textbook for use in MBA programs, the book is highly readable, practical, and action-oriented, giving managers at all levels of experience guidance on how to improve marketing operations and create customer-centric organizations. It explains valuable tools such as customer value funnel, customer value assessment, service-quality-image-price (SQIP) analysis, and CRM models. Each chapter has a customer value insight checklist, action items, and informative figures and tables. This revised edition addresses current trends in value-adding business practice, from understanding how to drive a market and find new ventures to the rise in customer importance of the online arena and new models and metrics for customer loyalty and retention. Great companies amaze and delight customers ― Superior Customer Value offers a strategic blueprint to learn from the market leaders and apply those lessons to your organization. Art Weinstein discusses the book in several videos on the CRC Press YouTube Channel.https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hcbe_facbooks/1140/thumbnail.jp

Defining Your Market: Winning Strategies for High-Tech, Industrial, and Service Firms

Visionary companies build markets today to be market leaders tomorrow. This book provides the blueprint. Defining Your Market: Winning Strategies for High-Tech, Industrial, and Service Firms contains research, case studies, and literature reviews on market definition to help marketers, managers, researchers, and strategic planners formulate profitable marketing strategies. Timely and practical, this book offers a research-based methodology for defining markets that will help your company determine relevant markets and make it the most competitive business in the industry. Although market definition is the foundation for formulating business strategies and is critical to corporate performance, marketers and top management often rely on intuition or incomplete analyses when targeting markets. This text discusses the marketing methods used by leading companies and executive and provides you with the knowledge to create strategies that will work for your company. Defining Your Market examines the topics that will help your company become more successful now and into the next century, including: customer and competitive-driven market definitions the five core dimensions of market definition-- customer needs, customer groups, technology, products, and competition managerial implications related to strategic planning, formulating the marketing mix, integrating marketing and technology, and global strategy strategies for businesses for redefining markets and successfully competing in the 21st century the impact company size has on marketing strategies how to avoid the dangers of creating a market definition that is too narrow and limiting or one that is too broad and overlooks profitable niches in the market Each chapter of Defining Your Market features exercises that will help you understand new concepts and allows you to put these methods to immediate and profitable use. You will be able to learn about the tools and techniques that work for Andersen Consulting, Dell, General Electric, Intel, Merck, and Microsoft, and dozens of leading business marketers.Defining Your Market provides you with strategies that will help you define and redefine the most relevant and profitable markets for a successful and competitive business.https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hcbe_facbooks/1143/thumbnail.jp