What should you do when your brand becomes "hot" overnight among influential endorsers? Do you exploit this sudden rise in popularity and mainstream the brand, or do you attempt to slow the diffusion process and seek to understand how to market to these consumers? Drawing on the case of Dunlop Volley in Australia, the authors argue that mainstreaming the brand by targeting later adopters results in a short-term fashion cycle rather than creating long-term brand value. Because these brands are "discovered" by consumers, marketers must first understand the value system underlying this adoption and then fit the marketing program to these values. In the case of Dunlop Volley, slowing diffusion rates was achieved through four tactics: rejecting hard-sell marketing, appearing authentic, targeting alternative distribution channels, and delaying launch to the mainstream audience. These activities ensured the ongoing credibility of the brand with endorsers and helped revitalize a brand long thought dead.

Many firms have implemented company-wide systems called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, designed to integrate and optimize various business processes, such as order entry and production planning, across the entire business. Such systems are complex, and implementing one can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Limited reports in the popular press suggest that these systems have achieved mixed success at best; some imply that failure of implementation threatens the existence of the company. Here we present an objective view of ERP systems, based on interviews with operating managers, IT personnel, and consultants. The dominant reason for adopting ERP was to simplify and standardize IT systems; the second most common reason was to have access to accurate information. Cost of implementation generally ranged from 1.5% to 6% of annual revenues, with the software portion of the costs being just the tip of the iceberg. Implementation time varied from 12 months to 4 years. Return on investment in ERP was mixed--from 5% to 20%. For all the negative press ERP systems have received, our interviews indicated that all firms represented in our sample were pleased with them, despite some problems. Successful implementations were characterized by thorough senior management involvement, a cross-functional implementation team, clear guidelines for performance measurement, and detailed plans for training users. Importantly, a single ERP system does not provide an end-to-end solution, as most companies use other systems for specialized functions. Overall, though, the future of ERP is very promising.

Among marketing mix variables, price alone directly affects a firm's revenue. The advent of a new medium for buyer-seller interaction, the Internet, is changing the issue of price for both customers and suppliers in an unprecedented way. On the one hand, there are Internet dynamics that flatten the customer value pyramid (defined by the value of the customer to the firm) because of technology that facilitates customer search, customer control over transactions, the provision of means by which the customer can make rather than take the price, a return to one-on-one negotiation, and commoditization of markets. Countervailing dynamics of the Internet enable the firm in some instances to differentiate pricing all the time, to create customer switching barriers, to "de-menu" pricing, to differentiate on other dimensions of the purchase decision, and to reduce transactions costs. A conceptual model is proposed for identifying Internet-based pricing dynamics and market forms according to the relative strengths of buyer and seller. These dynamics suggest that pricing decisions can be as creative as those made about the development of new products and services or advertising campaigns. Indeed, pricing may be the last frontier for marketing creativity. In the hands of the wise, the Internet might be the digital wagon that carries pricing pioneers to the edge of the digital frontier.