COVID-19 has quickly disrupted how companies market their brands to consumers and the way customers shop for products. The current environment offers an unprecedented opportunity for smaller and midtier brands to compete against their more established rivals for exposure, mindshare, product trials, and market share with a new and broader base of potential customers.
Rather than trying to sell standardized products or services to the biggest possible set of buyers, B2B companies need to develop ways to help specific customers achieve better outcomes. Instead of describing their solutions, companies first need to understand customers'specific challenges, objectives, operating practices, and competitive environment, then create offerings to deliver value within a customer's specific business context and culture.
This is an MIT Sloan Management Review Article. Many projects are launched with great promise but lose traction and momentum during project delivery, when the real work of the initiative is underway. Shifting organizational priorities, changes in leadership, and distrust of information about the project's progress can scuttle a project's reputation and, ultimately, its chance for success. This self-perpetuating downward spiral can cause contributors to distance themselves from an effort that is losing support, cannot overcome inertia, or worse, is derailed. Even the most technically sound and strategically important projects can fall into this "cycle of doubt"and fail to meet their objectives. Building on previous work on project branding, the authors conducted a multisource, practice-based field investigation to seek insights on how to help organizations and project leaders understand, avoid, and recover from the cycle of doubt. Analyses revealed practical insight on three related issues: how to recognize when a project is vulnerable to the cycle of doubt; how to ensure that a project does not fall into a downward spiral of skepticism; and how to reverse negative momentum if a project begins to stall. The research found four main categories of doubt triggers that can sap support and lead a project into a negative tailspin. These warning signs are when strategic priorities change, sponsors appear equivocal, delivery hiccups occur, or communication missteps raise doubts. The authors offer eight action steps providing possible avenues by which vulnerable projects can successfully overcome or avoid a momentum slide. An additional checklist helps project leaders get a sense of how well (or poorly) their projects are positioned to forestall or recover from escalating doubts.
The traditional marketing mix--product, place, price, promotion--yields narrow strategies that are increasingly at odds with the imperative to deliver solutions. Marketers need to adopt a new framework focused on solutions, access, value, and education--SAVE.
This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. As the competitive landscape grows tougher, project leaders must sequence, time and articulate core messaging about their projects in much the same way a marketing manager would organize an external customer-facing branding effort to promote a company's products and services. And therein lies an opportunity; brand your projects in order to gain an edge in obtaining funds and the best staff. Just as product branding creates awareness and sustains value in the minds of an organization's external customers, shareholders, and constituents, a brand mindset can empower a project leader to develop strategically-timed messages to create visibility and engagement among key targets. Depending on the stage of the project, different project brand audiences may include senior business leaders, project sponsors, and team members with primary allegiances to vertical functions, as well as network partners external to the home organization. The savvy project leader will ensure that all parties up, down, across, and outside the organization understand, internalize, and embrace the promise of the project brand, agree on goals, and employ steadfast support for the initiative through its completion.
In virtually every industry, the focus of green competition is shifting from a race to launch new eco-friendly products to a battle over what constitutes a "green" product in the first place. The definition can vary from one sector or product to the next, but whatever your business, if you're not engaged in the debate and in shaping the rules, you risk being assessed against standards you can't meet. Once you understand what degree of standardization exists in your industry and what your company's internal capabilities are, you can choose from among four strategies the authors offer: adopt existing standards; co-opt them by negotiating beneficial modifications with a standard-setting body; define standards where none exist; or break away from the current standards by challenging and supplanting them. In the building sector, for example, LEED certification is considered definitive, so architects, construction companies, and office furnishings suppliers naturally choose to adopt LEED standards. But the coffee industry has more than a dozen competing standards, so Starbucks decided to create its own-the C.A.F.E. Practices.
Most companies know that they need to be greening their offerings-if not to gain advantage, then simply to keep up. In this article the authors offer a framework for embarking on the green-product development process, introducing three broad strategies that companies can use to align their green goals and capabilities. An "accentuate" strategy involves evaluating products in the company's current portfolio and playing up or extending latent or existing green attributes (as Arm and Hammer did when it repositioned its 150-year-old baking soda as "the #1 environmentally sensible alternative for cleaning and deodorizing"). An "acquire" strategy involves buying someone else's green brand-an approach used effectively by L'Oreal when it acquired The Body Shop, Unilever when it acquired Ben & Jerry's, and Colgate-Palmolive when it acquired Tom's of Maine. Finally, companies with innovation expertise can use an "architect" strategy, building green products from scratch, as Clorox did when it developed its celebrated Green Works line. Unruh and Ettenson offer case studies, outline benefits and hazards, and describe the optimal organizational and competitive circumstances for each strategy.
This case presents market research data concerning the launch of a new drawstring trash bag in Brazil. Ad-lider, one of the leaders in the Brazilian plastic bag industry, has purchased the production machinery for producing the trash bag, and now must decide how the new product should be launched. Data for focus groups and field interviews are included for analysis. The case touches on many areas of marketing, including new product development, marketing research, and creating customer value.
This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Of the myriad complex decisions that senior executives make before and during a merger, one is mandatory and critical but often given short shrift: the branding of the new corporate entity. When executed effectively, a corporate rebranding can greatly facilitate the merger of the two businesses by sending the right signals to people both inside and outside the organization. In a study of more than 200 mergers and aquisitions completed since 1995 with a transaction value exceeding $250 million, the authors found 10 different strategies for corporate rebranding. The 10 options can be grouped into four main categories that communicate fundamentally different messages: (1) This deal is a merger and we are adopting the stronger brand; (2) this deal is a merger and we are adopting the best of both brands; (3) this deal is a transformational merger and we are creating a new brand; and (4) this deal is simply a portfolio transaction and no brand changes will occur. In any M&A, executives need to select the right strategy with respect to three important constituencies: employees, customers and the investment community.
This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. To optimize a portfolio of brands, companies can use a step-by-step approach: decide on the brands to review; analyze each brand with respect to its contribution to the company; assess the brands according to current market performance (traction) and future prospects (momentum); and classify the brands along those three dimensions (contribution, traction, and momentum), allowing managers to identify both challenges and opportunities. The process enables companies to sort their brands into different categories: power (a brand that needs to be defended ferociously and deployed judiciously), sleeper (a brand that with a little fast tracking can build into a power brand), slider (a valuable brand that has lost momentum, is slipping backwards, and needs immediate intervention to prevent meltdown), soldier (a solid brand that contributes quietly without the need for much management attention), black hole (a brand that sucks up resources and may or may not ever pay out), rocket (a brand that is on its way to power-brand status), wallflower (a small, underappreciated brand with very loyal customers, often underpriced and undermarketed), and discard (a brand that should have been mothballed years ago). Companies can then tie together the objectives for each brand into an overall plan, which will include brand architecture and resource allocation.
Best Western (BW) is striving for global brand leadership in the broad worldwide mid-scale lodging market. Management must decide how best to strategically position the Best Western brand in an increasingly competitive lodging environment. There is also the need to provide direction and connection to BW's affiliates and members worldwide to ensure that marketing and business success in different markets is not isolated and random. How to achieve this goal presents management with many organizational, marketing, and branding challenges.
In a global economy, marketing managers need to consider factors that don't apply in domestic markets. When an Israeli refuses to buy a German car, for instance, the issue isn't product quality. It's history.