When is a buyer not really a buyer? How can the best product at the lowest price turn off buyers? Are there anonymous leaders who make the actual buying decisions? As these questions suggest, the reality of buying and selling is often not what it seems. What's more, salespeople often overlook the psychological and emotional factors that figure strongly in buying and selling. By failing to observe these less tangible aspects of selling, a vendor can lose sales without understanding why. In this article, first published in 1982, Thomas V. Bonoma sets up a procedure for analyzing buying decisions and tells sellers how to apply the resulting framework to specific situations. Steps in the procedure include the following. First, identify the actual decision makers. Though it may come as a surprise, power does not correlate perfectly with organizational rank. The author outlines five bases of power and offers six behavioral clues for identifying the real decision makers. Second, determine how buyers view their self-interest. All buyers act selfishly, but they sometimes miscalculate. As a result, diagnosing motivation is one of the most difficult management tasks to do accurately. The author suggests several techniques to determine how buyers choose their own self-interest. Third, gather and apply psychological intelligence. There is no formula for placing sound psychological analyses magically in the sales staff's hands. However, the author offers three guidelines--make sure that sales calls are highly productive and informative, listen to the sales force, and reward rigorous fact gathering, analysis, and execution--to help managers increase sales effectiveness.

Senior management's expectations before launching a particular product program directly affects whether they see the product as performing well or poorly. Optimism and enthusiasm are essential for making any project work, but being realistic is important too. Therefore, program and brand managers should not overpromise their marketing plans to senior management. For their part, senior managers should ask marketing subordinates to make confidence levels explicit. To ensure this, management can link bonuses to the accuracy of marketing forecasts.

Introduces learning by the case method, with application to marketing learning. Places case learning in the stream of experiential learning and explains the advantages and disadvantages of experiential learning methods. Turning to case learning specifically, the note discusses the nature of cases, their construction using a physician-patient analogy, why companies cooperate with case writers, how cases are analyzed, the role of the case teacher, and the beneficial effects of successful case study. Concludes with some preparation guidelines for students and instructors and gives sources for further reading.

An introductory note for MBA students on the nature of marketing and topics encountered in its study. Defines the topic then breaks marketing into two major conceptual pieces--the tools, tasks and variables of the marketer, and the marketing process. In the tools piece, promotion (advertising and selling primarily), pricing, distribution, and product policy are considered. In the processes one, situation analysis, strategy formulation, planning, organizing, budgeting, marketing implementation, and marketing performance analysis are introduced. The intent is to give the beginning MBA student an overview of both the discipline and the major topics involved in its study. The organization proposed captures in large measure the design of the First Year Marketing course at the Harvard Business School as well as the organization of the book Marketing Management by the authors of this note.

Gives some tips to maximize all learning; offers the pros and cons of experiential learning (cases) as a method; and gives some guidelines for effective case preparation, discussion, and learning.

Scarce managerial talent, sales force turnover, and client attrition were potential problems underlying IDS' disappointing performance at mid-year 1987. The marketing vice president had three potential "fixes": 1) increasing or decreasing the $35 million budget for marketing programs, 2) accelerating the expansion of the 6,746-person sales force numerically, and 3) emphasizing the strategic geographical expansion of the sales force. The teaching objective is to show the intricacies of planning, organizing, and budgeting as a three-way interaction which impacts results.

Hurricane Island Outward Bound, a small, nonprofit school that helped pioneer experiential education in the United States, has recently recovered from a financial crisis. Students take the role of the school's new marketing manager, who is preparing his first marketing plan for the organization. Faced with a tight marketing budget, students must choose among several marketing programs by evaluating their past performance and further potential. Alternately, students may shift pricing or the course mix to generate additional marketing funds. Case explores appropriateness of marketing tactics relative to strategy, appropriateness of strategy, pricing and service mix issues, and marketing's management of demand in an extremely seasonal business.

Bill Ryan, president of the Gillette Co.'s Personal Care Division, is considering changing the division's planning and control system for marketing. White Rain, the division's most recent success, had been launched by taking shortcuts through the system, while other marketing programs the system produced sometimes still faltered. The case examines the components of a planning and control system for marketing, criteria for good systems and good programs, and ways that marketing managers work with a system.

Most U.S. companies have developed fairly rigid marketing structures to achieve certain and predictable results, when the business climate is equally certain and predictable. But such engines of efficiency have a price. As top executives come to rely on routinized marketing structures instead of management imagination, they neglect managers' marketing skills. Companies can nourish such constructive subversion by seeking out "hungry" managers, rewarding good performance, and making creative rule breaking possible.

Presents the second of two cases describing the struggle to find "the right advertising" for the Dry Idea antiperspirant brand introduced in 1978 by the Gillette Co. and its advertising agency, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne (BBDO). The case begins with Gillette's November 1983 decision to stage a bake-off placing BBDO in competition with a second agency to "cook up" a breakthrough advertising campaign for Dry Idea. It then proceeds to describe the six-month bake-off implementation period, provide a report of bake-off copy test results, and pose the question facing product manager Carole Johnson late in April of 1984: who won the bake-off?

Provides an overview of video contents and three attachments: 1) chart discussed at meeting shown in video, 2) historical Dry Idea copy strategies, and 3) graphic comparison of Dry Idea share trends and airing history.

Provides an overview of the two-part video: 1) bake-off participant interviews with managers from Gillette and its advertising agency for Dry Idea, and 2) creative presentations by the two bake-off competitors.

Presents the first of two cases describing the struggle to solve creative problems on the Dry Idea antiperspirant brand introduced in 1978 by the Gillette Co. and its advertising agency (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne). Provides company and industry background plus a historical brand review, and focuses on the issue facing product manager Carole Johnson in October of 1983: how to get good creativity fast?

Presents a sequel to the (A) case, which features a diary-style account of "a day in the field" with Ray Burnett, a field sales representative for Waters Chromatography Division.

Provides background information on the high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) industry and the Waters Chromatography Division, an operation engaged in the development, manufacture and sale of HPLC instrument systems and chemical products. An overview of Waters' marketing effort in general and sales/service operations in particular provides a lead-in to the focus of the case: a diary-style account of a day in the field with Ray Burnett, a Waters field sales representative. Includes information on Ray's background and his current supervisor, a general description of Ray's job responsibilities, and a detailed account of one day's customer calls. Written for use in the communication section of the first year marketing course taught at HBS. The primary teaching objective is to show how one company executes the selling function.

The difficulty of segmenting industrial markets has dissuaded companies from trying, despite the benefits they lose in terms of market analysis and selection. The problem is to identify the most useful variables. One way to do this is to arrange the five general segmentation criteria of demographics, operating variables, customer purchasing approaches, situational factors, and personal buyer characteristics, into a nested hierarchy. The segmentation criteria of the largest, outermost nest are general characteristics about industries and companies. Innermost nests are specific, subtle, and hard-to-assess traits.

Most companies are able to forge a marketing strategy, but have difficulty implementing it. Marketing practice has two components: structural and human. There are four levels in the structural hierarchy--functions, programs, systems, and policy directives--and each has its pitfalls. Of 32 companies sampled, those best at marketing practice have a strong sense of identity and direction, appeal to customers (including distributors) in unusual ways, have marketing managers who are willing to substitute skills for the formal structure, and see the executives as more important than the execution structure.

Mr. Kenneth Treece, marketing director of Frito-Lay's Grandma's (R) Cookie division has received the final test market figures for the new supermarket line of Grandma's Ready-To-Eat cookies. One set of data, the Kansas City test results, was extremely encouraging; market share was 50% higher than management had projected. Although the results of the Northwest region test were not as positive, they seemed to justify continuing the rollout. In light of these conflicting test figures and the previously less than satisfactory performance of Grandma's in single-serve packages, Mr. Treece wonders how he can change the rollout specifics to better ensure the success of the new packaged Grandma's line.

Mr. Joseph Lawler, newly-appointed president of Boston Whaler, Inc. (BWI), believes that better dealer management is the key to his company's continued growth. BWI manufactured a high-price, high performance line of power and other boats for the recreational, commercial, and other markets. Its 250 dealers were served by a small force of regional managers. Most dealers were not exclusively Whaler distributors, and Whaler sales ordinarily did not account for the majority of dealer revenues. Mr. Lawler wants the dealers' "commitment" to BWI increased, whether through new dealer agreements, training, minimum stocking requirements or whatever other device will help increase the importance of the BWI relationship to the dealers. Presents a relatively complete account of distribution management problems, and additionally, allows a thorough key account analysis of BWI's top 50 dealers.

Trade show expenditures are the major form of organized marketing communications activity for many companies outside of efforts by their sales force and distributors. Yet managers are frequently unenthusiastic about shows, despite the opportunities they offer for contact with existing and potential customers. This attitude is primarily due to the difficulty of measuring the success of any given trade show program in effectively and efficiently meeting a company's marketing needs. It is useful to classify trade shows in terms of their function, dividing them roughly into those where the major focus is selling activities and those where satisfaction of nonselling objectives is a likelier consequence of participation.