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It's high time to shift our focus from the "avails" in media content to those in consumers' lives - that is, where, when, and how people might be receptive to relevant commercial messages.

Measuring the effectiveness of marketing investments can be frustrating - especially if a company focuses on a long-term outcome like increasing customer equity. Though there are decision-support models to help marketers allocate their budgets, until recently such models aimed to maximize near-term sales, which aren't always consistent with long-term brand health. Now, however, Wachovia has created a model that helps it make customer-equity-driven marketing-mix decisions. The model's architects - Hanssens, a professor at UCLA; Thorpe, a senior vice president at Wachovia; and Finkbeiner, an executive VP at TNS - began by parsing customer equity, or the lifetime value of customers, into three measurable components: customer acquisition, customer retention, and share of wallet. They then assembled data on past marketing activities and changes in the components - a daunting task, given the decentralized nature of previous investments. Once the database was created, a model of how investments affected outcomes could be built and used to design equations focusing on marketing-mix questions. Wachovia now has, for example, an equation to estimate how an increase in cable TV advertising will affect customer acquisition in a market. Just as important, the model highlights how much factors beyond the control of marketing, such as economic swings, affect outcomes. After Wachovia began using the model, it found, as suspected, that a marketing mix with maximum short-term impact would not achieve the biggest increase in customer equity. Wachovia learned that it was overinvesting in traditional channels and underinvesting in emerging ones. The introduction of this decision-making tool has also supported a broader cultural shift at the company toward competing on analytics.

The top tier of society's income and wealth distribution has become a widespread emulative target, and there are implications for consumer satisfaction and collective well-being. The author describes the roots of the problem and how three shifts--in wealth and income distributions, of women into corporate hierarchies, and of the growing importance of electronic media--have led to an escalation of North Americans' consumer aspirations. She then shows how quality of life has been affected in at least three important ways and ponders a sustainable way forward.

The authors describe their research, which found that when a quantity of a given resource - such as food, money, or cigarettes - is physically divided into smaller quantities, it reduces both the total quantity consumed and the speed of consumption. For marketers, these results suggest that simple forms of packaging have the ability to create dramatic variations in consumption. For consumers, the message is simple - for consumption that you want to control (but that is tempting), the simple act of partitioning the resource will help curb consumption.

To maximize happiness, consumers must accurately predict the emotional consequences of their options and make product and service choices based on those predictions. The authors describe concepts including 'hedonic editing' and the role of multiple choice, and discuss eight common consumption biases that can decrease consumer happiness. In the end they show that 'hedonomics' challenges two commonly-held assumptions in economics: that maximizing a desired external stimuli equals maximizing consumer happiness; and that what consumers choose reflects what makes them happy.

The time has come to develop new mental models that reflect the complex inter-linkages between modern consumers and business. The lines between consumer and industrial marketing are blurring in five important ways, including the blurring of B2B and B2C marketing and the blurring of value chains. The author describes each, along with the implications they contain for bridging disciplinary silos and rethinking our approach to the roles of market research, customer experiences, metrics and dashboards.

In October 2007, the British band Radiohead caused a stir when it announced it would allow customers to decide how much to pay for its new album, released exclusively as a digital download and available only from the band's own website. The pricing plan represented a significant break from the industry standard of fixed prices for music, typically 99 cents for individual songs and upward of $9.99 for complete albums. How viable is such a "name-your-own-pricing" plan? And what does Radiohead's move say about the future of the music industry?

The largest retailer of diesel fuel in the U.S., Flying J, is rethinking its growth strategy as the economy goes into a recession. Its major customer base, owner-operated truck drivers, are facing increasing costs of doing business. Yet Flying J is considering whether to increase its price of diesel fuel.

This case concerns the selection and scheduling of orders by a small industrial titanium fabricator that recently has been plagued by poor deliveries and a lack of capacity. At the time of the case, Ti-Tech must decide which of four orders to accept, with capacity making it impossible to accept all four. Each order represents a different mix of labor, revenues, and potential future work. The case forces the student to choose among the four orders, given limited capacity available, other business likely to come along, and the requirements of each order. The case is an updated version of Fabtek (A).

This case concerns the selection and scheduling of orders by a small industrial titanium fabricator that recently has been plagued by poor deliveries and a lack of capacity. At the time of the case, Ti-Tech must decide which of four orders to accept, with capacity making it impossible to accept all four. Each order represents a different mix of labor, revenues, and potential future work. The case forces the student to choose among the four orders, given limited capacity available, other businesses likely to come along, and the requirements of each order. The case is an updated version of an earlier supplement, Fabtek (B). It should be distributed in class after discussion of the (A) case.

In 2007, JetBlue faced enormous criticism from its customers and the media after a Valentine's Day storm led to delays and cancellations. How did the airliner navigate the crisis? In this case students study communication strategies developed from scientific research on the process of persuasion that can help brands recover from adverse publicity and regain their customers' trust. Six examples illustrate a range of actions - such as the "come clean" response and "polish the halo" response - and teach students how to apply various communication frameworks.

BzzAgent is a word-of-mouth marketing firm. The founder, Dave Balter, sees blogs as an important way to communicate BzzAgent's unique positioning: transparency. He sees the firm's blog--the BeeLog--as a way for the firm to participate in conversations with clients, employees, and "agents." However, he has been unhappy with the level of interaction the blog has been generating, and is considering shutting it down. The case provides a context for a discussion about word of mouth marketing and social media, as well as about blogs specifically. It also provides examples of other corporate blogs, and allows for students to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of this potentially-important form of communication.

An updated "Four Products" case. This 2008 version includes: sliced peanut butter, foldable bicycle tires, high-end wooden puzzles, and artificial dirt for thoroughbred race tracks. These four products form the basis to assess the drivers of new product adoption. In particular, one of the critical tasks in the marketing of new innovations in predicting demand and rates of diffusion for those products. And while one can speculate on the scope and rate of diffusion for any given product, it's helpful to compare and contrast diffusion across products. Doing so allows one to focus on the drivers or product characteristics that influence product diffusion, making one product a star and another a dog. Specifically, looking across products allows one to pick up on things that get lost in discussing a single product. Note that this case often gets used with HBS Note #505-075, "Note on Innovation Diffusion: Rogers' Five Factors," which either can be distributed along with the case or after the case has been taught.

Progressive Insurance, a leader in the automotive insurance market, has succeeded through innovation. The case describes the company strategies for differentiating their service through Immediate Response Vehicles, Express Quote (comparing prices for prospective customers, and multichannel marketing agents, 1-800 numbers, and the Web). Through these programs and a series of creative advertising campaigns the company has built a strong brand in a relatively short time. Channels with their pricing and channel strategies remain.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 508102.

This case is intended to work well as an exam or a capstone for a course on decision analysis, simulation, real options, and game theory. It explores a conventional snack-chip marketer's strategy in China for promoting and advertising a recently acquired healthy snack-chip brand in mid-2002. The marketer has some key decisions to make, now and in the future, about a range of marketing expenditures in the context of an exciting emerging market and in the face of a formidable competitive threat from its chief rival. The case allows students to consider how two parties' decisions about marketing expenditures and market entry interact and to extend the notion of a single party's downstream decision (or real option) to multiple parties' "interactive" real options. The case's competitive situation can be modeled as a dynamic game of imperfect information, or a multiperiod decision situation with continuous uncertainties and a strategic interaction embedded downstream. Monte Carlo simulation of both parties' payoffs under equilibrium play in the downstream subgame yields a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium, which entails "interactive" threshold policies for both parties.

Spreadsheet supplement for case UV1302.

Despite strong appeal among job seekers and outside recruiters, TheLadders' corporate job listings seem to lag. Could raising prices help solve the problem? TheLadders considers this strategic paradox.

The product planning manager for BMW Group Canada (BMW) wondered how to revive the once-promising BMW Individual program. Despite a strong start when the BMW Individual Collection (IC) was launched in 2002, and significant growth in total BMW sales over the past three years, IC sales had declined substantially. At the corporate level, no specific measures had been taken to ensure a constant focus on the Individual program. At the customer level, BMW retailers were putting forth little effort, likely because they had no additional incentive to push a program that appealed only to a very small portion of their customer base. The product planning manager wondered how he could revive the BMW Individual program in Canada and give it the attention it deserved.