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A key concept underlying competitive strategy is that of WTP, representing the consumer's 'willingness to pay' a premium price for goods or services. Through branding and other efforts, companies strive to push their message out and create a high willingness to pay, whereby consumers feel there are few or no substitutes for what these companies are selling. Social media, however, are making push-based marketing anachronistic. Users of social media typically eschew professional communications forced on them by faceless and impersonal organizations, in favor of more personal conversations. These individuals seek greater engagement with their preferred brands, and involvement-with or without the company's approval-in creating brand personalities. Their affinity for these preferred brands might well auger the dawn of a new WTP: willingness to participate. This article presents a model of consumer engagement through social media, and argues for re-conceptualizing WTP by utilizing a series of examples which show how companies that engage consumers via social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) stand to reap the benefits of long-term competitive advantages.

Online customer reviews are an important type of user-generated content, through which consumers share their experiences with products and services in order to help others make informed purchasing decisions. In this article, we discuss the goals of online customer reviews and develop practical, actionable principles that can be used to improve the presentations of customer reviews. We identify four goals-two ultimate, and two intermediate-of online customer reviews. The two ultimate goals are: (1) to assist consumers in making accurate choices, and (2) to reduce the cognitive costs of making such choices. The two intermediate goals are: (1) to help consumers form an unbiased understanding of the product, and (2) to construct a set of evaluative criteria. Drawing on the constructive view of consumer judgment and choice, we present a conceptual model of online-review based consumer judgment and choice. We report principles that will improve the presentation of reviews, and discuss the benefits of the new design over the traditional presentation of online reviews.

Traditionally, consumers used the Internet to simply expend content: they read it, they watched it, and they used it to buy products and services. Increasingly, however, consumers are utilizing platforms-such as content sharing sites, blogs, social networking, and wikis-to create, modify, share, and discuss Internet content. This represents the social media phenomenon, which can now significantly impact a firm's reputation, sales, and even survival. Yet, many executives eschew or ignore this form of media because they don't understand what it is, the various forms it can take, and how to engage with it and learn. In response, we present a framework that defines social media by using seven functional building blocks: identity, presence, relationships, conversations, groups, reputations, and sharing. As different social media activities are defined by the extent to which they focus on some or all of these blocks, we explain the implications that each block can have for how firms should engage with social media. To conclude, we present a number of recommendations regarding how firms should develop strategies for monitoring, understanding, and responding to different social media activities.

The concept of viral marketing has been discussed in the literature for over 15 years, since Jeffrey Rayport first introduced the term in 1996. However, the more widespread use of social media has recently pushed this idea to a whole new level. We provide insight into the relationship between social media and viral marketing, and illustrate the six steps executives should take in order to dance the social media/viral marketing waltz. We define viral marketing as electronic word-of-mouth whereby some form of marketing message related to a company, brand, or product is transmitted in an exponentially growing way-often through the use of social media applications. We consider the three conditions that need to be fulfilled to create a viral marketing epidemic (i.e., giving the right message to the right messengers in the right environment) and present four different groups of social media viral marketing campaigns (nightmares, strokes-of-luck, homemade issues, and triumphs). We conclude with five points of caution that managers should heed when trying to launch their own viral marketing campaign.

Consumers are adopting increasingly active roles in co-creating marketing content with companies and their respective brands. In turn, companies and organizations are looking to online social marketing programs and campaigns in an effort to reach consumers where they 'live' online. However, the challenge facing many companies is that although they recognize the need to be active in social media, they do not truly understand how to do it effectively, what performance indicators they should be measuring, and how they should measure them. Further, as companies develop social media strategies, platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are too often treated as stand-alone elements rather than part of an integrated system. This article offers a systematic way of understanding and conceptualizing online social media, as an ecosystem of related elements involving both digital and traditional media. We highlight a best-practice case study of an organization's successful efforts to leverage social media in reaching an important audience of young consumers. Then, we conclude with several insights and lessons related to the strategic integration of social media into a firm's marketing communications strategy.

There is incessant demand for 'proof' of return on investment (ROI) for social media spending, and a significant degree of uncertainty among marketers with respect to allocating effort and budget to social media. In this article, we address these issues by identifying different ways that organizations use social media, highlighting important distinctions in these approaches and describing how to frame the spending decision for social media. Additionally, we identify dimensions that can be used to differentiate important types of social media in a social media mix, and relate this to tactical marketing execution. We also highlight the different nature of social objectives, the 'backward' process for meeting them, and the importance of establishing a social media 'mission control' as part of that process.

Real-time adaptation is crucial in today's unpredictable world. A plethora of revision triggers force organizations to adapt to a fluid reality. This article suggests that leaders need to develop the capacity for real-time adaptation since it is impossible to anticipate and plan for every eventuality. Super-flexibility is one way to achieve real-time adaptation. The term is an umbrella concept that encompasses agility and versatility, as well as resilience and robustness. In a practical sense, it is a dialectical capacity of withstanding turbulence, like a camel surviving in desert conditions, while transforming, like a chameleon changing its color. Based on the second edition of the book Super-Flexibility for Knowledge Enterprises (Springer, 2010) and distilling the authors' experience in Silicon Valley, this article describes the conceptual foundations of super-flexibility, and presents five action principles for becoming super-flexible.

An overlooked but important benefit of CSR is to insure a firm against a decline in reputation in the face of adverse events. Through a case study and a multi-year analysis of stock price responses for S&P 500 companies following product recalls, we find that firms that have high CSR ratings fare better than those that do not. Furthermore, a firm that is exceptional in both doing good and avoiding harm suffers virtually no reputational damage following negative media publicity. Using the results of this study, we offer a guide to managers for determining the appropriate amount and mix of CSR activities.

In recent years, the idea of conscious capitalism has emerged as an important alternative approach to the problems confronting American capitalism. Embraced by a number of corporations and prominent business leaders, it represents a new strategy for reconciling business, social, and environmental objectives. While this movement is an inspiring one and worthy of admiration, we believe the assumptions that underlie it suffer from a number of important limitations that make it unlikely for the movement to achieve the ambitious promises of its proponents. In fact, it is often difficult to do well by doing good, and few firms have been able to sustain superior social performance over the long run. Moreover, reconciling the interests of all the firm's stakeholders is often hard to achieve in practice. Most important, the adherents of conscious capitalism overlook the critical role that governments must play in reconciling corporate interests with broader public objectives.

Even slow-growing markets can be highly dynamic, if there is rapid turnover of the customer base. Examples include smoking cessation aids, video games, diapers, bridal magazines, and real estate agencies. Potential new entrants can assess the opportunities by calculating what the authors call the net turnover rate, or NTR-the ratio of new consumers to total consumers in a given year. They can then use several suggested strategies to break into these high-turnover markets and, once there, maintain their position.

Managers typically look for ways to reduce wait time to increase customer satisfaction. New research suggests there's a better approach: showing customers a representation of the effort, whether literal or not, being expended on their behalf while they wait. (The prototypical example is the travel website Kayak, which shows customers each airline it searches.) Studies show that customers prefer waiting when the work being done is transparent-even when the waits are longer or the results are no better than those obtained with shorter waits.

Although there's ample research to guide marketers in naming new products, little of it has addressed follow-on offerings, even though these make up the bulk of new products in many industries. Companies have two basic strategies to choose from. They can stick with a name, often adding a sequential indicator (PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3), or they can come up with an entirely new name (Nintendo's Wii). Three questions managers should consider when deciding whether brand-name continuation or brand-name change is the best way to go for their next-generation product.

How do effective managers get employees to act promptly? New research suggests that it's by making their requests at least twice. Though you may think redundancy is unnecessary and even a waste of time, a new study indicates that it helps your message cut through today's information overload.

The financial meltdown made clear that the executives of many major financial institutions were operating with inadequate or distorted information about the values and risks of their firms' assets. It's fair to say that business scholars bear some responsibility for that. Most of them are neither studying nor teaching emerging best practices in asset valuation and risk management. They need to begin exploring the interior of leading-edge companies to provide detailed, qualitative case studies.

As we continue to redefine capitalism, let's not discount the role of aspiration and the desire for luxuries in fueling productivity.

Choosing which innovative ideas to pursue is often an exercise in guesswork. But by using existing management tools in a new way, you can effectively gauge your innovation's potential along two crucial dimensions: Can it withstand market pressures from competitors? And can it deliver more economic value to customers than alternatives?

We've seen plenty of unethical behaviour in the business arena over the past decade. But surprisingly, bad behaviour doesn't always lead to reputational consequences. The authors offer a Model of Reputational Loss which explains why, using Arthur Anderson and PayPal as prime examples. The key levers involved, they argue, are the firm's perceived control of the situation; perceived certainty that the event truly occurred; the level of perceived threat to stakeholders; and perceived deviance from established practices. In addition, they show that stakeholder motivation and media coverage also play key roles in whether or not an organization's reputation is significantly damaged by bad behaviour.

Having spent the past five years working with the boards of some of the world's leading organizations, the authors reached a conclusion: boards need to become much more diverse -- not just demographically, but also in terms of the backgrounds, competencies and interests of their members. However, they warn that putting fresh faces onto boards provides no guarantee that benefits will ensue: diversity can also lead to gridlock. The fact is, people often feel threatened or annoyed by colleagues who are very different from themselves and have difficulty accepting, much less appreciating, those colleagues. In this article they describe the costs and benefits of diversity and provide seven recommendations for effectively diversifying boards - or senior teams -- in any industry.

'Earnings management' - the drive to meet earnings targets, and the things executives will do to make that happen -- has become a pervasive practice, and according to the author, it is a step down a very dangerous path. Far too many of our leaders are using their talents and corporate resources to 'smooth earnings' rather than to build their companies, he says. This has become a significant feature of the unhealthy community in which our CEOs now live -- a community that causes people to lead inauthentic lives. The good news is, if we can refocus CEOs on communities that are both healthy and meaningful, we can return authenticity to the C-suite. The first step on this road: do away with stock-based incentives. This doesn't mean that executives shouldn't own any shares, but they should be prevented from selling any stock while serving in that capacity, and indeed for several years after leaving their post.

Although we think of ourselves as being reasonable, we often make negative attributions about other peoples' intentions and hold them responsible for issues that arise. While we hold our positions with a high degree of certainty, none of what we are thinking is spoken directly to the person involved. When and if we do share our emotionally-charged assessments and theories, we generally do so only with people we feel will be sympathetic to our views. These private conversations tend to be held behind closed doors and rarely, if ever, do the targets of these conversations ever find out what we really think. The result: undiscussables - sometimes referred to as the 'elephant in the room'. The author shows that undiscussaables can be incredibly disruptive to trust and to the whole process of getting work done, and provides three tools to help eradicate them from the workplace.