Commission-free stock brokerage app Robinhood has been in the news lately. First, its members used their market power to manipulate the value of the GameStop stock, launching a stock-trading mania that took Wall Street by surprise. That mania backfired on Robinhood. The central Wall Street clearinghouse mandated Robinhood achieve a…

Measuring customer satisfaction is nothing new. Most companies — and indeed most of the Fortune 1000 — track customer satisfaction in some standardized form: overall satisfaction, NPS, and most often apply advanced analytics and modeling to identify the most critical satisfiers and dissatisfiers. While there is much overlap in customer…

When was the last time you tested messages? Oops! Too late! It’s probably happened to most of us. You’re watching television, and an advertisement comes on. “Whoa,” you think, “why are those people so close together? Why aren’t they wearing masks?” I call it PPSD (post-pandemic stress disorder). Jokes aside, our perceptions about the way the world is and should work…

The Consumer Decision Making Journey and the ways companies can influence it has exploded with the influx of new channels such as e-commerce, digital media, online video, email, organic search, paid search, experiential marketing, and social media. The complexity of a customer’s Decision Journey cannot be comprehended or summarized by…

Many companies do not regularly conduct an analysis on why they won or lost a sale. Part of the reason for that is, once you’ve won the business, you’re off celebrating or (preferably) looking for your next win. It is unlikely that your salespeople are ruminating about why they won…

If you are not testing your advertising, you are not alone. Research has shown that many businesses do not formally test their advertising before launch. There are probably many reasons why businesses are not using testing and experimentation to maximize ad performance. There may be prejudices against ad testing that…

Diversity in the United States has been steadily increasing. Both in the workforce and the customer base, people are more diverse, in ethnicity, gender, age, culture, beliefs, politics, and in many other ways. Savvy businesses understand that diversity is good for business: Bianca Miller Cole, writing in Forbes, reports that…

Segmentation analysis is one of the most powerful marketing tools available. It used to be that segmentations were durable: you only needed to re-do your segmentation once every 3 to 5 years, depending on your category’s volatility. That’s all different now. Since the global Covid-19 pandemic, so much has changed…

True Story: A major sample provider declined to allow a marketing research company owner to pay for purchases with a credit card to earn airline miles. So, that research company took its $300K annual sample purchases to another sample vendor. The original sample provider never reached out to find out…