Because of its evolutionary roots, the affective system of evaluation is inherently more ordinal in its architecture than the cognitive system. That is, the affective system focuses more on the relative ranking of target objects on the evaluative dimension than on their absolute values on the same dimension.
This article explains how the metric, Customer Value Added (CVA), can be applied to develop effective marketing and branding strategies. Strategies that are successful against competitors should focus on creating CVA that is greater than those produced by competitors. To do so, one must first regularly measure and monitor CVA by examining its components, perceived value and variable costs per unit. Next, one must develop strategies and tactics to increase CVA effectively and efficiently. In the long run, the organization that succeeds in achieving and maintaining the highest CVA wins.
Why companies have had difficulties determining marketing ROI and how they should approach evaluating marketing ROI. (Reprinted from Columbia Ideas at Work, "Many Happy Returns on Marketing," 8/31/2009, pp. 1-2.)
The authors test methods, based on cognitively simple decision rules, that predict which products consumers select for their consideration sets. Drawing on qualitative research, the authors propose disjunctions-of-conjunctions (DOC) decision rules that generalize well-studied decision models, such as disjunctive, conjunctive, lexicographic, and subset conjunctive rules. They propose two machine-learning methods to estimate cognitively simple DOC rules. They observe consumers' consideration sets for global positioning systems for both calibration and validation data.
Since Max Barenbrug and Eduard Zanen founded Bugaboo, a baby stroller company, in 1995, the company had grown into a global corporation with over 800 people worldwide. Such rapid growth and accretion of brand equity presented Bugaboo with both opportunities and challenges. Max's vision was to become "the leading mobility brand in the world." To achieve this vision, the company would have to introduce new products in categories outside of strollers. How could the company capture and replicate the essence of what drove its initial success?
The U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent upwards of $18 billion on marketing drugs in 2007. Detailing and drug sampling activities account for the bulk of this spending. To stay competitive, pharmaceutical managers need to maximize the return on these marketing investments by determining which physicians to target, when, and how to target them. In this paper, we present a two-stage approach for dynamically allocating detailing and sampling activities across physicians to maximize long-run profitability.