Arie Goldshlager’s posterous

Based on an analysis of over 7,500 New York Times articles, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman found that awe-inspiring articles are more likely to be among the newspaper’s most e-mailed stories on a given day. Practically useful, surprising, positive, and affect-laden articles are also more likely to be viral:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html?ref=technology

http://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/documents/research/Virality.pdf

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A note by Bruce Temkin on a similar topic, prompted me to revisit this 2007 Christopher Hart Harvard Business Review article on Beating the Market with Customer Satisfaction.  The article features a study, by Claes Fornell, of 200 companies that shows a clear correlation between higher levels of customer satisfaction and higher stock prices:

http://telesight.com/christopherhart_hbr.pdf

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I found the following Byron Sharp perspective on Loyalty Programs thought-provoking.  Note particularly:

“Marketers have tended to use the loyalty program concept as an all-purpose marketing initiative, when in fact loyalty programs attract the least desirable consumer for a supermarket wanting to increase its business - the ones who already are loyal and do most of their shopping in your store,” he said.

“These shoppers actually have the most to gain – something for nothing. ...

“Infrequent shoppers – the customers a supermarket would like to have change their behaviour and shop at an outlet more often – are actually less likely to get around to joining up.”

Prof Sharp says this is what researchers call a ‘selection effect’ and it trips up unwitting marketers.

“If you take a store like Myer for example - they boast that loyalty program members spend an average of $822 a year in-store compared to $795 for their other customers – but this does not reflect any change in buying behaviour, it is just that heavier customers tend to join loyalty programs,” he said.

“Giving away money to already loyal customers destroys the rationale behind most loyalty programs.

“To get a real advantage, supermarkets or stores need to attract consumers who buy from their category a lot, but don’t yet regularly shop at their stores.”

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20100802-20582.html

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1) “Retaining” Unprofitable Customers

When you simply “retain” unprofitable customers, you also retain the losses that they produce. Unprofitable customers should instead be managed, e.g., using one of the strategies outlined in the following article:

http://hbr.org/products/R0804F/R0804Fp4.pdf

 2) Retaining 'Walking Dead' Customers

When you simply “retain” “Walking Dead” Customers, you could potentially produce the opposite result.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1756

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1) Is the Tipping Point Toast?

2) Who are the best spreaders of information in a social network?

“Perhaps the most interesting outcome is that the new approach emphasises the location of the individual within the network relative to the information..."

http://bit.ly/bGFSn6

3) Neighbor Networks: Understanding the Power of Networks

“People tend to cluster into groups and communicate more frequently within rather than between groups. As a result, people within the same group develop similar views. They tire of repeating arguments and stories explaining why they believe and behave the way they do, so they make up shorthand phrases, jargon, and a whole system of phrasing, opinions, symbols, and behaviors defining what it means to be a member of the group. Over time, the tacit knowledge that is meaningful to insiders becomes more complex, making knowledge more difficult to move to other groups. Information becomes “sticky,” such that holes tear open in the flow of information between groups. These holes in the social structure of communication are what are known as “structural holes.”

http://bit.ly/9UkA1

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Will one of the nation's greatest violinists be noticed in a D.C. Metro stop during rush hour? 

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Listening to both sides of the iPad conversation, I have revisited the “Purpose Brand” article by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall on “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure”:

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