Commenting on my last post on ‘stimulus-response’ Andrew Weir says: “In my humble view marketing should focus on delivering great brand experiences (experience of a product, service, brand) as well as brand promises (stimulus-response?). It is vital that the promise matches the experience (alignment...
OK. This is a real biggie. It’s about an error – a misperception – that pervades everything marketers do: their beliefs about how marketing works (and therefore what they are trying to do when they do marketing), how they seek to do it, and how they measure success. What’s more, like the evidence of...
A number of people have asked me what I read as background to my Marketing article on ‘predictably irrational’ consumer decision-making. Aside from various interviews I’ve done over the years, here is a list of the main books I’ve read in this arena. The first two books are game-changers in my view ...
So here’s the agenda for reinventing marketing I promised a while ago. First off, we need to recognise the core. Organisations apply knowledge and resources to supply individuals with products and services that are better quality and/or cheaper than these individuals can provide for themselves. This...
I wrote today in Marketing magazine about discoveries in psychology that are revolutionising our understanding of human decision-making. Many marketers are seizing upon these findings as grist to the mill of marketing’s prevailing persuasion paradigm . I think the opposite is true. As we dig deeper,...
OK, rant about marketing fads over. The point I’m really trying to make is that online social networking is just one small sub-set of a vast new continent of possibility: Volunteered Personal Information (VPI). It’s the big picture of VPI, not just one small part, that marketers need to get to grips...
When we say making and implementing decisions is the epicentre of consumer value, there’s one thing we need to be clear about. This is not – definitely not – a claim that somehow ‘consumers are changing’ in some fundamental, revolutionary way. Quite the opposite. There’s nothing new here at all. It was...
The alternative to ‘ stimulus-response ’ is to assume that, generally speaking, individuals buy and use marketing as they do any other product or service – when it adds value to them … and they ignore marketing that doesn’t add value. That begs a load of questions, especially questions relating to ‘what...
The big assumption behind stimulus-response marketing is that all the power rests with stimulus (and the stimulator), and that the response is just an automatic by-product of the nature of the stimulus. In other words, the responder doesn’t really have much say in the matter. To see the flaw with ‘stimulus...
Somewhere, lurking in the background of every marketing initiative lies some sort of theory of human motivation and behaviour. Big problem: During marketing’s formative years, one particular school of psychology dominated academe – the theory of behaviourism as espoused first by John Watson and then...
