I just returned from China and was elated by everyone’s use of WeChat’s mobile closed, personal contact-focused network: part messaging service, part social network. WeChat provides instantaneous multimedia communication with text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, photo/video sharing, location sharing, and contact information exchange. It supports social networking via shared streaming content feeds and location-based social plug-ins to [read more]
Social marketing has been around for several decades, since Philip Kotler’s pioneering work in social cause marketing. What started out two decades ago as an arena of marketing for non-profit organizations to help good causes raise awareness, action and money, has now evolved into a mantra of consumer and B2B branding. A new principle has been added to the traditional 4Ps [read more]
Wal-Mart faces a daunting business challenge. When Wal-Mart started its high growth strategy in 1969, it followed the movement of American middle class families from declining cities to new suburbs. Wal-Mart built thousands of stores to service this massive migration of growing household income, along with distribution centers to link these suburban and exurban stores into the largest retail chain [read more]
There is perhaps no more committed customer base than Apple’s consumers. The latest iPhone is as much a luxury item as you can find in the smart phone market. Its top model is tagged at $850 (without service contract) at the top of a smart phone market that reaches down to $150 in the U.S. Its consumers are high-mid to [read more]
In Chapter Two of our book, we discuss how to grow through developing committed customers and stakeholders. It is more important to obsess about you customers than to obsess about your competitors. It is your customers, not your competitors, who buy your products and drive your profits. Losing customers is expensive. We live in a world characterized by an abundance [read more]