Too often, industrial companies are leaving cash on the table – and missing opportunities to cement customer loyalty and boost repeat sales of their equipment – because they base decisions about bundling and pricing their services on anecdotal information. We offer a systematic approach to examining markets, leading to a much more informed perspective on the opportunities and risks in bundling and pricing services.

When it comes to packaging, size matters. In a research paper, INSEAD Associate Professor of Marketing Pierre Chandon and co-author Nailya Ordabayeva, an INSEAD PhD student, found that changes in the shape of packaging or portions can have a big impact on our consumption patterns.

Review the following six bromides from a recent how-to article phoned in by a reigning email-marketing magnate... and then read why you should ignore them.

Bringing a new product to market is one of the most costly and risky activities that any GM faces.

Voice-of-the-customer research and stage gate reviews have improved the odds of achieving success. But do they go far enough?

Three important tasks are frequently overlooked even though they offer the ability to identify weak links early on.

So, how can you overcome the odds? Arm your team with a three-step commercialization insurance policy designed to identify and assess risks.

In marketing, context can be as critical as content. Recent research by Zakary Tormala and others finds that messages are perceived as more powerful when they are preceded by different messages that appear to have less substance or to be authored by someone with lesser credibility

Jeff Sexton at Future Now identifies and challenges seven common marketing claims, explaining why they are ineffective and offering ideas for making them persuasive.
1. Superior Customer Service
2. Easy to Use
3. Most Experienced
4. We're #1
5. 100% Risk-Free
6. Cutting Edge
7. Best Value

Way too many conversion rate optimization projects are coming up empty. Companies feel they work too hard for too little return. Most conversion rate optimizations efforts are focused on pages and elements but don't focus on the entire persuasion scenario. Perhaps and understanding of The Hierarchy of Optimization can help.

An investigation shows that investors suffer when firms stop giving quarterly earnings guidance.

By the time NASDAQ reached its peak in the recent bull market, many financial commentators had begun to accept the idea that stock market valuations were no longer driven solely by the traditional economic factors: earnings growth, inflation, and interest rates. Instead, they suggested, new factors—such as structural changes in the economy, new rules of economics, and the value of intangible assets and brands—justified the lofty stock prices. Today those valuations seem ludicrous, though the fundamental question remains: has the market changed what it factors into share values? Using a simple model based on changes in earnings, inflation, and interest rates, we found that the traditional factors alone explain most of the medium- and long-term movement in the S&P index of 500 stocks over the past 40 years. We uncovered scant evidence that the market had changed the things it consistently factored into stock prices.

Many analysts argue that despite the carnage on Wall Street over the past year, stock prices are still high by historical standards. Is that true? Could stocks fall some more before they reach bottom? Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel, author of Stocks for the Long Run, suggests that benchmarks such as the price-to-earnings ratio present a more hopeful picture than many market observers believe.

The return on the market portfolio plays a central role in the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), the financial theory widely used by both academics and practitioners. However, the intertemporal properties of the stock market return are not yet fully understood. In particular, ther is an ongoing debate in the literature about the relationship between market risk and return and the extent to which stock market volatility moves stock prices. This paper provides new evidence on the risk-return relation by estimating a variant of Merton's (1983) intertemporal capital asset pricing model (ICAPM).

The stigma haunting startups that fail to go public can taint their credibility and force them to refocus. And those are the lucky ones.

This paper by the Federal Reserve Board compares the predictions for the market value of firms from the Gordon growth model with those from a dynamic general equilibrium model of production. Special attention is focused on the prediction for movements in the market value of firms in response to a decline in the required return or an increase in the growth rate of the economy. The tension between theory and data suggests that the skyrocketing market value of firms in the second half of the 1990s may reflect a degree of irrational exuberance.

This 33-page .pdf IMF paper provides an overview of recent theoretical and empirical research on herd behavior in financial markets. It addresses the following questions: What precisely do we mean by herding? What could be the causes of herd behavior? What successes hav existing studies had in identifying such behavior? And what effect does herding have on financial markets?

A good general overview of stock analysis; uses easy analogies and covers the Balance Sheet and Income Statement as well as giving an overview of methodology and purpose

self-explanatory; nice complement to article on fundamental analysis also by TheStreet.com

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