How conjoint analysis, a tried-and-true market research tool, can be used to support organic growth.

There is a better way to determine how many—what portion—of your customers were satisfied. Time and again studies have shown that customer loyalty is fleeting for all but the most satisfied of customers, because any customer who is not “completely satisfied,” is dissatisfied to some degree, and/or with “something.” That “something” is the “crack in the door” through which competitors can sneak and steal your business.

I propose one fundamental question to ask; with just two multiple-choice follow-up questions. The first question will tell you how many of your customers are really satisfied—and thus likely to be loyal.

One of the biggest problems startups face is a lack of money. After they develop the product, they often don't have much left over for marketing and advertising.

Fortunately, if you do it right, you won’t need to advertise. Or you may only have to invest a fraction of the amount to get ten times the results.

How do you do this? You create a product that sells itself. This four-point checklist will help you pull that off.

The mere fact that an online video advertisement reaches a viewer's computer screen does not guarantee that the ad actually reaches the viewer. New experimental research by Thales S. Teixeira looks at how advertisers can effectively capture and keep viewers' attention by evoking certain emotional responses.

By the time we make a purchase, we have read reviews, compared prices and fully evaluated our options, whether we are buying a pillow or a Porsche. In the face of newly empowered consumers, marketers have had to rethink how they can win at the point of purchase. Jim Lecinski, Google's managing director of U.S. sales and service, has written an e-book, Winning the Zero Moment of Truth, about a "new mental model for modern marketing," which he calls ZMOT, or the Zero Moment of Truth. To learn more, Knowledge@Wharton and Wharton marketing professor Jerry (Yoram) Wind spoke with Lecinski about the explosion of choice, today's highly informed consumer and what this new decision-making moment means to marketers.

Let’s face it: All too often, life is a succession of hassles. There’s an endless array of frustrations, inconveniences, complications, disappointments, and potential disasters lurking in most of our daily experiences. Even very good products and services (we’ll call them simply “products” for simplicity’s sake) have their weaknesses and drawbacks. My new smartphone sometimes drops my calls; my favorite hotel chain sometimes loses my reservation; those new lightbulbs last longer but produce less light; my new hybrid car gets better mileage but the engine feels less peppy … Managers, marketers, designers, service suppliers, and salespeople for the companies that provide these products don’t focus on their weaknesses. That’s understandable. They devote their lives to making products that are as good as they can possibly be and then to promoting them as enthusiastically as they can. Who wants to concentrate on the negatives? Yet we’ve found that organizations that excel at demand creation do exactly that. They examine the lives of customers through the lens of what we call a Hassle Map—a detailed study of the problems, large and small, that people experience whenever they use their products.

Here’s a quick tool to help you prepare for a sales call, and assess you performance afterwards. It’s a simple check list that covers the basics of consultative selling. To use the tool, cut and paste the list into a document and print out copies for your personal notebook. Before and after each meeting, check off the items that you covered. Over time, as you continue to audit your sales calls in this way, you’ll find that hitting these essential bases becomes automatic.

New research revealing a disparity between what shoppers say and what they do debunks the myth of the ethical consumer.

Almost 50 years ago Ernest Dichter, the father of motivation research, did a large study of word of mouth persuasion that revealed secrets of how to use social media to build brands and businesses. The study was reported in a 1966 article in HBR.

A major Dichter finding, very relevant today, was the identification of four motivations for a person to communicate about brands.

Avinash Kaushik’s recently offered a webinar about how to use your analytics to gain insight into acquisition cost, revenue, net profit, micro-conversions, and economic value. The webinar is available to the general public (see link in article) and in it you will learn how analytics can increase marketing accountability. However, just in case you can’t squeeze that kind of time out of your schedule, below you’ll find a brief summary of the main concepts.

A more productive salesforce offers one of the biggest opportunities for growth. But what company can afford to shut down its sales engine for an extended overhaul? Among 25 leading companies that successfully managed this dilemma, Bain & Company found that six frequently used tools consistently produce the most value.

While experience is vital in growing any business, there are preemptive steps you can take to optimize success when launching a new product or service, such as developing a “marketing plan.” If you’ve had experience, you may find you’ve already considered these questions in some capacity.

Here s a short engagement strategy checklist to help elevate engagement in your email programs.

For years, sales managers have debated the difference between “hunters” (who take qualified leads and close them into customers) and “farmers” (who develop the account, expands contacts and engage in up-sell/cross-sell activity. What’s funny about that debate is that it’s entirely obsolete… at least in the most successful large firms.

The following is a list of 26 DIY Marketing strategies that you can try to build your sales back up to where they need to be.

How do you produce content that is useful, engaging and/or entertaining? And how do you do that when budgets are tight and your time is limited?

Let’s start with four general guidelines, before looking at some specific ideas.

Rather than putting consumers in arbitrary “buckets” for targeting, marketers should join them online in communities of passion and interest.

Master the innovation life cycle with a jobs-to-be-done perspective of markets.

Everyone takes a free green grocery bag, but how do you lure stressed-out consumers and businesses to walk the green walk more consistently? Marketing students look for levers of change.

The vision of one-to-one marketing, a concept that has gained new vigor in the interactive age of online marketing, has captured the imagination of managers, students, and educators. The idea is that a firm learns the preferences of each customer, thereby creating an insurmountable barrier to competition. Theoretically, a firm can predict what customers will want before the consumers are even aware of their own needs. But that, warns marketing professor Itamar Simonson, is unrealistic.

There’s an important difference between a client and an advocate. Advocates do more than simply buy from you. Advocates are engaged customers who demonstrate their vendor allegiance through such activities as spreading positive word of mouth, recruiting new prospects and helping their vendors improve. How can a firm nurture trust to help sustain these important advocate behaviors?

When consumers are overwhelmed with options, marketers should give them what they really want: ways of shopping that lower the cognitive stress.

Talent trumps training, and strengths development beats them both, say the authors of a new book on sales effectiveness.

Dan Heath and Chip Heath explain why it's not enough to give people something they need.

In a video interview with Web Marketing Today, Bryan Eisenberg offers a 7-minute primer on what he terms the Five Rs of search engine marketing. Here's a quick overview of Eisenberg's thoughts on each R