问答题
Darwin's Theories Applied to Marketing
Why are General Motors and Ford in trouble? Why did Delta, Northwest, US Airways and United Airlines go bankrupt? Why were C2 and Pepsi Edge such notable failures?
One answer might be "divergence." Over time, every category breaks up into multiple categories, creating chaos for companies that try to keep their brands in the mainstream of the market.
Charles Darwin called divergence the driving force that creates hardy new species. His theory can as easily be applied to marketing as biology.
Charles Darwin Divergence is the least understood, most powerful force in the universe. In his book
The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called divergence the driving force that creates a new species.
In our book The Origin of Brands, we use Darwin's concept to describe the process that takes place to create a new category. What starts off as a single category (the mainframe computer, for example) winds up as multiple categories—mainframes, mid-range, desktops, laptops, handhelds, servers, etc.
Each of these developing categories represents an opportunity to build a new brand. Digital, Compaq, Dell and Palm, for example.
There are two forces at work in nature, according to Darwin. One is a gradual change from an ancestral to a current condition. (A process biologists call "anagenesis".)
Divergence The other is divergence, a splitting of the ancestral tree to create new branches. (Biologists call this "cladogenesis".)
Anagenesis produces strawberries the size of plums. It just won't turn a strawberry into a plum. It takes cladogenesis or divergence to do that.
Darwin called the first force "natural selection", or the survival of the fittest. The competition between individuals improves the species.
Two hundred years ago, the average American adult male was 5 feet 7 inches tall. Today the average American adult male is 5 feet 9 inches tall. That's evolution at work.
The second force of nature is the principle of "divergence". Random changes or mutations create an incipient new species and then the competition between species drives them apart.
First Portable Computer The first portable computer, introduced in 1982 by Compaq Computer, weighed 18 pounds. Essentially a slimmed-down desktop with a handle, the product was called a "luggable" computer by many users.
Compare today's desktop with today's portable computer (now called a laptop.) On my desk is a Dell computer (29 pounds), a Sony monitor (17 pounds) and a Microsoft keyboard and mouse (3.5 pounds). Total weight: 49.5 pounds.
On the road, however, I carry a Toshiba Protege, which weighs just 4.5 pounds. No longer can you put a handle on a desktop computer and call it a "portable". The portable or laptop computer has diverged from the desktop computer. The process never stops. Today the laptop category is in the process of dividing into full-featured machines that weigh 6 to 8 pounds and ultralight machines that weigh 3 pounds to 4 pounds.
If you're in the laptop computer business, your instincts might lead you in the opposite direction. If you think of "the" customer as a single identity, you might try to satisfy the customer's every wish.
Compromise Brands
As a result, you might decide that your laptop computer needs to be a compromise. As full featured as possible and as light as possible. In other words, you would put your product right in the middle of the market where there is no market.
In Darwin's words, "nature favors the extremes" The "sweet spot" of a market is an illusion that soon gives way to multiple sweet spots. So which spot do you want your brand to occupy?
Darwin writes about a human example of the pressure that nature exerts on species to diverge. "As with mariners shipwrecked near a coast, it would have been better for the good swimmers if they had been able to swim still further, whereas it would have been better for the bad swimmers if they had not been able to swim at all and had stuck to the wreck."
If sailors were a species, given enough time and enough shipwrecks, there would eventually be two species of sailors: swimmers and non-swimmers. Again, the mushy middle is the place to avoid.
Wal-Mart vs. Saks Look at department stores. Wal-Mart and Target are doing well at the low end and Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom are doing well at the high end. It's Sears and JC Penney that are caught in the mushy middle.
In groceries, Wal-Mart has become the leading chain at the low end while Whole Foods is rolling along at the high end. It's the supermarket chains in the middle that are having problems. Kroger, the largest pure grocery chain, lost ＄100 million last year while Whole Foods made ＄137 million.
In automobiles, low-priced brands like Hyundai, Mazda and Kia are doing great and so are high-priced brands like Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. General Motors and Ford with their mid-priced brands are slowly getting crushed. (Hyundai, Mazda and Kia sold 838, 405 vehicles in the U. S. last year.)
In air travel, no-frills airlines like Southwest, Airtran and JetBlue are flying high along with NetJets and the corporate jet market at the high end. It's the traditional airlines like American, United and Delta that are suffering in the mushy middle.
Coke's C2 Disaster In carbonated beverages, Coca-Cola (150 calories) and Diet Coke (0 calories) are big successes while its half-and-half brand, C2 (75 calories), has gone nowhere. If you want your company to live a long and happy life, it's not enough to "evolve" your brands to keep up with competition. You also need to look for opportunities to launch new brands to take advantage of diverging categories.
Toyota responded to the pressure to diverge by introducing Lexus, a high-end brand which has become the biggest-selling luxury car in America. Dell is doing the same thing. An enormous success at the low end of the computer market, Dell just announced its XPS brand, a line of desktop and laptop computers to be marketed as luxury models.
In the world of business, you need to practice divergence as well as evolution.
【正确答案】a.
A: Consumers' choices can be influenced by many factors; consumers' desires are constantly shifting, depending on their needs and on styles that have caught the popular imagination. Consumers are courted, enticed, and implored by sellers of goods and services. Using celebrities to endorse products has been one of the important advertising gimmicks.
B: Definitely. People like to think negative advertising dose not sway them but the fact is they are. Others always copy celebrities' behavior. Celebrity endorsement serves a model for community.
A: Yes. Celebrity endorsements express formal support or approval for someone or something. If a famous person buys a product, many consumers are most likely to follow suit. They may buy it as well. It is even more so, when consumers lack confidence in their ability to identify exactly what it is.
B: Many people always do the same as the famous people have done, because they trust celebrity. They may distrust advertisement, but celebrities' behavior has a big effect on consumers. Therefore, using celebrities to endorse products benefit the company. It gives the company an advantage, improves its reputation, and helps the company in promoting sales.
b.
A: In most companies, no one knows and understands your customers and their changing needs better than the marketing department. Certainly that knowledge should be routinely presented and understood by the chief executive and board of directors, right?
B. But over time, and for a number of reasons, the marketing function and the 12-suite often drift apart, resulting in a disconnection between the overall strategy of the company and what marketing understands to be the actual needs of customers.
A: Why has marketing evolved so far from the executive suite over the years? You'd think corporate leaders would want to align the marketing function with the overall direction of the company.
B: In many companies, marketing exists far from the executive suite because the CEO perceives that there is not the same pressing need to master the marketing discipline as there is. Unlike operations where there are established techniques in inventory management and reengineering, there are no obvious and permanent cost-cutting results to be gained through marketing, short of simply slashing the advertising budget.
A: In addition, marketing is not naturally inherent in a CEO's day-to-day job as is organizational behavior and leadership.
B: This lack of accountability makes it very difficult to track the financial impact of marketing investments, and so marketing becomes abstract to both the CEO and board. What are the consequences of not having this alignment?
A: When a firm's marketing activities are not supportive of its greater strategic goals, the result can be low growth and declining margins. The presumption of organic growth is baked into most companies' stock value, but many companies and their boards are faced with a requirement for organic growth that they're unsure how to meet.
B: Yes, for these companies, the yawning gap between actual revenue growth and investors' expectations is a ticking time bomb. Marketing is the way in which firms can close this gap because it encompasses all the activities of an organization that listen to the customers' voice and ultimately generates profitable relationships.
A: What are the key challenges in aligning marketing activities with corporate strategy?
B: The key challenge is to develop a set of metrics that measure the impact of marketing activities against the goals of the corporation. Many marketing managers will tell you that marketing performance can't be measured. It is not that managers are short on measurement tools, or that marketing metrics lack utility.
A: I believe the problem is that these managers don't know what metrics to measure or how to interpret the results. They may collect all manner of plausible marketing-performance metrics, from customer satisfaction to retention, but if these can't be correlated with marketing activities and revenue results, the data aren't very helpful.
【答案解析】