2 posts tagged “sloan management review”

MIT's Sloan Management Review published an article showing that sales promotions such as GM's "You pay what employees pay" fail more often than not. They also talk about the Pontiac Solstice/Donald Trump promotion's success because it was not so easily duplicated. Also mentioned as a success (another GM product) was Cadillac's "Five Second FIlm Commercial" competition. The competition "invited site visitors to shoot and upload a five-second film on any topic. More than 2.5 million consumers visited the page, 2,600 of whom submitted films." This led to success: "in the four months following the promotion, sales of the Cadillac V-Series jumped by 25%."

The key to success, is getting the customer to react quickly accroding to authors Betsy Gelb, Demetra Andrews and Son K. Lam. That speed comes from meeting one or more of three motivations: "economic, informational and affective. Economic incentives make a purchase less expensive in money and/or in time and effort. Information influences consumers' beliefs about the brand or product category. The affective approach arouses favorable feelings and emotions and associates them with the promoted brand."  

MIT's Sloan Management Review has an interview with Professor Lee Fleming, Harvard, on innovation. Just a couple of quotes from Fleming:

on innovation becoming a top agenda item for many CEOs -

"It's part of a general trend that's been taking place for a long time, but it might now be accelerating. One reason is that there are a lot more technologies, like the Web, that have opened up countless possibilities . . ."

on many being misinformed about innovation -

"One of the biggest problems is there tends to be a huge gap between the person who understands the technology and the person who understands the business model. I'm not sure why this gap still persists because we've now educated so many MBAs who were engineers. Is it just so fundamentally difficult to get those two mindsets within the same person? If that's the case, then maybe we should stop trying to have the engineer get an MBA and simply teach the engineer how to talk to the MBA -- and vice-versa."