issue 8 april 2008 marketing premium store...

MarketingIssue 8 April 2008

Premium store brandsThe hottest trend in retailing

PLUS: News and new appointments; Professor

Nader Tavassoli on the new marketing challenges; latest

research and faculty insights.

Adapting to changeMarketing to the new multi-channel consumer

Rewriting the textbookStaying ahead in the digital world

In this issue of Insight Marketing we focus on branding; in the retail sector, marketing strategies, digital marketing and we investigate the perceived wisdoms of branding. Brands inevitably evolve, but there are revolutions sweeping through the industry and we have to adapt with open minds.

As Johanna Waterous, Director, McKinsey and Company, says in her interview with Professor Patrick Barwise on page eight, ‘Faced with dozens of media and channels, traditional ‘product push’ strategies are neither effective nor affordable.’ Marketers can no longer rely on traditional strategies.

On page 18, Professor Nader Tavassoli discusses how company brands need to be built from the inside out, engaging everyone, and how crucial HR teams are to making this happen from the start.

These are stimulating, rapidly evolving times and this issue tackles many of the ideas and challenges head on. I hope you enjoy it.

Insight Marketing Issue 8

Inside this issue

04 News The latest updates from Marketing06 Feature Premium store brands08 Interview Adapting to change11 Case Study The Síminn brand inside14 Feature Rewriting the textbook16 Faculty Profile Professor Nader Tavassoli18 Feature Building brands from the inside out21 Feature The business & strategies of branding

Few thought about the word-of- mouth marketing power of a trillion text messages a year.page 8 >>

London Business School – ranked as one of the world’s foremost centres of international business insight, research and practice – is proud to announce the launch of a comprehensive portfolio of Executive Education Programmes, to be held at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC).

The Dubai programme portfolio covers key business areas: Leadership, Human Resources, Finance, General Management and Business Administration. With, naturally, the very same levels of cutting-edge thought leadership as is offered at the London campus.

Embarking on a programme of Executive Education through London Business School in Dubai will make a huge impact on your organisation, personal development, and career. Places are limited, so it is advised to reserve your place as early as possible.

To request a brochure email [email protected] or call +44 (0)20 7000 7390

To find out more or to register for up coming events in Dubai, please visit www.london.edu/execed/dubai/

London Business School Tel +44 (0)20 7000 7390 Email [email protected] www.london.edu/execed/dubai/

YOUR GATEWAY TO WORLD-CLASS BUSINESS THINKING

Nirmalya KumarDirectorCentre for Marketing

3Issue 8 April 2008

Contents

Simona Botti

BA, (Bocconi), MBA, PhD (Chicago)

Assistant Professor of Marketing

Simona Botti joins London Business School from Cornell University, where she was an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management. She received her undergraduate degree in Business Administration from Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, in 1995 and her PhD and MBA in Marketing from the University of Chicago in 2004. Before starting her PhD, she was a junior faculty member in the Marketing Department of SDA Bocconi, the Graduate School of Business at Bocconi University. Her interests are in consumer behaviour and decision making. Her research focuses on how making a free choice versus having the same choice externally imposed influences consumers’ satisfaction with the outcome of that choice. More generally, she is interested in how people’s judgments and evaluations vary as a function of different choice-making strategies. Simona’s recent research has been published in journals such as Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Anja Lambrecht

Maîtrise des Sciences de Gestion (Paris), Diplom-Kauffrau, PhD (Frankfurt)

Assistant Professor of Marketing

Anja Lambrecht joins London Business School from the UCLA Anderson School of Management where she held a position as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing. Previously, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Anja received business degrees in both Germany (Diplom-Kauffrau) and France (Maîtrise des Sciences de Gestion) in a joint degree programme at Goethe-University, Frankfurt and Université Paris-Dauphine, Paris. She also holds a Ph.D. in business from Goethe-University, Frankfurt. Anja previously worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company in Germany. She focused on clients in the software, media, telecommunications and insurance industry and specialised in solving marketing and sales related issues. Anja’s research focuses on empirically studying pricing, consumer choice and consumer adoption of new services and technologies and their impact on firm profitability. She has a particular interest in pricing decisions and consumer choice when firms offer multiple pricing plans. Anja’s research has been published in journals such as Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Science.

Responding to the changing nature of competitionCo-hosted by Ingram and the Centre for Marketing

Forthcoming events

For full details and to register, please visit www.london.edu/marketing

New faculty appointments >>

Low-cost combatants are changing the nature of competition as executives knew it in the twentieth century and an obsession with traditional rivals has blinded companies to the threat they pose. This was the subject under scrutiny at the second seminar co-hosted by Ingram and the Centre for Marketing recently.

Nirmalya Kumar, Professor of Marketing at London Business School, presented strategies to fight low-cost rivals, followed by a ‘Question Time’ style panel debate chaired by Andrew Seth (former CEO of Lever Brothers). The panel included Chris Ingram (founder and Chairman of Ingram), Stephen Miron (Managing Director of the Mail on Sunday) and Brian Williams (Managing Director, Swire Hotels).

All over the world, especially in Europe and North America, organisations that have business models and technologies different from those of market leaders are mushrooming. These companies offer products and services at prices dramatically lower than the prices established businesses charge, often by harnessing the forces of deregulation, globalisation, and technological innovation. By the early 1990s, the first price warriors had gobbled up the lunches of several incumbents. Now, on both sides of the Atlantic, a second wave is rolling in and business leaders need to develop new strategies to stay in the game, the audience was warned.

16 April 2008

Unintended Consequences of Pricing Decisions

Marco Bertini (London Business School)

Pricing is seldom an area of business that managers talk about with great enthusiasm. Interestingly, while managers typically agree that ’getting price right‘ is an important undertaking, considerable research has shown that pricing decisions are too often determined by simple rules-of-thumb and biased processes that ignore consumers and, consequently, may have little to do with the long-term maximisation of firm profit.

The objective of this seminar is to re-examine (and at times challenge) a number of common pricing decisions from the perspective of consumer psychology. Some of the topics we will discuss include new product pricing, promotions and bundling. A behavioural approach (as compared to, say, traditional economics) provides fresh insights on how managers should think about pricing their firm’s products and services in the marketplace. The end goal is to make seminar participants aware of basic, yet significant, effects of pricing actions on purchasing behaviour and the corresponding courses of actions that are available to managers.

7 May 2008

Building Brands from the Inside Out: Getting Marketing and HR to Play as a Team

Nader Tavassoli (London Business School)

In too many organisations branding remains an externally facing communication exercise. If brands are to be an integral part of a company’s strategy, they need to gain traction internally. The reality, however, is that a majority of people do not know or understand their company’s strategy. It should thus be no surprise that they fail to deliver the brand promise to customers.

This seminar provides a framework, practical tools, and best-practice examples for addressing this problem. These leverage core skills already in the marketer’s tool box but, critically, require HR to champion the brand across its core processes, which should not only lead to improvements in the top line, but also affect the bottom line through cost savings and productivity gains on accepted HR metrics. Ultimately, brands that are created from the inside out are the foundation to a difficult-to-imitate competitive advantage.

11 June 2008

Marketing to the City

Tim Ambler (London Business School)

The UK has many of the world’s best marketers with unrivalled flair and creativity. However, they are often under great pressure from their employers, and especially their Finance Director, to cut both budgets and what they can do. Many are limited to just one of the 4Ps, namely promotion. Marketing organisations such as the Marketing Society have worked hard to get more attention in the board room but 10 years of knocking on that door has produced little result.

More recently we have woken up to a better strategy, namely that marketers should use their marketing skills on a new audience: investors and analysts. Company boards and Finance Directors in particular need to pay attention to the City and their share price. When the City demands more information about customers, brand equity and marketing activities, the Board itself has to be able to explain their marketing. The reality is that marketing is the sourcing and harvesting of cash flow and nothing interests the City more than cash flow. This seminar will outline the campaign so far and open a discussion on how best we can market marketing to the City.

Simona Botti

Anja Lambrecht

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News

Private labels are no longer cheap and inferior products, say Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict EM Steenkamp. They have come a long way and many represent top quality and good value for consumers.

Premiumstorebrands

The hottest trendin retailing

Private labels started as cheap, inferior products. Historically they did not even carry the name of the store. Usually, the package with black letters on a white background simply identified the product, like paper towels or dog food. Most consumers saw these generics for what they were – undifferentiated, except in their poor quality, but at a very low price. More recently, store brands became copycats. Copycats imitate the leading manufacturer brands in the category. Their touted value proposition is the same quality as leading manufacturer brand, but at a considerably lower price (typically 30-40%).

In contrast, the current private label strategy at best practice retailers is to use ’Premium Store Brands‘ to help position the retailer as a ’brand‘. The emergence of these new premium private labels is the hottest trend in retailing. Examples of premium private labels include Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Choice (US), Loblaws’ President’s Choice (Canada), Tesco Finest (UK), Marks & Spencer’s St. Michael (UK), Woolworth Select (Australia), Pick and Pay’s Choice (South Africa), and Albert Heijn’s AH Select (Netherlands).

The important distinction between premium store brands and traditional copycat brands is the clear vision of the retailer to differentiate on quality vis-à-vis the manufacturer brands combined with the absence of any attempt to copy the packaging of the leading manufacturer brands.

DifferentiationWhy do retailers develop premium store brands? Our research has identified two reasons: the retailer’s need to differentiate itself from other retailers and the retailer’s need to generate higher profits by differentiating its private label from manufacturer brands.

Retailers are beginning to recognise that while the classic copycat branding strategy does help as a tool against manufacturer brands, it does not help differentiate the store against other retailers. It does not provide a reason for the consumer to buy at this retailer in favour of another retailer, since every major retailer has a more of less equivalent private label. In fact, in the consumers’ mind, often the only thing separating one retailer store brand from the other is the name on the label. To escape this commoditisation, retailers are investing in premium store brands.

Higher profit marginsCopycat private labels have to sell at a considerable price discount versus leading manufacturing brands. After all, they do not claim to be better, only to provide (purportedly) equivalent quality for a lower price. However, that poses a problem for the retailer. Although the profit margin percentage the retailer earns is higher on its copycat store brand than on leading manufacturer brands, profit dollars

may actually be lower. This is because copycat private labels sell at a considerable discount. A 30% profit margin on the sale of a store brand priced at $1 generates less dollar profit than a 20% profit margin on the sale of a manufacturer brand of $1.75. In contrast, the two types of premium store brands are priced at par or above leading manufacturer brands (we dub these “Premium-Price Store Brands”) or sell only at a small discount, typically 10% (we call these “Premium-Lie Store Brands”). Thus, versus manufacturer brands, higher profit margin percentage translates into higher dollar profits for premium private labels.

Premium-lite store brandsThe premium-lite store brand starts with leading manufacturer brands as the standard and then attempts to make a superior product at a lower price. If retailers can pull this off from a product development perspective and convince customers of the performance from a marketing perspective, then life can become unbearable for manufacturer brands. It is the holy grail of retailer private label strategy. This is the ambition of retailers around the world, regardless of retail type or size.

A leading example of the premium-lite strategy is Canadian retailer Loblaws’ President’s Choice store brand. In its marketing, rather than focus on price, President’s Choice emphasises

the quality of the ingredients and the care with which the products are prepared. It competes directly against the major manufacturer brands on quality. Since Kellogg’s had two scoops of raisins in their cereal, President’s Choice cereal had to have twice the number of raisins, whilst still being cheaper. The Decadent chocolate chip cookie under the President’s Choice label has 39% chocolate chips compared to 19% chocolate chips by weight in Chips Ahoy!. In addition, real butter replaced hydrogenated coconut oil and quality chocolate substituted for artificial chips. The resulting Decadent product became Canada’s market leader in chocolate chip cookies despite being sold only in the 20% of the market held by Loblaws.

Premium-price store brandsWhile most premium store brands are still somewhat cheaper than leading manufacturer brands, there are indeed some premium private labels now that are more expensive than leading manufacturers’ brands. Premium-price store brands were pioneered in the United Kingdom by retailers like Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, and Tesco. South Africa’s Woolworths has a strong private label focus, selling nearly all its foods and general merchandise products at premium prices under the Woolworths name. In the US, Victoria’s Secret has been able to develop several premium-price private

label brands. A compelling case study of the premium-price strategy is provided by Britain’s Tesco, one of the world’s largest retailers.

In our research, we examined Tesco’s pricing strategy in various categories as it related to the Tesco Finest range. For example, in orange juice, both Minute Maid (£1.68 per litre) and Tropicana (£1.62) were priced below the Tesco’s premium store brand Tesco Finest (£1.84)! There was no manufacturer brand priced above Tesco Finest. In milk chocolate bars, Tesco Finest at 89 pence for 100 grams was priced above the category leader Cadbury, which was priced at 54 pence. Only a few speciality brands, like Lindt at £1.29, commanded a premium over Tesco Finest. To be a premium-price store brand, the private label must be able to price above some of the leading

manufacturer brands in the category. However, there will be niche and speciality brands that are priced higher than the premium-price retailer

brands because most retailers have a mass-market strategy.

Retailer private labels have come a long way. Banish the old image of cheap low quality toilet paper or canned beans packaged in black and white. Today’s sophisticated retailers are successfully experimenting with premium store brands and retailer brands can extract a price premium over famous manufacturer brands with long histories such as Cadbury, Danone and Tropicana. Rather than perceiving them as a poor cousin to manufacturer brands, many consumers can be persuaded to pay more for top quality private labels.


Feature

The emergence of these new premium private labels is the hottest trend in retailingIn the consumers’ mind, often the only thing separating one retailer store brand from the other is the name on the label.

What are the main trends in marketing?Over the last couple of years we’ve seen two related mega-trends: proliferation and polarisation.

Proliferation is a trend cutting across industries and geographies. There are four underlying drivers of this trend, most of which are now well known: proliferating media channels; proliferating sales or distribution

channels; fragmenting customer segments and proliferation of occasions (consumers interacting with, purchasing and using the same brands, products and services in different ways on different occasions). For many of our clients, principally large, established businesses, few of the legacy tools, organisation models or capabilities in marketing and sales are geared for this proliferation. One implication is that we are seeing the need for

new marketing capabilities that weren’t needed just five or six years ago. So as this proliferation ‘tsunami’ is hitting there is enormous change going on inside commercial organisations. It touches almost every aspect of commercial decision-making.

The other ‘mega-trend’ we are seeing is accelerating polarisation. Put simply, this is manifested as category growth at the top and at the bottom price points while the traditional middle market is being squeezed. We see this as a consistent pattern across dozens of categories, across multiple countries. It has been going on for around five years but is gaining speed. More recently, we are seeing polarisation not just in terms of price, but other dimensions of consumer shopping behaviour and attitudes. For example, within fresh food, local, organic and ‘Fair Trade’ varieties are growing significantly faster than ‘standard’ varieties. Another example is in the grocery channel, where small convenience formats at one end, and mega-stores at the other, are growing at twice the rate of traditional mid-sized supermarkets.

One important outcome of proliferation and polarisation is that an increasing number of companies are realising that they have to be more customer-centric. Faced with dozens of media and channels, traditional ‘product push’ strategies are neither effective nor affordable.

We still see too many businesses sticking to a view that being ‘customer centric’ means ‘giving the customer more’ – often adding services and options, leading to spiralling costs and unmanageable complexity. But the winners are finding ways to turn proliferation into selective new growth opportunities. They are exploring the shopping behaviour of different customer segments in real time and assembling extended networks of information to build a more multi-faceted picture of consumers. And they are refocusing their channel and marketing spending based on superior customer insights captured at the ‘cell’ level; ensuring investments are ‘fit for purpose’ for specific customer sub-segments, need-states or occasions.

In your experience, what is the single biggest mistake that companies make with regard to marketing? The single biggest mistake is treating marketing as an ivory tower where insights are locked up. Many companies really struggle to share customer insights with the people who actually interact with customers everyday, or to translate great customer insights into meaningful action at the front line. It’s difficult to change because marketing is often defined in too limited terms, often focused on just communications and above-the-line traditional media spend.

Making the shift is hard. It requires changes in organisation design, performance metrics and incentives, capabilities, analytic tools, information sharing and decision-making processes. In short, it requires a transformation of the commercial engine room of the business. For many businesses, this transformation will take many months if not years.

Adaptingto changeTraditional marketing strategies no longer apply as the growth of the internet has created multichannel consumers who are buying in a very different way.

Professor Patrick Barwise talked to Johanna Waterous, Director, McKinsey and Company about proliferation, polarisation and the surprises the internet still holds in store for marketers.

Johanna Waterous


Interview

The BackgroundFounded by the Icelandic government in 1906, Síminn enjoyed a monopoly position until market liberalisation began in 1998. Competition was intensifying but Síminn still held a market leadership position in all its product and service domains in 2003. They offered a full range of data communications services to consumer and business markets, including fixed (land) lines, mobile phone equipment sales and service, data services, and cable.

The challenge for the new management team was to evolve the brand from its monopolistic centre of gravity to something more consumer-centric: from a company known only as the biggest telecom company

in Iceland to the customer’s first choice; from products to solutions, value, and results; from transactions to relationships; from technology-orientation to market-orientation; from a state-owned and run business concern to an attractive investment option; and from a defensive strategic responder to a dynamic and innovative player in the market. The situation was complicated by a lack of common vision, mission and core company values within the firm, and a workforce that found itself divided squarely between the new and old “guards.” The team had to redefine Síminn’s core business, and essentially turn the company around. Tough as the challenge was, the potential payoff was great.

Síminn brandinside

The

Would you accept that working out marketing ROI for long-term brand building advertising is more difficult than for short-term direct response programmes?Traditionally, too many marketers have argued that you just can’t measure the impact of brand marketing spending, whereas you can isolate the affect of direct marketing or point-of-sale campaigns. In fact, it is often the case that measuring the impact of targeted, short-term marketing programmes can be extremely difficult, because there are so many extraneous events to account for: competitor pricing or marketing activity; point of sale execution or even the weather!

In any case, in most leading companies, the CEO and CFO no longer accept the argument that you just can’t measure the impact of brand building, except over a number of years. Or, indeed, will sign off on marketing budgets that are based broadly on “what we did last year plus or minus 5%”. One of the direct outcomes of proliferation in media channels and media consumption is the relative decline in the effectiveness of traditional media and shift in spending to new media and channels, including increasing below-the-line spend on point of sale programmes. An unforeseen benefit of these shifts in spending is that the new analytics and tools available to measure the impact of search and internet advertising are raising some tough questions about the traditional analytics (or lack thereof) applied to traditional marketing spend. Many of our clients are seeking ways to develop better disciplines, financial rigour and ongoing measurement systems to better assess marketing spend effectiveness.

What has been the most surprising thing to happen in marketing in the last five years?For me, it’s been the speed and scope of the impact of the internet on customer purchase behaviour. Just three years ago, many pundits predicted the internet would transform sales transactions; we’d all be buying online, traditional stores were doomed and online marketing was all about price. Few thought about the word-of-mouth marketing power of a trillion text messages a year. Even fewer predicted the scale and power of online communities, write-in reviews and ratings, or the impact of blogging in shaping consumer attitudes and purchase decisions. Or the potential to reach millions by posting ads on ‘billboards’ in mass multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Or how search would change everything. Indeed, few people really anticipated a truly multichannel customer.

So it’s no surprise that today few companies really fully understand this multichannel consumer and even fewer know how best to market to her. The impact that online activity is having on offline purchases is huge, with over 60% of all non-food purchases influenced

or involving the internet at some point in the customer purchase ‘journey’. And it’s not just about online: in some categories, up to 40% of all online orders result in a telephone call at some point. So anybody who is focused on building great online sales and marketing skills had better be investing in their call centres as well. And it isn’t just about a channel to sell a product or deliver a message; it’s also about how you conduct consumer research, test new products or get feedback on service levels.

Finally, I don’t think any of us really understand the next generation of multichannel consumers, today’s 10- to 17-year-olds. My 13-year-old son talks about products he’s learned about while playing an MMOG. Like every teenager, he’s very brand conscious, but learns about brands and what’s new or hot in dialogue with his friends on Facebook or MySpace. He is ‘experiencing’ products before they are even launched and knows more than could ever be communicated in any advertisement, brochure or sales pitch. And his point of view isn’t being informed by three or four personal friends, it’s being informed by three or four thousand strangers.

In the United States 50% of teenagers are now participating in one of these community sites, the UK is next in line. And 50% of those who are in these communities say that their

online community friends are more, or as important, as their real life friends. So as you are thinking about a brand re-positioning or launching a new idea, how do you find the folks in those communities that are most influential? That’s a problem that nobody was thinking about five years ago. And if you’re the CMO of a consumer business, you might want to worry if your marketers have never looked at MySpace or YouTube or played an MMOG….

Is there anything which you think is just below the horizon which will be a big surprise?In the business-to-business sector, we believe that Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) represent an enormous opportunity which is growing rapidly, they can be very profitable but are generally under-penetrated by traditional marketing and sales strategies. Innovations in online businesses and communities are also transforming this segment. For example, a combination of smart search, online auctions and e-purchasing is enabling SMEs to club together to achieve effective scale economies, as well as enabling small businesses to reach thousands or even millions of customers cost effectively – witness the importance of SMEs for eBay.

Between 1906 and 1998, Síminn had a monopoly of most telecommunications services in Iceland. But when the law changed and the market was opened for competition, the company needed to change radically.Here, the case for change is laid out, illustrating how evolving a brand to meet new markets involves every element and individual in the company to effect necessary change.We see a number of benefits from working

together. First, the Centre provides learning opportunities for our colleagues who work with clients on marketing and sales issues, e.g. to participate in lectures and speaker events. They get exposure to new people and ideas at the sharp end of the marketing and sales arena.

The second benefit is the opportunity to exchange ideas, test emerging thinking and have a continuing dialogue with other experts in the field. This form of informal debate and challenge with external experts is a critical part of our research process.

The third benefit is the opportunity to co-create and host events like the LBS-McKinsey CMO Forum. A few years ago we were struck by the absence of a forum which is explicitly designed by and for CMOs of

leading companies in the UK. (On the other hand there are several established industry-specific marketing events, and many geared to more junior marketing executives.) With LBS, we have created an invitation-only event which provides an informal opportunity for senior executives to share ideas, debate and network. The feedback from attendees of previous LBS-McKinsey CMO events has been very positive, particularly about the quality of debate and idea exchange. While we jointly host the event, we enlist CMOs to help set the agenda, lead break-out discussions and speak on selected topics in what are always highly interactive plenary sessions. Working with London Business School gave us the unique opportunity to create something special for this audience in the UK.

Why does McKinsey and Company support the Centre for Marketing at London Business School? >>


Interview Case Study

“Few companies really fully understand this multichannel consumer and even fewer know how best to market to her”

The StrategyThe starting point to meet Síminn’s challenges was a major six-month brand positioning project initiated in 2003. This provided the following strategic blue-print. Síminn’s vision is to become known as a guide, or proactive leader, someone who not only knew where the industry is heading, but that was also trusted to lead customers unerringly through the growing complications and choices that lay ahead in an era where information and communications are included among people’s most basic needs. Síminn’s mission—its purpose—was to be customer-focused and services-minded. Beyond helping, guiding, and educating customers this requires an integration of products and services that can meet customer evolving needs in and across consumer and business markets.

The associated brand promise rested on Síminn’s ability to provide a complete range of products and services – something competitors could not match. However, Síminn needed to take advantage of this better to make it a differential advantage and become a One-Stop Shop; a single source for products, expertise and technology, and a provider of new solutions that will best meet their needs. This positioning should be supported by a brand personality of “a caring, trustworthy and reliable family man/woman around 35 years old, modern, quite fit and healthy, cheerful who is respected in the community, and looked upon as a role model; international, trendy, exciting, and very pleasant to be with.” Compared to the Síminn personality of old—“an old man who bores you at a party”—this new Síminn personality is younger, more dynamic, and more passionate. The personality should also be relevant to

a target market better defined in terms of consumers’ attitudes and lifestyles to gain a competitive advantage, as Icelandic consumers were basically saturated on technological needs.

The ChallengeThe repositioning task at hand qualified more as a company turn-around effort—something that would require much more than an external brand marketing campaign. In fact, launching an external campaign before getting the house in order would only raise customer expectations. Without executing the strategy internally, this would backfire.

Síminn needed to examine its structure, systems and processes to identify barriers to deliver on its brand positioning and create levers to gain strategic execution. It would also need something that would help employees

of the company stand up for and live up to the new and demanding vision, mission, and values set forth for the company and the brand; something capable of resolving the cultural divide existing between the old and new guards within the company, so that the new vision and core values could be lived. In short, Síminn needed an internal branding campaign, one that would guarantee a corporate culture capable of supporting and reinforcing the essence of the brand. An internal brand program that would align, coordinate, and unify the internal and external branding programs, marketing and business plans and strategies, and activities and decisions of front-line and non-consumer-facing employees. They needed to develop a workforce of motivated, energised, enlightened and empathic ambassadors of the brand.

This would not be an easy task. Executing

the new brand strategy required transformative change. Síminn was organised as separate business units served by functional silos or support units. Underlying this seemingly tidy organisational structure was actually a complex array of dozens of small profit- and cost-centres. Historically, these were more likely to squabble over budgets than attempt to achieve an integrated market offer. Building a truly customer-focused organisation would not be obtained with a single initiative, or all at once by decree. It required interdisciplinary partnership and leadership, and buy-in across all parts of the fragmented organisation.

“Building a truly customer-focused organisation would not be obtained with a single initiative, or all at once by decree”

This case was originally prepared for ‘Customer Focused Marketing: The Key to Unlocking Profits’. An Executive Education Programme run by London Business School.

The questions below reflect the channels of discussion that are explored during the programme.

1. How could such a transformation be engineered, exactly? What are the design tenets guiding the task?

2. What would the internal rollout look like? What kind of training might this involve?

3. Would the firm again need to reorganise to better serve targeted customer segments?

4. Who should be involved as strategic and tactical partners, and how would they be involved? Finally, how would results be measured and success of the program be gauged, monitored, and controlled?

For more information on this and other marketing programmes at London Business School please contact Sonia Fisher.Tel: +44 (0)20 7000 7000 Email: [email protected]

“Tough as the challenge was, the potential payoff was great.”

PostscriptThe original case (London Business School ref CS 07-006) was prepared by Professor Susan Fournier of Boston University and Professor Nader

Tavassoli of London Business School as a basis for classroom discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a management situation.


Case Study

Practitioners in the field of digital marketing, representing companies including Google, Virgin, and Betfair, joined the CMO Breakfast recently. The discussion was chaired by McKinsey’s London Sales and Marketing Practice and London Business School’s Centre for Marketing.

All participants agreed that this issue is at the top of the CMO’s agenda, but that the right organisational setup or capabilities to identify and capture opportunities from digital marketing have not been achieved by them or their peers.

We know what it takes to build and strengthen a brand and how to optimise sales channels and go-to-market strategies in the traditional world, however, we have not yet found the right ‘formula’ and capabilities to do the same in the digital world.

What are the Marketing capabilities needed in new world of digital marketing?The discussion generated many unresolved questions, including: How does the digital world impact the

consumer decision model? Is the traditional purchasing funnel from awareness building to repurchasing still valid? Creating awareness or improving the success rate of purchases must be looked in a different light if 25% of online consumers actively share their advice with peers and 30% of consumers compare choices online. Leveraging each touch-point across the purchasing funnel requires not only a deep

understanding how consumers today make their decisions, but also implies a significant integration and coordination challenge of traditional and digital channels.

How do you effectively integrate digital and traditional marketing? Digital marketing is not additive, but fundamentally changes the way we do business. How do you seamlessly merge digital and traditional marketing campaigns, manage trade-offs between investments in digital and traditional marketing and finally, how do you organise online and offline businesses?

How do you leverage the fact that ‘online goes mobile’ allowing you to reach your consumers and customers ‘on-the-go’?

How do you respond to new online pricing models which allow you to personalise pricing to a much more granular level, while you face the risk of increasing price transparency at the same time?

How do you effectively optimise lead users, communities and networks to drive innovation and create a positive word of mouth effect through your customers?

At the same time, how can you manage the risk of consumer activism? Every consumer becomes a publisher, but with no accountability for the published content.

For details of future events hosted by London Business School’s Centre for Marketing, please visit www.london.edu/marketing/ To get in touch with McKinsey & Company, please email David Corby at [email protected]

textbookRewriting

the

Staying ahead in the digital worldTraditional marketing processes and capabilities which have been refined over the past decades have to change or revolutionise to be effective in the digital world, says Dieter Kiewell, Partner at McKinsey and Company. Right now brand owners, search agents, portals, e-commerce and communication sites or web communities are rewriting the textbook of marketing excellence.

1. Consumer are online: Average EU internet penetration is between 50 and 60% with countries like Portugal or Sweden reaching 80%.

2. Internet usage approaching mainstream demographics: Online population doesn’t differ significantly from total EU population in terms of age, level of education, or any other demographic criteria.

3. Consumers spend more time online: Time online increased 44% during the past 2 years.

4. Consumers increasingly engage in ‘user generated content’: Community sites increased by 500% from ’06 to ’07, measured by page views, while search increased by 50%, portal and content sites by 16%, e-commerce sites remained constant and communication focused sites decreased by 20%.

5. Consumers trust recommendations of their peers: 63% of consumers trust recommendations from consumers, 51% of consumers trust consumers opinions posted online, while only 33% and 10% trust search engine ads or online banner ads.

Key Facts >>


Feature

What are the main challenges for the marketing function today?In many organisations, the marketing function is required to move up the food chain. This requires an expanded skill set. Marketers’ skill sets have not been keeping up, however, and marketers often lack the competence to integrate marketing with the firm’s core processes: strategy, operations and people.

It starts with mindset. Marketers typically think top-line, whereas management think bottom-line. Ask a Marketing Manager the difference between sales, revenues, cash flow and income and you will send them into a nervous tizzy. Start talking return on assets and meet their blank stares. Only by getting your marketers up to speed can you expect your business model to gain traction and reap rewards through appropriate market behaviours.

What is the single most important thing that marketing can do to boost the bottom line?Marketers are under increased pressure to be accountable, and rightly so. However, this very pressure has also accelerated an ever-increasing short-term focus on sales promotions – which are often detrimental in the long-term – and quick hits like brand extensions, that often dilute rather than strengthen the brand.

Instead of being driven by simple and often misleading metrics, marketers should focus on the customers, their differentiated needs and how to align the entire organisation, not just communications, with serving those needs better than the competition. This is not a quick fix, but continual organisational focus on the customer leads to long-term success.

How can companies use marketing to innovate?Marketers should gather the voice of the customer, distil this into insights and

represent it across the entire organisation to create mutually-reinforcing systems, structures, and processes that establish innovative ways of serving the customer. This represents deep innovation that leads to focused and defensible market positions.

What is the Centre for Marketing’s unique contribution to the discipline of marketing?In many organisations, marketing is stuck in the communications box, removed from the firm’s core strategy process. We help marketers think more strategically, thereby providing them with the leverage to contribute their unique skills and creativity and transform their businesses. This is not something you can gain from marketing textbooks, many of which are stuck in the past. It is a live experience and the Centre provides a natural forum for a fruitful exchange.

What have been the findings and how can they be applied?Some of these ideas are still in their infancy, but they have me most excited right now. As part of the research for ‘Brand Turnarounds’ we have discovered several threats to brands’ long-term health. For example, brands are sometimes overly protected and their essence – their DNA – is rigidly set in stone. When the core

market evolves it can then literally move away from the brand, slowly but surely. Marketers need to learn to create an adaptable DNA with a culture of embracing mutations. In other firms, brands mutate in order to hold on to their ageing customers and thereby abandon their core market position. Here, marketers need to learn to let go and to keep fresh to continually recapture the same market position. These are only two of the patterns we have uncovered in establishing that one needs to understand what got a brand into trouble in order to find the right remedy to bring it back on track.

Other ongoing research challenges marketers to try to capture ‘in group’ customers by turning off ‘out group’ customers. For example, The Ivy often leads annual surveys as being Londoners’ favourite restaurant. It leads the same surveys as Londoners’ least favourite restaurant. If The Ivy cared about market-wide ’average‘ ratings – something I see too often in practice – it would try to appease the brand detractors. Not only would it dilute the brand appeal to those who love The Ivy, but it also misses out on an important point, namely that detractors (the out-group) can be highly useful in fuelling acceptance and action by the target in-group. This was a lesson not lost on the George Bush campaign that mobilised its core Republican voters by alienating the Democrats. John Kerry, and Al Gore before him, instead went with a watered-down message to attract undecided voters. My research examines how marketers can apply similar strategies in their battle for sales.

From altering rigid mind-sets to how the popularity (or not) of London’s The Ivy restaurant can teach us all valuable lessons, Professor Tavassoli discusses the challenges facing today’s marketers.

Professor Nader Tavassoli

Professor Nader Tavassoli is Chair of the Marketing Faculty at London Business School and Non-Executive Chairman of The Brand Inside (www.thebrandinside.com/). Previously, Nader was on the marketing faculty at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he was also the Richard Leghorn Career Development Professor of Entrepreneurship and Director of the eBusiness track. He received his doctorate from Columbia University.

Nader’s research is on brand strategy, marketing communications and consumer psychology, with a special emphasis on cross-cultural differences in behaviour. He is currently writing a book on internal branding.

Nader’s teaching and consulting expertise is in branding, customer orientation, marketing strategy and global marketing. He is the director of the London Business School Executive Education Programme Customer Focused Marketing: The Key to Unlocking Profits (http://www.london.edu/executiveeducation/ckmp.html). His corporate clients have ranged from high-tech start-ups to over 20 of the Global Fortune 500 companies. Prior to his academic career he lived and worked in England, France, Germany, Spain and the US.

“If The Ivy cared about market-wide ‘average’ ratings it would try to appease the brand detractors”

“Brands are sometimes overly protected and their essence – their DNA – is rigidly set in stone”


Faculty Profile

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Engaging people in the process of building a company’s brand cannot start too early and the key lies with the HR department, says Professor Nader Tavassoli.

Building

the inside outbrands from

In too many organisations branding remains an externally facing communications exercise. If brands are to be an integral part of a company’s strategy, they need to gain traction internally. The reality, however, is that a majority of people do not know or understand their company’s strategy. It should thus be no surprise that they fail to deliver the brand promise to customers.

Fortunately, there are initiatives that can be taken to overcome this issue. These initiatives leverage core skills already in the marketer’s tool box. Critically, however, marketers need to involve HR as well as obtain the Finance Director’s blessings. In many companies this is uncharted if not hostile territory for marketing!

The 6 A’s journeyBuilding brands from the inside out is a process that involves taking people along the ‘6 As’ journey: from attention, to awareness, acceptance, advocacy, action and adherence. Each stage has different drivers and requires different interventions depending on the situation: business as usual, an attempt of a brand turnaround, or a merger, for example.

Each stage faces formidable barriers. On the one hand, to attract senior managers’ attention, a convincing business case for an internal branding campaign must be made. On the other hand, increased revenues and cost savings do not get the rest of the organisation excited. Instead, one of the most effective

ways is to dramatise the current problem with the (lack of) brand through the voice of the customer. This makes the situation tangible and credible. Creating awareness for the proposed solution is then about communicating the brand across hopelessly clogged internal communication channels, to employees of whom the majority do not trust what top management has to say. What is needed is a simple, clear and sensible articulation of the strategy along with a visible commitment from top management.

To gain acceptance and advocacy one-size-fits-all will not work. Which of the employees are the brand advocates, agnostics and antagonists? Identifying advocates and enlisting

them as brand champions—those that are opinion leaders within their functions—is a powerful tool for winning over others less involved with or cynical about the brand. Antagonists can also be useful in energising the debate and, thereby, create a burning platform for agnostics.

Building brands from the inside out is a grassroots exercise that needs to penetrate every functional silo, from information technology to research and development, from accounting to sales and service. Actions, those thousands of daily decisions that ultimately create (or destroy) the brand should be inspired top-down—through concrete behavioural change—but need to be continuously invented

If not through its people, at what point exactly does an organisation create a differentiated brand?


Managers from leading companies, including Masterfoods, Shell and BT, came together at Red Bull’s London offices recently, to discuss the Business and Strategy of Branding with London Business School professors Nirmalya Kumar (Faculty Director, Executive Education) and Nader Tavassoli (Chair, Marketing Subject Area).

Using an ‘Alignment Analysis’, taught at London Business School, Tavassoli identified four critical ‘gaps’ that need to be addressed in this process (figure 1): The Specification Gap, Performance Gap, Communication Gap and Satisfaction Gap. The alignment process has four benefits: It creates customer focus Provides strategic traction Creates a self-sustaining competitive advantage

Creates company assets in intellectual, emotional, and, action-based social capital within the heads, hearts and hands of the employees.

of brandingand strategyThe business

Business, Brand and Behaviour. The three Bs are the cornerstones of successfully managing the business and strategy of branding. Their alignment is paramount for delivering customer value and sustaining a competitive advantage.

by the various actors themselves. Rather than first create a company-wide mapping of all possible initiatives, and what will appear an insurmountable challenge, try to identify quick gains. These can be used to prove the benefits to top management and maintain their attention, and they can be celebrated to win over others. These are also the seeds to adherence, something that requires visible top-level sponsorship and long-term engagement, as well as adaptation to changing market conditions. It must be constantly monitored through employee polls and against the programme’s KPIs to keep it on track. Otherwise traction will be lost.

HR as brand guardianA recent study by The Brand Inside (www.thebrandinside.com) indicated that for 60% of sampled organisations it was unclear who is responsible for building the internal brand in order to support the external promise. As the 6 A’s process indicates, the human resource (HR) department must take the lead in this process. Unfortunately, instead of championing the brand, HR is often at the very source of commoditising the firm’s own products and services by having a generic people process. Recruitment ads are more bland than on-brand. They are largely generic with different logos adorning the same tired copy next to near-identical images of dynamic and diverse young adults. Job descriptions, key-performance indicators, development programmes, incentives and rewards tend to look similar across many of the competitors in a given industry. In addition, many people have similar educational and social backgrounds and (often) have worked for one or more competitors in the past. Even the current HR buzz topic of “employer branding” misses the point. It is typically associated with generically creating a great place to work, but it is not about creating a differentiated organisation in a strategic sense. This begs the question: if not through its own people, at what point exactly does an organisation create a differentiated brand?

The clearer the brand can be communicated, the easier it is to gain alignment within the business and clarity within the market. Internal branding starts at the top of the HR agenda: company values need to be less generic in practice—usual “commodity” suspects that appear across competitors include the hackneyed phrases of trust, integrity, innovation, quality and partnership—and nurture a culture that expresses the brand and thereby executes a differentiated strategy.

Engaging people in this process cannot start too early. It starts with recruiting people with

the right attitude, who are naturally inclined to live the brand. Having differentiated recruiting ads will attract on-brand applicants through self selection. HR’s job doesn’t stop there. The selection process should assess the candidate-brand fit. Many organisations use the same hiring criteria as competitors and hiring might as well be outsourced. Once on the ground, making the induction process a showcase for the brand immediately engages people in the strategy. Then, going forward, it is essential to

communicate the brand across all the touch-points HR communicates with the workforce: training, development, performance reviews, promotions, and incentive schemes. Leading companies are learning that reviewing and rewarding people for on-brand behaviours, rather than financials only, can set them apart from the competition.

Show me the money!To gain top managers’ and HR’s attention, these efforts have to lead to measurable results. One set of measures relates to cost-savings involving key HR metrics. On-brand ads save recruiting costs through self-selection, saving costs on handling the wrong applicants.

On-brand selection processes further result in a higher yield rate in job offers accepted. Moreover, it should be no surprise that people like to work at organisations where there is an attitudinal and cultural fit. This translates into higher retention—reducing costly turnover—and even lower absenteeism. There are already accepted ways of monetising these returns and, when added up, they will more than cover the budget required for the programme. This will be music to the Finance Director’s ears.

Communicating and living the brand through HR also results in higher pride, sense of purpose, and motivation levels. Motivated people who fully support the brand and understand their individual role in delivering the right customer experience are also likely to be more productive. Needless to say, recruiting and developing people on-brand will also positively affect the customer experience. People will know how to behave in order to deliver the advertised brand promise. This creates customers and grows the top line. Ultimately, brands that are created from the inside out are the foundation to a difficult-to-imitate competitive advantage.

It should be no surprise that people like to work in organisations where there is an attitudinal and cultural fit.

Professor Nader Tavassoli is Chair of the London Business School Marketing faculty and non-executive Chairman of The Brand Inside.

MIND THE GAP

Firm & PartnersBrand touchpoints & service delivery

CustomersBrand experience

& perceived service

Communication gap

StrategyBrand positioning & service design

CustomerDesired brand

& expected service

Specification gap

Satisfaction gap

Performance gap

Figure 1


Feature Feature

The mission of the Centre for Marketing is to improve the practice of marketing. Our world-class faculty, innovative and rigorous research and programmes addressing relevant marketing topics, all help us to deliver on our mission. But equally important is our interaction with marketing practitioners - our supporters find interacting with us similarly beneficial.

Benefits of Centre for Marketing membership include two free places for supporter’s employees at each of our seminars, the Centre for Marketing Evening Programme, and invitations to other selected events. Membership also includes complimentary Library Partnership, allowing access to and use of books and other resources. Supporters have access to faculty research in progress and receive copies of the School’s biannual marketing publication Marketing Insight, and the quarterly Business Strategy Review.

Centre for Marketing membership for one year is £16,500 (+VAT) per company. For further information, please contact the team on +44 (0)20 7000 8627 or email [email protected]

The Centre for Marketing would like to thank its members for their ongoing support. Our corporate supporters are: Betfair, Masterfoods, McKinsey & Company, Procter & Gamble, Shell International and WPP.

Centre for marketing

The Specification GapAlignment both starts and ends with the customer. Understanding target customers and continuously investing in learning about their evolving needs is the primary building block of the alignment process. Based on these, firms should design their strategic brand positioning and offering and formulate a clearly articulated value proposition. The distance between target customer needs and the resulting value proposition characterises the Specification gap. Businesses need to understand that some customers make very specific tradeoffs. Therefore, they need to be clear on which key attributes to outperform and which ones they can scale back on. Businesses also need to make sure that structures, systems and processes are designed with the customer in mind, rather than serving narrow interests of a functional silo.

The Performance GapThe Performance gap encompasses the difference between brand touchpoints and the brand positioning. Brand touchpoints extend beyond advertising and media to include employees, especially those who interact with your customers on a daily basis. Therefore, it is imperative to align an entire organisation internally around a positioning so as to maximise consistency and minimise the Performance gap. According to Tavassoli, the execution of a brand positioning – which requires changing actual behaviour – can be the biggest difference between success and failure. Most companies agree that they are not successful at executing strategy. This comes as no surprise given that most employees do not know or understand their company’s strategy.

The Communication GapThe Communication gap represents the difference between customer experience and brand touchpoints. The question that firms need to ask is whether they are demonstrating and documenting the value-added that they communicate? Firms spend extraordinary efforts at extolling their virtues in order to land a deal, but relatively little effort in making sure the customer derives and realises the value gained. This is key for building close relationships.

The Satisfaction GapThe circle is completed by the Satisfaction gap, which defines the space between customers’ expectations and desires and their experience. In essence, this is what firms measure when they conduct customer satisfaction surveys. On the one hand, expectations can be overly

raised by advertising or the salesforce, and expectations should be managed. On the other hand, in order to close the Satisfaction gap and deliver on customers’ expectations and desires, companies have to look internally at their operations and ensure that they are delivering on the brand promise. A problem arises when each organisational silo looks at business needs from their ‘own’ perspective. A holistic solution is to take a company view that encompasses the 3B’s: brand, business and behaviour.

Competing against store brandsIn terms of total sales, retailers are far larger than manufacturers. As a result, private label sales are now a major part of the industry. While private label products started out as generics, they have migrated over time from ‘low quality, cheap price’ to ‘same quality, but cheaper’ alternatives. Beauty products are currently the fastest growing category in private labels.

Private labels are not only more profitable for retailers but also provide a means of differentiation from other retailers in an increasingly competitive marketplace. So how do manufacturer brands compete against store brands?

1. Fight SelectivelyTaking Germany as an example, while private labels have increased from 23.4% to 32.1%, all other brands except for premium, have suffered as a result. The market leader and second brands have declined less than 10%, with all ‘other’ brands declining significantly further. This demonstrates that unless manufacturer brands hold a number one or two position in the marketplace, they may not be worth ‘fighting’ for. Therefore, manufacturer brands have to first assess where their brands can create value for consumers, retailers and shareholders. In these areas, there are two ways to compete effectively. The first is through category management and continuous innovation. The second is by leveraging emotional and functional benefits inherent to the brand and not necessarily the product itself.

2. Partner EffectivelyFast growing, super-efficient retailers are not the enemy! Instead of fighting against retailers, manufacturers need to look at areas where they can help retailers differentiate themselves. For example, Nike is currently engaged in designing a line of lower-priced shoes for low-cost US retailer Payless Shoes. While success at hard discounters is possible, it is limited to specific conditions.

3. Innovate BrilliantlyIndustries with high levels of innovation have lower private label penetration. Therefore innovation is a key competitive advantage for manufacturers. This involves managing three key processes: New Product Development, New Product Launches and the Intellectual Property Protection Process. Based on research in Private Label Strategy, Kumar found that New Product Development is most successful at extreme ends of the spectrum: either incremental or radical. The former is characterised by small changes such as packaging redesign versus the latter which many involve an entire change in concept. The developments in the middle were high on complexity, but not enough to create substantial value and differentiation. With regard to launching these products, there are also two divergent strategies to be considered: ‘Sprinkler’ versus ‘Waterfall’. The sprinkler strategy advocates launching a process incrementally in different locations and to different markets while the waterfall strategy advocates one global launch. The choice between these is clearly depends on the product category as well as the competitive nature of the marketplace. Lastly, manufacturers need to establish an Intellectual Property Protection Process so as to leverage their brands against private labels.

4. Create Winning PropositionsDiverting money from communication with customers to communication with retail creates a vicious cycle that does not benefit the firm in the long run. Therefore, manufacturers must work toward combining functional benefits with emotional reasons and spend resources to communicate these to clients. Once an emotional bond is established, consumer consideration is locked in. To secure the subsequent journey from consideration through to purchase and re-consideration, it is imperative to price products competitively and maintain a commitment on quality.

Manufacturer brands face a vicious cycle: As private label share increases, manufacturers’ share decreases, particularly for those who operate on the second tier. As this continues over time, systems profits are moving from manufacturers to retailers, who are now building R&D and advertising capabilities and further exerting pressure on manufacturer margins. Therefore, it is critical for manufacturers to address these dynamics now and adapt their strategies to compete in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Centre for Marketing Faculty in the Press 2007Membership

Tim AmblerMarketing, 19 December 2007Financial Times, 10 December 2007Campaign, 23 November 2007Mint, 17 October 2007Australian Financial Review, 1 October 2007The Business, 28 July 2007 Financial Times, 16 July 2007 Marketing, 4 July 2007Human Resources, 8 June 2007Financial Director, 31 May 2007Marketing, 30 May 2007The Daily Telegraph, 11 May 2007Financial Times, 7 May 2007 Marketing, 25 April 2007Business Zone, 11 April 2007 Freelance UK, 3 April 2007Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph 20 March 2007Financial Times, 10 February 2007 Cambridge Evening News, 6 February 2007Financial Director, 4 January 2007

Patrick BarwiseMarketing, 12 December 2007The Guardian, 26 November 2007Marketplace, 15 November 2007Marketing, 7 November 2007The Economic Times, 28 September 2007Marketing, 26 September 2007CRM Today, 26 September 2007Irish Times, 27 August 2007Financial Times, 23 August 2007The Observer, 12 August 2007Financial Times, 27 July 2007 The Observer, 15 July 2007 NZ Marketing, 1 June 2007Press Association Regional Newswire, 15 May 2007The Express on Sunday, 22 April 2007 Advertising Age, 19 February 2007Broadcast, 9 February 2007Director, 1 February 2007Marketing, 31 January 2007Financial Times, 13 January 2007

Marco BertiniThe Times, 18 January 2007

Dan GoldsteinM2 Presswire, 25 September 2007Time, 27 August 2007Psychology Today, 1 May 2007 Financial Times, 6 January 2007

Nirmalya Kumar The Economic Times, 31 December 2007Calcutta Telegraph, 17 December 2007Daily Mail, 14 December 2007The News & Observer, 9 December 2007Australian Financial Review, 7 December 2007

Business Line (The Hindu), 29 November 2007Carolina Newswire, 27 November 2007The Times of India, 8 November 2007Business Standard, 6 November 2007The Times of India, 3 November 2007CRM Magazine, 1 November 2007Korea Times, 26 October 2007The Economic Times, 24 October 2007Business Today, 21 October 2007Media Newsline, 9 October 2007Brandweek, 3 September 2007Business Standard, 31 July 2007 Brand Strategy, 9 July 2007 Business Strategy Review, 1 July 2007 The Hindu, 21 June 2007 The Hindu, 7 June 2007 Financial Times, 14 May 2007 Business Standard, 7 May 2007 Agency faqs, 7 May 2007Rediff, 3 May 2007Business Standard, 1 May 2007 Marketing Magazine, April 2007PR Web, 27 April 2007Rediff, 23 April 2007The Economic Times, 18 April 2007 Australian Financial Review, 13 April 2007 CRM Magazine, 1 April 2007 Los Angeles Times, 25 March 2007 Business Today, 25 March 2007 Financial Times, 14 March 2007Business Standard, 6 March 2007Rediff, 6 March 2007Private Label Buyer, 1 March 2007 Electrical Wholesaling, 1 March 2007 ENP Newswire, 15 February 2007 Seattle Post Intelligencer. 5 February 2007The Economic Times, 4 February 2007 The Grocer, 3 February 2007The Economic Times, 3 February 2007 Research Alert, 2 February 2007 Rocky Mountain News, 2 February 2007 The Fort-Worth Star-Telegram, 29 January 2007 Advertising Age, 22 January 2007 Business Standard, 2 January 2007 Gourmet Retailer, 1 January 2007

John RobertsAustralian Financial Review, 1 October 2007The Observer, 3 June 2007 Sunday Mail, 18 March 2007Sunday Telegraph, 18 March 2007

Nader TavassoliBrand Strategy, 9 July 2007 Business Strategy Review, 1 July 2007 Marketing Week, 11 January 2007

Naufel VilcassimTimes Higher Educational Supplement, 2 March 2007


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