Best Practice: Marketing

Summary
Companies that were once product-driven are finding themselves offering solutions or services to customers. The increasing cost and difficulty of obtaining new customers and retaining them has led to greater investment in building long-term relationships. This article looks at some examples of companies, such as Apple with its Genius Bar or Ikea, with its flatpack furniture assembly service, who are developing interesting solutions or added-value service offerings to build customer loyalty. It also examines how marketers can develop and promote their own solutions based on a better understanding of their customers' decision-making processes.

Summary
The number of customers who are prepared to complain is rising. Effective complaint handling can drive business improvement, improve internal communications and increase operational efficiency. And handling complaints well is one way of ensuring customer loyalty. However, only around 50% of complainants report a satisfactory resolution to their problem. This article looks at why complaints might be badly handled by an organisation and proposes ways to improve customer relations. Dell and Ryanair are among the brands identified as providing poor customer service while American Express and Cathay Pacific are some of the brands identified as getting it right.

Summary
A green brand strives to have the following attributes: ecological, equitable and economic. Research conducted by Cranfield School of Management and elsewhere indicates that successful marketing of a green brand involves three steps: gathering insight into consumer practices; developing sustainable brand propositions; and delivering and communicating green values. This article explains the best practice to follow to achieve these three steps.

Summary
Some brands, such as Apple and L'Oreal, have very successful brand portfolios, while others get it wrong with a brand architecture that is a confusing mess of sub-brands. This article advises how to make brand portfolios interesting, while still being able to speak to the target consumer audience. Suggested strategy includes to build from the commercial priorities of the business, demonstrate a unique point of view, assign clear roles for growth, establish a simple hierarchy, employ imaginative visual and verbal signposts and encourage play and creativity.

Summary
Whatever you call it, there is no standard definition of brand positioning, or the process of setting out what a brand promises to stand for in the eyes of its target consumer. Brand positioning is often made up of component parts which include: brand proposition, character, essence, values and benefits. This article offers guidance on understanding the process and puts forward a framework from which to write a decent brand positioning statement.

Summary
A brand can be defined as a promise in the customer's mind, with brand equity as the sum of the constituent ingredients of that promise. This Best Practice paper looks at the way that brands can create and, often unknowingly, damage brand equity. It discusses how to define a brand's equity systematically, how to budget appropriately to support it, and how companies risk undermining it by neglecting core investments in time, thinking and money to renew the brand promise. It also outlines the main steps to creating an accurate assessment of a brand's value and advises using valuation techniques to interrogate brand health and focus executives' minds on the key issues for the business. Like all papers in the Warc Best Practice Series, it includes a list of related articles and items for further reading, many of which are available on Warc.

Summary
In today's competitive environment, the major sources of shareholder value creation are the intangible marketing assets of the business such as brands and customer relationships. These represent around 80% of a company's value that do not appear on the balance sheet and it is the failure of the marketing community to get to grips with shareholder value that is the real reason why so few companies have a marketing person on their board, says Malcolm McDonald. This article briefly describes how the marketing community should address this major deficiency.

Summary
The issue of paying agencies and agency remuneration has always been beset by difficulties. In this Best Practice article, Merry Baskin looks at the different ways to remunerate agencies beyond traditional and historic models of agency compensation. She advises on how to avoid some of the pitfalls of payment-by-results models, how to produce a 'balanced scorecard' and outlines a recommended overall process.

Summary
CRM matters more in some organisations than in others. The industries where it is most dominant are: financial services, utilities, retail and travel and leisure. This article outlines ten things that need to be tackled, which include integration with data, process, communications, structure and metrics and improving conversation quality with individualisation, customer centricity, dynamic interaction, customer selectivity and peer-to-peer facilitation.

Summary
There are some common themes about what works in social media; those presented here are a synthesis of various insights from the Cranfield Customer Management Forum. Companies ranging from Virgin Media to IBM to Great Ormond Street Hospital to Citibank and Volkswagen all have different social media strategies with different goals in mind. Macdonald and Wilson examine their effectiveness and what more should be done.