iChoose – What Mobile Phone Customers Really Want

Choice modeling is a powerful tool for understanding customers’ choices. Here, the authors explain the benefits of this sophisticated methodology by way of a Booz & Company study of more than 1,800 consumers in the United States. The study provided insights to service providers and mobile phone manufacturers on how to best approach consumers and gain market share

Boosting the Bottom Line through Improved Trade Promotions

For most companies, trade spend constitutes 10-20% of sales and is the second largest item on the P&L behind cost of goods sold. Yet, despite the financial and strategic importance of trade spend, many companies do not fully leverage their investments in it. This article explains how they can.

The New Complete Marketer

Authors Andrew Tipping, Ed Landry, and Gregor Harter explore in this article how chief marketing officers are moving beyond their roles as deliverers of marketing services and representatives of the customer to the company to take a serious role in company strategy.

New Life for Tired Brands

In this strategy+business column, authors John Jullens and Nikhil Bahadur postulate a framework for discovering the dormant vitality in an old product line.

Not Just Effective but Efficient: A New Blueprint for Marketing in an Era of Fragmented Media

CMOs need to pay more attention to marketing sourcing while increasing transparency into the marketing ROI. Authors Nikhil Bahadur, Pat Houston, Curt Mueller, and Marth Turner explain how.

Beyond the Mass Mailing

This article looks at direct marketing in an era when consumers are bombarded with information and offers suggestions for cutting through the clutter. The authors’ explanation of “next-generation campaigns” relies on sophisticated behavior analysis and tight customer segmentation to offer marketers an effective and efficient way to reach their target audiences.

The Power of Operational POS: From Managing at the Mean to Managing the Meaningful

Authors Rich Kauffeld, Paul Leinwand, Johan Sauer, and Carter Utzig explain in this article how new capabilities are redefining how manufacturers and retailers work together to grab their share of customers’ wallets.

The Adaptive Sales Force: Five Steps for Staying Aligned with Customers

As the face of a company and the primary source of its revenues, the sales force is among an organization’s most critical assets. And the importance of its role is only growing as competition intensifies, products commoditize, and companies focus more on organic growth. This article offers five steps for aligning sales organizations with customers.

Always On: Advertising, Marketing and Media in an Era of Consumer Control

Another in the “future of business” series from McGraw-Hill, this book offers an in-depth look at the rapidly shifting and increasingly fragmented media landscape. In it, Booz & Company’s Christopher Vollmer asserts that we are at the beginning of a consumer-centric digital age, in which the traditional ways of marketing products and services are no longer viable.

CMO Thought Leaders: The Rise of the Strategic Marketer

This unique book will take readers inside the minds of forward-looking CMOs at such household-name companies as Procter & Gamble, American Express, NBC Universal, Bank of America, Google, Nokia, and FedEx. A team of experts from Booz & Company and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) have conducted 15 incisive and revealing interviews with former and current marketing leaders to uncover how they make the most of their company’s marketing efforts in today’s new media-driven consumer culture.

Marketing Media Ecosystem 2010

This study, conducted in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, was the first cross-industry partnership of its kind; more than 450 marketers, media companies, and agency executives participated in surveys, interviews, or both. Together, they identified the ways in which the complex media environment is reshaping the marketing ecosystem. And they spotlighted the priorities, capabilities, and partnerships that will be increasingly required across the marketer–agency–media value chain.