MIT Sloan Management Review

FOR SOME decades now, marketing textbooks and professors have assiduously distinguished between sales and marketing. Theodore Levitt’s 1960 definition is still the classic: “Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole [...]

BRAND EXTENSIONS have been the core of strategic growth for a variety of firms during the past decade. The power of such a strategy is evidenced by the sheer numbers. Each year from 1977 to 1984, 120 to 175 totally new brands were introduced into American supermarkets. In each of those years, approximately 40 percent [...]

COMPARING THE MARKETING strategies and tactics of business units today with those often years ago, the most striking impression is one of marketing strategy obsolescence. Ten years ago U.S. automobile companies were gearing up for their second postwar race to produce the largest car with the highest horsepower. Today companies are selling increasing numbers of [...]

AS MARKETS GROW more competitive, companies need to improve their understanding of their target customers’ needs, attitudes, and buying behavior. They must design their offers and their images to be competitively attractive. The target customers carry images in their heads about each supplier’s product quality, service quality, prices, and so on. The images are not [...]

INCREASING NUMBER of companies are realizing the value of combining separate elements of their product lines into bundles. Creating a bundle is like creating a new product. Thus bundles, like new products, can be instruments for implementing company strategy. Although bundles act like new products in the marketplace, they are typically much less expensive and [...]

Do temporary events lead to permanent changes in market positions? For example, will the confrontation with Greenpeace at the Brent Spar oil rig in the summer of 1995 permanently damage Royal Dutch Shell’s image and market standing? Do market share positions gradually build over time or are they conquered in short spurts?
Hysteresis is a phenomenon [...]

Superstition has always had a big impact on human behavior, sometimes yielding macroeconomic effects for even the most industrialized societies. An example of the effects of superstition is the rate of Japanese births from 1960 to 1990 (see Figure 1). A general, steady decline is evident in recent decades. But what jumps out is the [...]

In 1989, private labels or store brands accounted for 65 percent of sales of frozen green and wax beans and for 25 percent of sales of liquid bleach but for only 1.1 percent of sales of personal deodorants. As shown in Table 1, private label market share (in terms of both dollar sales and units [...]

In 1988, Don Clausing and I wrote an article on the “House of Quality,” a product development technique that had long been used in Japan and that was gaining popularity in the United States.1 Since then, over a hundred U.S. firms have adopted the technique for part or all of their product development activities. The [...]

“Be first to market” is one of the most enduring principles in business theory and practice. But the authors point out that many pioneer companies have failed, whereas most current market leaders were not pioneers. In analyzing why this is so, the authors found that market leaders embody five factors that are critical to success.