Marketing, Media & Sales Archive

Harley-Davidson has been able to build a community of enthusiasts around its brand that includes members from very diverse groups, and with almost no advertising. How does the king of heavyweight motorcycling keep its fans so loyal? It gives them a reason to "belong."

Once a purely American sport, basketball has been transformed by the N.B.A. into a global phenomenon. What marketing lessons does the N.B.A. teach? If you promote it, the fans will come.

With the marketplace changing so rapidly and product lives shortening, sales has become a strategic issue. But how do you make certain it is managed properly and that a company's best customers are satisfied? You do it by making sales a boardroom issue.

If Japan is to be a front-runner in the era of innovation it must demonstrate leadership in developing new industries and products. To do so requires managers to adopt a new "hands-on" approach and to take greater risks.

Robert J. Thomas, president and chief executive at Nissan, took time out to asses what he knew about the car business and where it is going. The result has been a radical rethinking of the business. Nissan is now in the midst of a major sea of change, entailing an internal shift from a business with a manufacturing mind-set to a marketing-oriented company that puts consumers' needs first.

The trouble with most market segmentation programs is that they capture customers' preferences only at one point in time. Instead of snapshots, what is needed are moving pictures -- or what the authors call "evolutionary segmentation." By detecting unfolding trends, companies can gain a much better understanding of what customer preferences are likely to be tomorrow, and why.

Sound marketing principles from an unlikely source, the Grateful Dead rock group. Jerry Garcia and his fellow musicians emerged from the non-materialistic counterculture of the 1960's to create an exceptionally strong and lucrative brand name that has stood the test of time, and even Mr. Garcia's death in 1995. The basis of the Grateful Dead brand was the group's sustained personal relationship with its customers, derived from an unusual dedication to playing its distinctive and improvisational music at live performances.