Vigilant marketing: Catching fleeting opportunities for growth spurts
Abstract
Marketing executives are constantly seeking opportunities to grow their brands, but find the task more challenging as their brands become bigger and the market more mature. In fact, brand sales in established markets tend not to grow gradually, but rather in spurts, ie short periods of growth alternating with longer periods of stability. These growth spurts come with either foreseeable events that businesses usually plan for, or unforeseeable opportunities that often relate to external events such as positive product reviews or celebrity sightings, which make a brand temporarily more attractive to its customers. For businesses to catch these unforeseeable, fleeting opportunities, this paper advocates a vigilant marketing practice, and discusses persistence analysis, a time-series method for it. To be vigilant, businesses need to be managerially prepared with opportunistic spending and analytically equipped with market intelligence tools. Using the aforementioned time-series method, this paper illustrates the unforeseeable opportunities for creating growth spurts and the need for vigilant marketing on several brands in the digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera market.
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Dominique M. Hanssens is the Bud Knapp Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. From 2005 to 2007 he served as executive director of the Marketing Science Institute. A Purdue University PhD graduate, Professor Hanssens’ research focuses on strategic marketing problems, in particular marketing productivity. He is a Fellow of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science and a recipient of the Churchill and Mahajan awards from the American Marketing Association. He is a founding partner of MarketShare, a global marketing analytics firm with headquarters in Los Angeles.
Fang Wang is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Lazaridis School of Business & Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research delves into marketing analytics, online consumer behaviour and firm strategy with new technology. Her work has appeared in marketing and information systems journals, including Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and Information & Management. She consults for high tech and startup companies.
Xiao-Ping Zhang is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and cross-appointed to the Finance Department at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University. He is co-founder and Chief Executive of EidoSearch, a company providing analytical services for financial Big Data. Professor Zhang’s research develops quantitative methods for fields such as machine learning, Big Data, finance and marketing. He is a frequent tutorial speaker at international conferences in those fields and Associate Editor for several IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) transactions.
Citation
Hanssens, Dominique M., Wang, Fang and Zhang, Xiao-Ping (2017, May 9). Vigilant marketing: Catching fleeting opportunities for growth spurts. In the Applied Marketing Analytics: The Peer-Reviewed Journal, Volume 3, Issue 2. https://doi.org/10.69554/XUDF3829.
Publications LLP