Creating Brand Names That Work

When it comes to brands, what's in a name is everything—a product is not a brand until you name it. What you call your product makes a difference. In addition to making the product yours and no one else's, a good brand name can create a competitive edge by being memorable, by communicating the special qualities of the product, and by setting the stage for a line of future products. Lorna Opatow brings practical experience to this article in which she identifies the problems and the promises in choosing brand names, and then provides guidelines for creating, developing, and evaluating them prior to testing for market acceptance.     

Some factors in industrial market segmentation

Buyer-seller relationships are complex, especially in industrial marketing. A model for segmenting industrial markets is proposed and implications for organization buying behavior are summarized.     

Industrial life cycles and learning curves: Interaction of marketing and production

The price-oriented experience curve has been widely utilized as a model to design marketing strategies. Yet, it is cost over which many firms exercise the most control. This article explores the cost-oriented learning curve in conjunction with the product life cycle model as joint strategy constructs. Implications of variations in the learning curve parameters are examined.     

Key problems facing industrial distributors

This article reports on a survey of the problems faced by industrial distributors. Five major problem categories are identified and managerial implications are derived from the findings.     

Direct mail response factors for an industrial service

This article addresses the lack of quantitative research on industrial services marketing communications by providing a quantitative study of a direct mail promotion for an industrial service. Prenotification, the structure of the letter, the ethnic background of the signatory, personalization, and prequalifying the respondent were tested as factors influencing the response rate in the direct mail promotion. The results are useful as baseline information for current practitioners and to provide insights for the future development of theories of marketing communications for industrial services.     

Learning curves for new products

A recent article addressing the extrapolation of learning curves fails to point out that the resulting learning curve is not, in general, a straight line but sharply alters its shape at high cumulative outputs.     

Financial and intangible factors in fleet lease or buy decision

We show that there is no single “best solution” in the leasing versus company ownership problem for the fleet administration industry as a whole. Because of the different styles and traditions of firms and because of the emphasis on intangibles beyond economics, a unifying framework of reference including the variety of factors is developed as a hierarchy and evaluated for priorities serving as a useful tool to guide each company to make its decision whether to lease or to buy. This appears to be an effective way for assessing tradeoffs previously regarded beyond the realm of measurement.     

Organizational Obstacles to Innovation: A Formulation of the Problem

A large corporation is a complex social system that seems to take on a life of its own quite apart from the purpose for which it is intended. When one of the purposes of the organization is innovation, the social system can produce obstacles that are not easy to overcome. In this article, Professor Volney Stefflre provides a refreshing look at the problems of keeping an organization innovative enough so that it can survive and thrive in a changing environment. Professor Stefflre's view is an unusual and creative one. It comes partly from his many years of working with a variety of manufacturers as they attempted to adapt to their changing environments through innovation. It also comes from his background in psycho-linguistics—the area, he says, where psychology and anthropology meet. It may not be surprising then that his article includes a brief look at empires and civilizations as part of the support for his thesis. This article is adapted from one of the chapters of Professor Stefflre's new book: Developing and Implementing Marketing Strategies . New York: Praeger Publishers Inc., 1985.     

Product-market strategies in the minicomputer industry

The minicomputer industry has undergone rapid technological change over the last decade and is now characterized by high growth, the emergence of new markets, and intense competition. This article addresses the marketing strategies employed by large and small firms in the minicomputer industry and identifies trends and dimensions that are important for success in such a rapidly changing environment.     

Women as industrial sales representatives

The incidence of women in industrial sales is rising, and females can now be found frequently in traditional all-male type industries such as steel, lumber, and heavy machinery. A strong consensus exists among sales managers that women are effective in industrial selling, and the representatives' records sustain this opinion. Women are proving themselves as worthy, capable, and competent, although they do face special problems in this type of work, some of which are role reversal, production pressures, sexual overtures, and loneliness during travel.     

Salesforce entertainment activities

Sales managers need guidelines for controlling the entertainment costs incurred by their sales personnel. Because of the difficulty in measuring the payoff associated with particular entertainment costs, the decision of whether to spend or not to spend is, of necessity, somewhat subjective. One guide is to compare entertainment activities among different salesforces. A survey of over 1300 salespeople employed in a wide variety of jobs in a large number of industries revealed the extent of entertainment efforts in five areas: taking clients out for lunch, for an evening meal, for a drink, for leisure activities, and parties for clients.