Measuring Marketing Productivity: Current Knowledge and Future Directions. Journal of Marketing, Volume 68 (Rust, R. T., Ambler, T., Carpenter, G. S., Kumar, V., & Srivastava, R. K. (2004))

Marketing has always suffered of a lack of accountability. The Journal of Marketing (volume 68) discuss about the tools that can be used to measure marketing productivity.

Financial metrics are not sufficient to measure marketing productivity so this leaded to the development of non-financial metrics. In this article, we studied a framework that separates marketing actions from the firm actions.

The firm strategies lead to technical actions that have an impact on the customer. We can then aggregate all the customer measures into the "marketing asset" which enables to have a long-term measure of the marketing productivity.

But in this article, we learn that this model is not perfect and that there are some research to do to improve it:

• strategies and tactics
• brand equity
• customer equity
• market impact
• financial impact
• competition

So there is still a lot of work to do to make this model a tool that can convince everybody that marketing is a very productive solution.

But personally, I was conviced by this article and I think that marketing is an aspect that can't be neglected in a company.

Customer value propositions in business markets. Harvard business review, Volume 84, Number 3 (Anderson, J. C., Narus, J. A., & Van Rossum, W. (2006))

How can you make sure that the customer will chose your product rather than another? That's the question that Harvard business review, Volume 84, Number 3 tried to answer.

There is a big problem in marketing : customers essentially care about price. But if I reduce my price my profits will decrease, so how can I solve this problem?

The only way to sell your product without lowering your price is to build a customer value proposition. To build such a proposition, you have to:

• Identify what are the requirements and preferences of your customer
• Identify the differences between your company and your rivals
• Provide some documents that will describe your product's performances
• Place the customer value proposition in the heart of your company's activities

There are 3 kinds of customer value propositions :

• All benefits propositions list all the advantages of your product. This method is very fast and simple but not very efficient.
• With a favorable points of difference method, your company will need a better knowledge of your rivals. You must be able to say what are the benefits of your product compared to the others. This requires more analysis work than the previous method but you will have better results.
• The last one is the resonating focus method. This is probably the most performant method but it's also the most complicated to achieve. With this method you will have to know very well your customer, so that you can concentrate on the favorable points of difference that deliver the best value for the customer.

This article was very enriching to me because each idea was illustrated with examples. This was very useful to help to understand the concepts more easily. This was also a good way to make it easier to establish the link between the ideas of the article and our future career. 

It is very important to be aware that to sell a product, you have to be focused on the customer and not on the product.

Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing

Today I read the very ineresting article Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing writen by Stephen L. Vargo & Robert F. Lusch.

In this paper, the two authors discuss about the marketing's evolution during the past few years. At the beginning, marketing was essentially focused on the product (4P's concept). But then marketing started to become more fragmented, and we connected all those marketing's actor to create a network: a new paradigm was born.
The old 'goods dominant' view became obsolete, tangible and discrete transactions shifted to intangible exchanges and relationships between partners. We moved from a static system to a dynamic system where we don't exchange anymore tangible goods but services such as knowledge, skills or information. In this model we are focused on the customer and not on the company.

This article was very pleasant to read because I always tried to relate theories that were mentioned to concrete examples. For example when we buy an Android tablet, we don't only buy a product, we also buy all the services offered with it (Play Store...). By doing this I was convinced by the truthfulness of what I was reading and I learned a lot about the marketing's evolution during the last few years.
I also tried to relate this article to my personnal experiences. Since I am a future computer science engineer triying to acquire management and marketing skills during this year, I want to be an interface between technicians and commercials. The new marketing model is more and more fragmented and I think that I can be a 'connection' between those diferent 'fragments'.

Marketing has always been one of the domains that I wanted to discover more deeply during my engeener studies. I think that understand how the market works is very important if we want to be part of it.
In my opinion a good project manager should have both technical and marketing/sales skills, that's why I expect a lot from this program. So I hope that marketing will be added this year to my long list of passions:

• Mathematics
• Computer sciences
• Energy
• Tennis
• Skiing
• Alpinism
• And pehaps... marketing!