Product Description

Building on the author’s previous book, Financial Aspects of Marketing, Marketing Finance stresses the pivotal relationship between finance and strategy in the marketing process, and clearly demonstrates the techniques and calculations that are necessary to formulate a comprehensive plan.Professor Ward also concentrates on how financial input in marketing can create shareholder value and demonstrates how to achieve the required integration of the finance function with marketing for the successful modern business.Marketing Finance is backed up with a number of integrated industry examples and case studies to demonstrate the success and failure caused by the marketing finance interface.* Concise account of how and why you should integrate a financial function within the marketing process.* Examples and case studies to demonstrate the marketing finance interface functioning in practice.* Reflects important new thinking that stresses the need for marketing to contribute to shareholder value.

Finance Industry Marketing

The Internet is the perfect medium to promote finance/financial industry news and products.To properly support your finance/financial goods and services marketing initiatives, a website should:* be easy to navigate and use* be similar to corporate brand* easy to find on keyword searches* include product support and warranty information* include end-user information and product instructions* include shopping cart / order transaction processing* include links to other company websites

Customer Service, Finance and Sales/Marketing: The Next Drivers for Operational Performance Management

Operational managers are increasingly demanding visibility into day-to-day performance metrics in order to align operational business activity with corporate objectives. In June and July of 2008, Aberdeen Group investigated a wide spectrum of operational performance management capabilities through a primary survey research program. The resulting August 2008 report – Operational KPIs: Are Your Daily Decisions Based on Fact? – provides analysis of responses from over 200 organizations, and uncovers the strategies, actions, technology investments, and services that Best-in-Class companies are utilizing to improve operational performance. Organizations are prioritizing the areas of the business that will benefit most from operational performance management initiatives. When asked to identify the areas of the business where operational performance management efforts will be directed next, respondents agreed that customer service is the top priority, followed closely by finance and sales/marketing operations. This document uncovers the different approaches and resulting performance that these functional business areas are experiencing.

The Changing Face Of Competitive Strategy

In nowadays global, intensively interconnected business environment, a major challenge faced by business organizations is how to maximize shareholder value and sustain growth, while at the same time creating economic value for all. Two essential ingredients of strategy are needed to achieve these long-run corporate objectives which are setting up and being the central part of constellations of partners with whom to conceive and cocreate a continuous stream of value propositions; identifying unique combinations of these value propositions by engaging customers in developing customized services that meet their continuously changing-and equally unique-needs.

Where Did Japan Go Wrong

Twenty years ago, with George Bush Sr. in command of the country, the US was gripped with almost a national hysteria about Japan.

The hottest read in business and government circles was Trading Places: How We Are Giving Our Future to Japan and How to Reclaim It, by Clyde Prestowitcz. Meanwhile, on the fiction best-selling list, was Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, about a Japanese attempt to destroy the American computer industry. Toyota cars were winning quality awards while GM cars dropped parts in the street. Venture capital firms were talking about adopting keiretsu structures.

Flash forward to 2008, when Japan’s competitiveness is wilting from dynamic economies elsewhere in the region including Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and, of course, mainland China.

What’s gone wrong?

In a recent Op-Ed in The Japan Times, Andrei Hagiu and Robert Dujarric opine that Japan’s hierarchical corporate structure has stifled innovation. Hagiu is a Harvard Business School professor and Dujarric heads the Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies at Temple University Japan.

Here’s how they see it:

To stay ahead of China, Japan needs to develop players who innovate at the top of the value chain — providers of things like software, content and services. But these sectors are the country’s Achilles’ heel, as exemplified by the absence of Japanese companies internationally in these fields as well as consulting, advertising and media. Unless it changes course, Japan could be crushed between the anvil of China’s manufacturing clout and the hammer of Western companies’ prowess in services.

Ironically, Prestowitcz saw keiretsu, the creation of interlocking partnerships between top companies and vendors, as a way that Japan could lock in economic growth. But Hagiu and Dujarric argue that the rigidness of keiretsu is actually holding the country back. “This practice can stifle entrepreneurship by creating a kind of planned economy within the keiretsu that fails to transmit market signals.”

If you do business in Japan or just have an interest in the country, this is a good piece from which to ponder its economic future.

When Worlds Collide: Facebook’s Diminishing ROI for Business Users

Do you find Facebook a helpful tool for maintaining and growing business contacts, or are you contemplating what Harvard Online editor Paul Michelman is about to do:

“Defriend” all his business contacts.

As a business tool, says Michelman, Facebook is not working, and it’s cluttering up what he really wants the service to do: maintain his social network. Read his very funny Harvard Business Online column, Why I’m Dropping You as a Facebook Friend.

As one of Michelman’s business friends, I expect to be getting my termination notice any day now. But I can’t say I blame his reasoning — I’m thinking of doing the same myself. Facebook provides few business tools, at least compared to competitor LinkedIn. It doesn’t make me more productive (just the opposite!). And it really doesn’t expand my business network in any useful way.

De-friending business contacts, Michelman observes, “not only will it keep out a lot of noise, but it will solve another pressing problem: keeping my inappropriate friends, and the even more inappropriate friends of friends, at a safer distance from my professional associates.”

Sounds like the “Colliding Worlds” theory espoused by George in Seinfeld when his fiancee, Susan, unexpectedly becomes buddy-buddy with his friend Elaine. Suddenly George’s self-identity (not to mention daily routine) is in turmoil.

“It’s just common sense,” George explains to Jerry. “Anybody knows. Ya gotta keep your worlds apart.”

Are your Facebook worlds colliding? Is it time to you put your business world and your social world in their proper, isolated orbits?

Online Banking and Marketing Statistics from Net.Finance

Since I’m a numbers junkie, whenever I’m at a conference, I try to note as many meaningful statistics as possible. By meaningful, I mean a number that provides an outsider with some insight into the business. Merely saying, “we beat our expectations by 63%” does NOT qualify, unless the speaker also shared their expectations.

The flow of numbers was about a bit below average during the three days I attended Net.Finance, but the two professional researchers on the agenda, Jim Van Dyke of Javelin Strategy and Asaf Buchner of Jupiter Research, delivered slides chock full of statistics. I will check with them to see if they are willing to share with our readers.

Marketing & Communications Manager/Finance/Hedge Fund

Increase brand awareness and drive sales, marketers are still struggling to create accountability programs that effectively measure the impact of marketing efforts, according to a new study from the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and MMA (Marketing Management Analytics). Although the majority of companies with a marketing accountability process tend to house this function within the marketing department, there is growing collaboration between marketing and finance. The 2008 ANA / MMA Marketing Accountability Survey, fielded by CoActive Marketing, surveyed 128 senior-level marketers in May 2008, following similar studies conducted together since 2005.

Overall, marketing accountability has a presence in nearly every company; however, a growing number of these programs are siloed within marketing departments. Forty-five percent of respondents indicated that their accountability programs were based within the marketing group, a jump of 14 points over the prior year.

Despite accountability programs becoming more entrenched within marketing departments, this year’s survey showed progress in improving the relationship between marketing and finance. Thirty-three percent reported “full cooperation and an open dialogue” in establishing metrics and methodologies for marketing ROI – up from twenty-two percent in 2007 – and nearly half of respondents found “some cooperation.” Increasingly, participants in the survey said they believed that marketing and finance “speak with one voice” or “share common metrics.”

“In demonstrating the value of marketing as a contributor to business growth, it is important for marketers to engage their counterparts in finance and throughout the organization,” said Bob Liodice, President and CEO of the ANA. “We are pleased that marketers are moving in the right direction, but there is still much work to be done.”

“To truly realize the value of marketing metrics, companies must move beyond backward-looking metrics to forward-looking insights that guide business decisions,” said Doug Brooks, VP, MMA. “This requires making the analytics accessible, transparent, easy-to-use and timely for marketing, finance and research.”

The Ellis MBA Advantage

Tap into the expertise of five of the world’s most prestigious business schools and advance your career with the Ellis College MBA. The Ellis MBA provides working adults with a powerful way to earn an MBA online in as few as 18 months-through courses developed in association with some of the most respected business schools in the world:

* Columbia Business School
* Stanford University
* The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
* Carnegie Mellon University
* The London School of Economics and Political Science

The Ellis MBA is specifically designed for working adults interested in learning advanced skills from top experts in business. Additionally, because Ellis College is a division of the accredited New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), U.S. federal financial aid and employer tuition reimbursement programs are available.

Marketing Meets Finance in Senior Honors Thesis

Tue., Jun 19, 2007
“My senior honors thesis demonstrated that marketing has an important role to play in the sale of financial products,” observes graduating finance major Maura Connors ’07. “Companies that sell different financial products need to understand their customers and carefully segment their markets.” For her thesis, the Isenberg School senior examined investment choices and personal characteristics of 63 respondents. Their principal investment choice involved investing in socially responsible versus traditional funds.

Drawing on previous research and advice from her two thesis advisors—marketing professors Easwar Iyer and William Diamond—Connors created a web platform from which she administered an experiment and an accompanying questionnaire. In the experiment, subjects were told that they had $1,000 or $10,000 to invest either on their own behalf or on behalf of a close relative. Their investment choices consisted of four funds—two designated as socially responsible and two as traditional. The subjects could click on links that gave them additional information such as the companies in which the fund invested and the rate of return. After making their investment choices, the subjects answered questions involving their confidence and risk profiles as investors, their attitudes toward environmental issues and corporate social responsibility, their materialistic and religious values, and other personal attributes.

Connors’ statistical analysis of the data revealed that most of her respondents were relatively conservative risk takers who expected their investments to exceed a minimum expected rate of return. At the same time, most respondents viewed the “environment” as an important issue, advocated corporate social responsibility, and embraced materialistic values only moderately. Most also insisted that their religious beliefs played no role in their investment decisions. The traditional income-oriented fund attracted the most money from the respondents. Intriguingly, a higher percentage of respondents investing on their own behalf chose the traditional funds, while a higher percentage of respondents investing for a close relative chose the socially responsible funds.

“My study shed additional light on the individual investment values of my respondents,” continues Connors, who joined State Street Corporation in Boston after graduation. “I learned that a socially responsible fund that would appeal most to a socially responsible investor should focus on being environmentally and socially conscious. It should target investors with relatively low materialistic values but at the same time yield relatively competitive annual returns, since profitability will always figure as a significant criterion in any investment decision.”