Brand trust is harder to earn in today’s economy? The pressure to cut costs makes delivering day after day on promised benefits more challenging. Social media creates messages that listeners deem more reliable than your own. And retaining meaningful and hard-to-copy differentiation has become more challenging in our copycat global economy. Silicon leader Dow Corning is one company that has managed to build authentic brand trust by clearly communicating its value promise, aligning people, adapting its business models, and letting its culture evolve to support its two brands, Dow Corning® and XIAMETER®. Dow Corning created the XIAMETER brand in 2002 to preserve market share as specialty silicon products commoditized, a savvy example of business model innovation that I wrote about in late 2011. The fully automated (from ordering to fulfillment) business model enables the brand to maintain profitability at the lower price points…
The high price of profits from many business models
As a budding economist, I was initially awed by the market mechanism: the invisible hand that encourages innovation and leads companies to efficiency levels that grow our nation’s wealth. Observing underlying economic principles at work never ceased to amaze me as a college or graduate student. My learning journey in economics was not unlike that of a science student seeing beauty in the laws of nature. What I have learned in decades of practice and observation however is that outcomes are only as positive as the underlying motives of decision makers in the private and public sectors. And in this regard, “Houston, we have a problem.” Over the holidays I read a Wall Street Journal article, “Counterfeit Cancer Medicines Multiply.” As the price of cancer drugs rose, they moved to being 8th among the top 10 drugs targeted by counterfeiters, according to the…
Smarter marketing requires more than personalized messages
I feel overwhelmed by the volume of digital messages coming at me from all corners of my life. And I am not alone. My 2013 prediction is that value is about to rapidly migrate once again in technology markets. Over the holidays I met a young woman in her 30s — a former boutique owner who now works at a leading retailer — who told me that she stopped using Facebook when she realized the postings kept growing in number and falling in sincerity. Also, she’s “unsubscribed” from retailers she buys from, finding that their recommendations based on past purchases more often insult rather than reflect her taste. She is tuning out to digital messaging much as I ignore the ads in newspapers to make my newspaper reading more efficient. Perhaps my message overload problem was not age-related, I thought leaving our conversation….