Customer dissatisfaction undermines brand equity whenever the brand fails to deliver something important to the customer. Usually, this is something basic that the customer took for granted—something that was once an innovation and a source of positive satisfaction, but which customers now simply expect as part of the standard product or service. Consider automated teller machines. Today, ATM’s are a commodity.  They no longer distinguish one bank from another and are not a significant source of positive customer satisfaction—yet they can certainly cause dissatisfaction.

A Common Transaction

Imagine you are on a business trip in an unfamiliar city and find that the only ATM near your hotel is out of order, out of cash or has a problem with your card. At that moment, how do you feel about that bank? Grateful to it for providing a conveniently located ATM? Absolutely not: You probably feel enraged or let down.

Contrast this with the same situation where the ATM works—as in, you get the cash. How does that feel? Has your attitude toward the bank changed as a result of the transaction? Not at all. Chances are, minutes after getting the cash, you’ll have forgotten all about the transaction.  Think about the impact on the brand. An ATM that works will do little if anything to increase customer satisfaction and strengthen brand equity apart from reinforcing awareness.  But one that doesn’t work will create dissatisfaction and may perceptibly damage the brand.

Identifying Dissatisfaction Should Be a Top Priority

For an existing business trying to increase overall customer satisfaction an loyalty, the first priority should be to identify and reduce the drivers of customer dissatisfaction with your brand. The main drivers usually reflect failure to provide some of the basics and can include egregiously bad performance on product or service features (such as fuel economy or, in service businesses, polite staff) that also have the potential to provide positive customer satisfaction.

You’ll almost certainly need to fix a number of basic things in order to ensure that you’re reliably delivering the current brand promise to meet customer expectations. only then can you switch your main focus toward the new and exciting things marketers love such as new products, new service packages, new channels and new creative advertising ideas.

As a result, the degree of uncertainty in business and consumer markets has soared. Yet, to conserve cash, most firms are reducing spending on the market research that would help manage that uncertainty. In the United States, spending on market research has dipped for four consecutive quarters, and chief marketing officers don’t expect the situation to turn around soon. Most big consumer marketers are seeking to shave 10 to 20 percent off of research budgets.

In flush times, a rising tide of consumption can compensate for less than optimal branding, positioning, pricing, or segmentation. That is certainly not the case now. At the same time that marketers must pare down research expenditures, they face added pressure to secure high-quality data and insights.

I recommend that marketers take the following seven steps to minimize the impact of reduced spending.

Stay focused. Savvy marketers focus their research on the products, brands, and markets that are key to their marketing strategy. In a recession, it’s essential to get a clear read on existing core customers, including those who are most loyal to the brand and those who are most profitable, rather than fritter away research resources on potential or peripheral consumers. When times are good, there is budget available for increased research on secondary products or customers. Now, nice-to-knows that are not essential will have to wait.

Enlist trusted partners. Marketers and research suppliers who trust each other and have established long-term relationships can jointly plan how to extract more insights and make better decisions based on fewer expenditures. For example, combining data sets may reveal new leading indicators of changes in consumer behavior. Tracking studies may have an edge over one-off projects. Marketers who trim costs by consolidating their budgets with an integrated research supplier should insist that the supplier aggressively explore synergies across its various component agencies as well as eliminate research redundancies.

Value experience and judgment. Marketers should tap the knowledge and intuitions of managers and researchers who’ve lived through previous recessions. In setting prices, for example, such insight can help calibrate the optimal level of price promotion offers. Experience also reveals proxies: in tough times, some marketers use research results from Sweden as a proxy for Scandinavia, rather than conducting the same research in all Scandinavian countries.

Seize opportunities overseas. Some large multinational marketers, such as Unilever, are shifting research expenditures away from Western Europe and toward emerging markets in Asia and Latin America. Relative to the developed economies, the costs of research in emerging economies are less and the payoff from incremental insight can often be greater. Brand preferences and consumption levels in emerging markets such as China, India, and Brazil tend to be more fluid. Consumer research is therefore critical to aid marketers trying to cement brand preferences early on as these economies develop.

Go online with a dash of skepticism. Online research is cheap, fast, and the wave of the future. Tools like SurveyMonkey allow non-expert users to create custom surveys in minutes. As an alternative to offline focus groups, custom online panels of consumers can be formed for qualitative research on new product ideas or new ads. Taking the do-it-yourself approach rather than outsourcing to a market research firm is attractive in a cost-cutting era, but you risk getting no more than what you pay for. The opinions of convenience sample of an enthusiastic online brand community may not represent all users.

Don’t cut across the board. Just as important as knowing where to cut research is knowing where not to cut. When marketers are creating fewer new ads and introducing fewer new products, it is doubly important to use rigorous pretesting to select the strongest alternatives. In categories where the bases for consumers’ value judgments are changing, modest expenditures on copy research can prevent blowing much more money on ineffective messaging. Adding a few questions to standard tracking studies is a low-cost way to shed light on changes in customer attitudes and purchase behavior. For key products, running conjoint studies to check on shifts in price elasticities of demand and price-attribute tradeoffs can usefully improve the profitability of pricing decisions at a time when cash is king.

Keep an eye on the new consumer. No one has a perfect record of predicting the future, and the recession is making it harder for consumers to envision or articulate their needs. Even so, and despite budget pressures, smart marketers devote a portion of their market research to getting a handle on future changes in consumer behavior. Are consumers of your brand going to revert to previous consumption patterns when the recession ends? Or are they developing coping mechanisms that will endure, especially if the recession is lengthy? What new products and services will consumers be open to embracing? If, as in the financial services category, consumer confidence and trust in brands have been seriously eroded, how long and what steps will it take to regain them? Eventually, the recession will end, and future success depends on being well-positioned, based on sound research, when it does.
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John Quelch, HBS

For entrepreneur extraordinaire Richard Branson, customer satisfaction and heightened product innovation is best derived from the minds of customers. “Listen, Listen, Listen” says Branson. Innovative ideas and methods to better meet your customers expectations are no more than a few questions away.

Customer satisfaction occurs when a buyer perceives they have received the value they have paid for. Value can come in the form of quality, but can also be related to great customer service, complaint recovery, product guarantees, and more. Setting up a system for soliciting customer feedback is an important component to any marketing plan as it reveals your real performance-both good and bad. Companies like Artemis Crane Marketing Research can help you define your customer research goals and design an instrument to help you collect, report, and analyze important customer feedback.

Consider these statistics:

• Only four percent of all customers with problems actually complain
• The average person with a problem eventually tells nine other people
• Satisfied customers tell up to five other people about their good experiences
• The cost of acquiring a new customer is usually five to seven times greater than retaining current ones

Satisfaction Surveys Boost your Bottom Line

An essential part of assessing satisfaction includes identifying dissatisfaction. Dissatisfied customers and employees often hold the key to marketplace success. Understanding when and why dissatisfaction occurs will help you implement changes necessary to gain and retain future customers. No matter what type of business you are in, surveys are an important tool to help you collect the information you need to understand and evaluate satisfaction.

Satisfaction Surveys Collect Valuable Information

Satisfaction surveys are an important vehicle for collecting your customers’ opinions and needs. They allow you to quickly capture information, and depending on the method you use, surveys can be implemented with relatively minimal expense.

A well-designed satisfaction survey can give you the answer to your most critical questions. Businesses often use satisfaction surveys to meet some of these objectives:

• Understand the expectations and requirements of your customers, employees, and members
• Determine how well your company and its competitors are satisfying these expectations and requirements
• Develop service or product standards based on survey findings
• Examine trends so you can take action immediately
• Establish priorities, goals and standards to assess how well you meet these goals
• Evaluate the impact of a change in a policy, product or service

In sum, satisfaction surveys help you make the right decisions. Successful organizations make satisfaction analysis an integral part of their business. They use statistics to translate responses into meaningful information to get the most out of their data.

Want your customers to stick to you like glue? Today it takes more than a punch-card or priority line.

If you give a discount to your most loyal customers, you might be doing something wrong. At least you’re not doing all you can to reward your best customers, and keep them coming back. Experts say there are some rules to follow to make your customers feel like kings from the very first moment they encounter your product or service. Do it right, and you’ll not only score a lifelong customer, but also an advocate for your brand—and that’s a lot more valuable. In order to bring you up to speed, Inc.com has compiled seven of the most innovative and ingenious tips from articles, guides, and interviews in Inc. and Inc.com over the past year. These are the new rules of building customer loyalty.

1. Create Enlightening Experiences
Whether it’s selling bikes in his Connecticut store or filling orders for corporate rewards programs, Chris Zane knows a successful business is about more than just selling stuff. Instead, he’s selling experiences. More than a decade ago, he used that concept to launch a business filling orders for custom-fitted Trek bikes geared for corporate rewards programs, Gina Pace reports. Zane’s Cycles builds the bikes to specification, and all the recipients have to do is attach the front wheel, using the included instructions. The end goal: Creating experiences that will make customers feel good about the reward product—and not irritated that they have to spend hours putting something together. Early on, he decided he wouldn’t nickel-and-dime customers and stopped charging for any add-on that would cost less than a dollar. He installed a mahogany coffee bar in his shop and gives away free drinks. “We’re looking at the lifetime value of the customer,” Zane says. “Why ostracize someone over one or two things that might cost us money when understanding the lifetime value gives us the ability to justify it?”

2. When You Do Wrong, Make it Right
Resolving customer complaints is among the best ways to earn loyalty. Lengthy apologies give customers the chance to connect emotionally. Leonardo Inghilleri, co-author of Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization, observes that money is not always the best remedy. That goes particularly for customers who are not buying on price, he said, companies should consider a thoughtful present or service.

3. Reward Customers With Games
A handful of luxury brands have for decades used promises of status to encourage customers to spend more through loyalty to their brands. Today, brands of all stripes are experimenting with the psychology of status and power in rewarding customers. A generation raised on video games is wired to love incentives—and that doesn’t just mean freebies. Gaming reinforces players through positive feelings generated by achievements, which are perceived through points, badges, discounts, or any award—tangible or not. Game mechanics are, simply, ways of generating those positive feelings. And it can be good for you: Giving customers something positive encourages additional interaction with your brand, service, or product. For this very purpose, LinkedIn added a progress bar that documents user-profile completion.

4. Quantify Customers’ Love
Ask the opinions of your valued customers. It can be something small, say, simply appending short surveys to receipts. To help improve the response rate, use the strategy of making a small donation to a charity for every survey completed. It should start with an overall rating, followed by a drill-down into specific aspects of the visit. “Start out with the two questions that really matter: Will you come back? and Will you refer your friends?” says Micah Solomon, co-author of Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization. A rating is also a defense against attacks on sites like Yelp. The ability to assert, “On a scale of 1 to 5, 97 percent of customers gave us a 5″ is powerful ammunition.

5. Make an App for That
You know loyalty cards. They might be punch cards, or plastic fobs dangling from countless key rings. They may soon fade into history, pushed out by smartphone apps that do more than just offer a high-tech alternative—they also provide businesses with a trove of useful information about their customers, Issie Lapowsky reports. Several start-ups have recently launched loyalty-card apps—check out Cardstar, Checkout, PlacePop, and Cardagin—to help businesses attract customers and reward their regular fans. At the same time, these apps ferret out marketing data, giving even the smallest shop access to high-powered analysis.

6. Do Rewards Better
Companies spend more than $2 billion on loyalty programs a year, and statistics show the average American household belongs to about 14 different rewards programs, even if they’re only active in six, Tim Donnelly reports. “They want to protect the customer relationship,” says Chris Cottle, vice president of marketing and products at Allegiance, which has provided customer feedback services to 1-800-CONTACTS and several banks. “It’s so easy for customers who are price-sensitive to slip away or go to a competitor. One of the ways you can make your customer relationship more sticky is through a well-planned and well-executed reward program.” Consider ways to integrate social media, tangible gifts, or a memorable experience. Just be sure to go beyond a simple discount. Physical prizes or earned bonuses like frequent flyer trips resonate much more, says Bob Konsewicz, a strategic consultant for Maritz Loyalty, which has worked with AT&T, Bank of America and General Motors. “If you get a discount, it’s kind of over and done with,” he says. consider new platforms for rewards, too. The Brooklyn Museum, for example, will award a free yearlong membership to the “mayor” (the person with the most check-ins at that location) on certain days.

7. Build a Giant Relationship
Russ Stanley, who is in charge of client relations for the Giants, explains to Inc. that the organization has introduced programs to help season ticket holders sell their seats for games they cannot attend, and assigned specific representatives to make sure these fans are happy with their ballpark experience.You read that right: Each season ticket holder has the name and phone number of a team official who will field questions or handle requests immediately. This approach, borrowed from major casinos that assign a concierge to important gamblers, builds bonds that cannot be created without such a personal connection, John Gerzema reports. “We give them the name, phone number, and e-mail address of a real person who is responsible to them,” explains Stanley. “We deal with problems immediately. If a person says they had trouble with a ticket that didn’t scan at the entrance and they missed an inning or two, I give them an invitation to another game.”

This document originally appeared on Inc.com, May 2011

In 2010, Artemis Crane Research CEO Ray Benedicktus published three articles in peer reviewed, A-level, marketing research journals, two of which explore consumers’ online trust beliefs.  Two of the articles examine the effects of brand, physical store presence, customer ratings, and consumer suspicion on trust in Internet retailers (Journal of Retailing) and the ways in which consumers apply consensus ratings (Journal of Business Research) in making online trust judgments.  The managerial implications are presented below.

Focus on brand image
A major challenge faced by all businesses is the development of a consistent and differentiated brand image. In the presence of a strong brand, trust cues like privacy policies and third-party certifications have limited impact
on trust. One emerging technique is lexical semantic text analysis, which can be used to determine
online brand position and to understand brand association structures. Internet monitoring applications (for example, Alterian SM2, Radian6, Trackur) give managers relevant, up-to-date information regarding what consumers are saying about their brand in forums, social media sites and on rating sites.

Highlight bricks-and-mortar locations
About 71 percent of online consumers search for evidence of a physical location prior to making online purchase decisions. Click-and-mortar firms that do not yet have an established online service record should ensure information
related to physical locations is in obvious view for website visitors. Such information gives consumers an indication that the firm is trustworthy because consumers generalize perceptions from previously successful physical store encounters.

Monitor and influence customer sentiment
Whether or not you sell online, your existing and potential customers are using the Internet to talk about your products and services. Overall, Internet users are more likely to share negative opinions than they are to spread positive sentiment. Thus, online ratings tend to be negatively skewed. To encourage all customers to participate, educate customers regarding availability of third-party feedback sites, reduce obstacles to accessing the sites
(provide hyperlinks) and offer incentives for feedback. Encourage direct complaints by identifying unsatisfied customers and resolving issues in a timely manner so that such instances are not broadcast widely on the web.

Focus customer attention on ratings on your website
Online services such as Yelp, Review-script.com, BazaarVoice, and PowerReviews/Buzzillions now allow businesses to display customer ratings on their own websites. Managing ratings information is not only critical for online operations but is a primary driver of offline business as well. Service providers are reporting that up to 80 percent of their new offline sales stems from customers reading online reviews and contacting the firms for service.

Understand how consumers use ratings
The importance of customer ratings generally increases as product risk (price and complexity) go up. In addition, results show that customers not only use ratings to make trust judgments, but also to form pre-purchase service quality expectations and to anticipate satisfying experiences. On average, consumers categorize ratings of 89.6 percent and above as high, 78 to 89 percent as moderate and 77 percent and below as low. However, even retailers in the high range whose ratings shift close to the range threshold are in danger negatively affecting consumer perceptions.

Please direct emails about this article to research@artemiscrane.com or leave your comments below.

Market Research
With monitoring tools, companies can view consumers’ online comments and interact with them within the monitoring platform. At every point of the buying cycle, firms can check out what their consumers are thinking and how they are behaving. The same social media tools can be used means for competitive intelligence, identifying new market opportunities, and targeting potential customers with one-on-one dialogue.

Product Development
Social media tools allow firms to find out what customers want and in terms of product improvements and new product innovations. Monitoring online conversation makes it easier for product development teams to determine what is deterring customers from buying. Analyzing industry trends and competitive information via social media tools show firms what competitors are offering to similar target markets, and puts marketers in touch with web influentials. Locating influential blogs and forum contributors can provide many opportunities to evolve products consistent with marketplace needs.

Competitive Differentiation and Positioning
One of the important advantages of social media is that it allows companies to be proactive in establishing a unique set of associations in consumers’ minds. Social media tools identify key information and insights in real time, allowing companies to make more effective product positioning decisions. Firms can better understand sentiments surrounding their own products and brands, as well as competitors’.

Building Brand Equity
Monitoring tools allow firms to monitor conversations about competitors in real-time. By being active in these dialogues, firms can build positive associations and mitigate negative online buzz. Firms can not only facilitate brand building via social media networks, but can also take advantage of opportunities to engage influential web users discussing competing products and services. These efforts pique the interest of target customers and assist companies in identifying product advocates within key online communities.

Want to get started with monitoring your brand’s online reputation? Ready to take advantage of monitoring tools that will give you competitive insights? Ask Artemis Crane Research about how you can get access to these powerful tools.

Businesses can be categorized into three levels of marketing performance. After you have identified the category in which your business belongs, consider the steps below as a path to improving marketing and revenue related profits.

1. Laggards: Those still integrating or not having adequate customer research to support their marketing systems.

2. Industry Average: These businesses have integrated customer research and marketing optimization into their plans, but do not rely as heavily on results and may track results less frequently than Best-in-Class businesses.

3. Best-in-Class: These organizations continuously filter through the dense noise and adjust marketing inputs for optimal bottom-line performance.

Laggard Businesses

Focus on customer data integration. Best-in-Class companies consider customer data management as a critical success factor. Only about 15% of Laggards integrate customer data into a customer research database, compared to 44% of Best-in-Class companies.In fact, the very definition of a marketing oriented company is a company that collects, analyzes, and shares customer data across multiple functions. Customer data is that foundation for delivery of highly relevant customer experiences, services, messages, and offers.Yet, 51% of Laggard businesses admit to doing a poor job of customer data integration.

Measure promotional effectiveness across defined customer segments. Different promotional tactics tend to result in different response rates based on characteristics of the target customer segment. Imagine sending coupons to your most loyal customers. This group is already highly likely to choose your product or service over competing alternatives, so targeting this group with discounts represents not only a waste of marketing resources, but also nets less revenue. Less than half of Laggard companies view promotional effectiveness as a priority, even though it is a key determinant of profitability. Companies like L.L. Bean have entire teams dedicated to segmentation and customer data integration. If you do not have the human capital for such efforts, outsourcing to an experienced research firm is the best way to get started.

Industry Average Businesses

Integrate customer feedback capabilities. Companies collect customer feedback using many methods, including periodic surveys, transactional/event-driven surveys (e.g., at key customer touch points), and promotional effectiveness surveys (e.g., user-friendliness of a website). In many cases, surveys are the only way to capture the information needed to enhance a customer or segment profile. These enhancements are the basis for marketing campaign adjustments and target messaging. Less than a third of Industry Average companies currently have a customer feedback management system in place, compared to 52% of Best-in-Class performers. Most customers of Alamo Rental Car receive a short survey request within minutes of returning their vehicle. Either this type of transaction-based effort or a periodic measurement may be the right solution for your business as well. Click here to tell us about your feedback system needs or for a free consultation.

Leverage the ever-present mobile channel. Marketing via SMS, MMS and location-based services is becoming increasingly popular, powerful, and acceptable to consumers. Currently, 44% of Best-in-Class companies now consider using mobile tools an essential part of their marketing activities, compared to only 13% of Best-in-Class companies. The combination of reach and intimacy makes the mobile channel important not only for reaching customers on the go, but also for marketing optimization. Interested in location-based offers and surveys? Ask Artemis Crane about how you can save money on QR code marketing solutions and analytics available from ScanLife.

Best-in-Class Businesses

Blueprint the ideal customer. Predicting customer behavior requires identifying and measuring the most relevant customer characteristics within each customer segment. Segmentation results in a scoring system on which you should be able to generate a list of attractive customers, as well as customers that score high on loyalty attitudes and behaviors. On these lists, the company can then identify those customers that are abandoning or migrating to other products. After identifying ideal and flight-risk customers, the company can take preemptive actions to diminish the likelihood of defection and increase cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. In 2010, Artemis Crane Research saved a client over $354,000 per month in otherwise lost revenue potential simply by identifying customers with a high risk of flight.

Focus on customer value management. Many companies still do not systematically identify their most profitable and most unprofitable customers. Connecting customer data across product lines, marketing channels, and geographies can be quite challenging. However, unless this challenge is taken head-on, fully understanding customer relationships is impossible. The first step in tackling the problem is changing the organizational mindset to focus on the value that each customer adds to the company, both short and long term. For more on customer lifetime value (CLV), watch the short video below.

Beyond data integration, analytics should be used to reappraise the value of customers on an ongoing basis – such that the company can decide which relationships warrant further investments and which are no longer profitable to pursue. Only 29% of Best-in-Class companies view customer lifetime value as a top priority, despite it being one of the most important marketing metrics for revenue growth and branding.

Try the Harvard University Customer Value Flash Tool by clicking here!

Want to discuss Customer Lifetime Value or Customer Surveys? Click the icon below to have a research consultant contact you by phone.

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Click here to view Dan Colbey’s Bio

1. Achieve differentiation. How can you make your brand or product stand out in an increasingly noisy marketplace? By identifying the needs of specific customer groups and positioning opportunities with the most profitable segments. By doing so, you will better differentiate your brand from your competitors.

2. Make informed messaging decisions. Why use generic messages that mimic competitors when you can create messages that will truly resonate with specific customer groups. A segmentation model helps you create new messages on an ongoing basis, sometimes even in response to macro-level trends—such as a recession and recovery.

3. Plan product road  maps. It’s a lot easier to build a road map when an organization has internal agreement regarding the characteristics of the most profitable customer segments. If decision makers share a common view, then planning new products and product adaptations becomes a far more efficient and cooperative process.

4. Optimize media channels. One of the biggest marketing expenses for any organization is media. Yet optimizing the mix of advertising on television, radio, billboards, print, online, direct mail, and other channels often requires a very expensive trial-and-error process. With a segmentation model, you can optimize media that most heavily influence  specific customer groups.

5. Select sales channels. In many markets, the ratio of direct versus indirect sales is changing. In some categories, intermediaries are losing out to direct, online sales. In other consumer categories, customers are more loyal to the store than the product brand. Optimization of a sales channel strategy is difficult. However, by examining the purchase behaviors of priority customer groups, organizations can make these decisions with confidence.

6. Embrace niche marketing. Few companies can afford to compete with the big fish in the big pond. Instead, a segmentation model shows you how to be a big fish in a little pond—or several little ponds. A segmentation project can be designed to identify, profile, and select niche markets.

7. Reduce waste in your marketing budget. Segmentation optimizes marketing spend by allowing you to focus on the most attractive segments, so you do not waste money on marginal segments.  Segmentation models can also help you determine which marketing investments will be most effective.

8. Improve brand management. With knowledge of specific customer segments, brand awareness and perceptions can be measured across all target segments and for unique segments. Tactics for improving brand awareness and perceptions are far easier to identify and test when done by narrower customer groups.

9. Deploy customer retention strategies. When it comes to customer retention, some strategies are obviously universal. All customer-centric companies seek to keep customer satisfied, but only 5% of satisfied customers demonstrate consistent behavioral loyalty. A segmentation study that includes analysis of current customers can identify interesting opportunities for customer retention. For example, some groups may be more likely to demonstrate loyalty behaviors based on loyalty programs, whereas others may be more concerned with the organization’s efforts to listen to its customers.

-article excerpt-

Earlier this year, Allen Ackerman decided to charge more for his firm’s employee-placement services. The company, A-List Placement LLC, did not land some potential new customers, he says, but revenue is up 30% compared with last year.

Mr. Ackerman’s move to hike prices comes as more of his peers are doing the opposite. September marked the 22nd consecutive month in which more business owners reported cutting average selling prices than raising them, according to a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group in Washington, D.C. Only 12% of owners said they raised prices, the survey showed.

“Owners and managers are struggling to maintain sales volume and market share,” says Ralph Zuponcic, managing partner at pricing strategy firm PricePoint Partners LLC in Hudson, Ohio. “To save that, many will drop prices,” he says. “The economy is driving that.”

The majority of small-business owners are lowering or holding firm on price points as consumers keep close tabs on their spending, according to the NFIB. The price wars will likely heat up as the holidays approach, Mr. Zuponcic says.

But some research indicates that racing to lower prices—even if it lures more customers—doesn’t usually put a company ahead. Even in down economies, raising prices just slightly can have a greater bottom-line impact than lowering them, according to a study in the McKinsey Quarterly, published by the business management advisory firm McKinsey & Co.

Read the rest of this article at the Wall Street Journal online.

Click here to check out an interesting branding debate.