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Marketing Concentration Spotlight: Jack Dewitt '18 Reflects on his Babson Marketing Journey4/9/2018  For Jack Dewitt, current Babson senior, deciding to concentrate in Marketing at Babson was a pretty easy decision. Though he described himself as someone who had always been into sales, his marketing concentration and expertise were already paying dividends for him long before graduation.
Wachusett Mountain Ski Area Partners with Babson Undergraduate Students to Improve Marketing Efforts3/2/2018  Tom Meyers, Director of Marketing for Wachusett Mountain Ski Area, was looking to expand his outreach to younger patrons. The mountain was hoping to tap into the 18-24 market and he thought the best way to do that would be to reach out to, “one of the leading marketing programs in the state,” Babson College in the Fall of 2017.
Professor Richard Hanna was teaching two classes Marketing Communications and Marketing Research. “I intended to use a real client for marketing communications and was contemplating using a real client for marketing research,” says Professor Hanna. “I knew [Wachusett] would be a great fit for both classes since they wanted to know how they should be allocating their advertising budget and leverage social media (perfect for marketing communications) and wanted to know more about the millennial market with respect for skiing and how they could attract them to a variety of events (perfect fit for research).” What do politicians and products have in common? Both are brands seeking your dollars (and in the case of politicians, your vote, too). The marketing textbooks of the 1980s and 1990s pushed for a customer (or market) orientation heavily relying on marketing research to find out what customers really want in a product and then deliver it. More recently, however, a product orientation has been touted for success, and suggests that creative product development will be embraced by consumers. Dr. Anjali Bal and her co-authors studied these approaches as they apply not only to products, but to politicians as “brands” as well in a recent article entitled “How customer and product orientations shape political brands” in the Journal of Product & Brand Management.
In today’s advertising world, marketers are faced with the challenge of maximizing the effectiveness of television commercials, especially since the birth of the DVR, Netflix, Hulu and other TV tools. Audiences are no longer forced to watch ads in between segments of programming, which is great for viewers but bad for marketers. To combat this problem, advertisers have tried to make commercials more high energy and engaging in order to retain viewership. In fact, over 80% of television ads are classified as high energy. You know these commercials -- the ones that are bright, action-packed and typically upbeat. However, recent findings revealed that all these attempts to capture the audience, may in fact be turning them away.  Family businesses are the epitome of the American Dream. An individual starts a business, watches it grow and thrive, and then hands it down to future generations. However, without succession planning, the conflict and drama can result in losses into the billions of dollars, which is what happened in 2014 to Market Basket, a premier New England family-owned grocery chain. Victoria Crittenden and her colleagues explored this case in a recent article in Industrial Management.
The Market Basket dynasty started when a husband and wife, both Greek immigrants, captured the American dream by opening a neighborhood food store. In 1954 the two Demoulas brothers (second generation) bought the business from their parents. However, when one of the brothers died suddenly, his share of the company was left to his children. The remaining brother took control of the company, but court battles determined that the deceased brother’s heirs would control 51 percent of the business. In 2014, the battle erupted when one heir (who was initially loyal to her uncle) switched sides and helped to oust the family leadership. This decision sparked massive protests and employee strikes resulting in a loss of $10 million dollars per day. This situation is an example of what can happen when family businesses do not have succession planning. The authors of “Family Business: When You Can’t Choose Your Partners” studied family businesses and offer the following recommendations. |
