MIT Sloan Management Review

That ideas can go viral is now a given in corporate marketing. But new research suggests the term “viral” marketing does not describe well what happens in the market.

Sharad Goel, senior researcher at Microsoft Research, and fellow researchers wanted to see whether messages spread via social networks virally, “like the common cold, some sort of biological contagion. One person gets infected and their friend gets infected and a friend of their friend gets infected.”
That wasn’t what Goel found.

In the tug of war between manufacturers and retailers, retailers seem to be winning. Retailers control market access and influence consumer behavior. Their power has moved downstream. What can be done to improve the situation? While manufacturers are locked into fixed investments and products with long payback cycles, retailers have a variety of ways of making money. This article explores how manufacturers can benefit by tailoring their approaches to a retailer’s specific business model.

Many companies are trying to leverage the power of Twitter to connect with customers and promote their brands and products. This article identifies factors that increase the likelihood of “retweeting” so that a company’s tweets will be shared with recipients’ networks.

There are several practices that don’t work well. The most important to avoid is blatant hard-sell messages. Twitter may be better suited for building brands than for building markets for new offerings.

Supply chain executives are uniquely positioned to be able to see the whole ecology of a firm’s business, because they’re so close to all the pieces. This is especially true when it comes to matters of sustainability. This interview with Edgar Blanco, Research Director at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics, outlines the areas in which supply chain managers can immediately have a sustainability impact, including packaging, transportation, supplier engagement, and customer alignment.

The new Summer 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review includes an interesting article on websites that “morph” — by adjusting their content to the cognitive style of their visitors.

Relationships between a company’s R&D and marketing departments aren’t always cordial — but they can be improved, according to a new article.

Johnson & Johnson provided an unanticipated demonstration of the increasing influence of social media this week, when it pulled an ad for its Motrin pain reliever from the brand's website -- and a marketing VP issued a statement apologizing for the ad.�

Not all growth is good. An analysis of Fortune Global 500 companies shows that the businesses that grew within the limits of their growth corridors performed far better than others — even those that grew faster.