IE Business School: Master in Management students win 2nd prize in Novartis Masterminds Challenge

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“Does Marketing Run through your veins?” This was the slogan for this year’s Novartis Masterminds Challenge, a marketing competition sponsored by the leading farmaceutical company with the objective to search for professionals with management skills and passion to demonstrate their talent, lead and execute a marketing plan in the healthcare sector. Our Master in Management…

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Marketing in times of adversity and stress

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Marketing in times of adversity and stressIE Focus | By Roberto Alvarez del Blanco,  Professor at IE Business School
Taking the scissors to the marketing budget is an all too familiar reaction in times of crisis, but it is a mistake that can weaken the brand and hamper attempts to differentiate a product.
The current severe market conditions mean that marketing decisions have to be based on certainty, decision and courage. Avoiding mistakes that imply significant conditioning factors in the mid and long term is as important as managing the crisis. Skilfully solving this new paradox requires fast solutions and consideration of long-term implications. Peripheral vision is also essential to see and interpret the signs, and identify useful solutions for planning a more stable future.From a marketing viewpoint we are facing vast complexities, but it is also a time of extraordinary opportunity. It’s true that challenges are on the increase, that some models are more vulnerable, or that negative signs can be seen on the horizon, but we have to find a way through the jungle and healthy economic options for the brand must be created, all without dying in the attempt. The pressure of the scant room for error can be relieved a little by remembering an old Spanish saying: be eager when others are being cautious and be cautious when others are being eager.

In times like the present the great temptation is to cut back budgets, and marketing is often the first to suffer. It is vulnerable because of the search for fast results or survival and because it is assumed that reducing marketing efforts does not have any short-term effect. The current climate requires the consideration of a number of priorities to avoid missing out on opportunities or committing irreversible errors and accepting that Lady Luck smiles on the decisive in times of crisis.

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The prosumer and new social advertising

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IE Focus - The prosumer and new social advertising IE Focus March 2009 | By Manuel Alonso, Professor at IE Business School

Let’s face it, the customer is always right, and this long-standing truth is growing truer by the day thanks to new technologies. Traditional marketing doesn’t work anymore.
The main effect of the exponential technological development of marketing in recent years has been the increase in consumer power in commercial relations. We have to accept the situation: the consumer is in command. He is no longer an isolated person bombarded by commercial strategies that lead him to take purchasing decisions. He has his own opinion, which he can say very easily through digital channels, directing it not only at advertisers, but also at other consumers, over whom he has huge influence. It is very easy to gather from this statement that usual advertising has abandoned the traditional unidirectional format to become not bidirectional between brand and customer, but rather multidirectional, where customers exchange information with each other.

Bearing in mind this situation, it comes as no surprise that the 2007 New Year cover Time magazine always dedicates to the person it considers as being most important in the previous three-hundred-and-sixty-five days was dedicated to you, and me, and each and every one of us, since we are at the helm of the new information era in which the consumer has become the prosumer: he has unlimited options for choosing products, for comparing them, for hearing other buyers´ opinions, for influencing manufacturers and advertisers… And all that power is making him more difficult to reach using the staler advertising formats, especially in the cold, corporate tone.

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