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Niraj Dawar

Visiting Scholar

Biography

I am the Barford Professor of Marketing at the Ivey Business School, Canada. I study marketing, brands, consumer behaviour, and strategy. My publications in these areas have appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Harvard Business Review, M.I.T. Sloan Management Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Marketing Letters, and other academic and managerial outlets. I also publish comment pieces and press articles some of which have appeared in the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Globe & Mail, Business Standard, and Business Today. I have worked in Europe, North America and Asia. Previously, I was on the INSEAD faculty from 1991-1998 as Assistant, then Associate Professor. In 2009-2010, I was Visiting Professor at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France) and at the Vlerick School (Gent, Belgium). In 2005-06, I was Visiting Professor of Marketing at INSEAD’s Asia campus in Singapore. In 2000 I was Visiting Research Professor at the University of Michigan Business School. In 1994 and again in 1995, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. I have written a number of case studies that have received awards from the European Foundation for Management Development. I am an active contributor to international conferences on business and marketing issues, and have worked in an advisory role with leading companies around the world. Niraj can be reached here.

Read case studies by Niraj here.

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Marketing

Marketing Advice for the NSA

As the media’s and the public’s short attention span inevitably shifts from coverage of the NSA’s activities to the next Kardashian story, you’ll be turning your attention from crisis-management to the long game. You’ll be re-examining your strategy, methods, and tactics for achieving total information awareness. In this, you could learn from companies in the private sector.

Marketing

Hobson’s choice on Tuesday

One of the things that marketing does really well is to make small differences loom large. To believe the ads, the difference between Tide and Sunlight laundry detergents, between Coke and Pepsi colas, Nike and Adidas athletic shoes, and Shell and Exxon gasoline, are so vast and so consequential that you should make your decisions to buy one or the other very very carefully.

Marketing

Apple, directionless?

The Apple Maps App fiasco is having an interesting effect on the company’s brand and its loyal fan following. The inevitable “this would not have happened had Steve still been here” conclusion is all over the internet.

Marketing

“No really, my market is different!”

Speak to enough brand managers of a global brand in countries around the world and you’ll soon come to expect the all too common refrain: “…but my market is different.” Ask them to elaborate, and you’ll get the low down on how consumer habits in their market are different, their consumers’ purchase behaviour is different, preferences and tastes are different, how the media and the retail trade are different, and how their consumers and customers require unique, tailored, and delicate handling.

Marketing

Pink shades for everyone!

Economic slowdowns, recessions, and even depressions are made worse than they should be because of psychological effects. In the expectation of an economic downturn businesses hold off on investments, consumers delay big ticket spending, and save rather than spend. The more talk there is of recession, the more a recession is likely. Recession becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Marketing

What happened to disintermediation?

With the rise of the web in the 1990s came predictions of disintermediation. In a world where the upstream players (the makers of products and services) could reach end customers directly through the internet, there was no longer a raison d’être for intermediaries.

Marketing

End of social?

With the Facebook IPO muddle, will money stop flowing to social media? Will the social media space stop consolidating (no more Instagram-like deals?) because the social media giants’ acquisition currency, their stock, has been devalued? Will the best entrepreneurs reconsider their social media ideas; put them on the back burner; be unable to fund them? Has the social media marketing fad passed?

Marketing

Why Marketers get no respect

Put on your thick skin, your Kevlar vest — this blog post is not for the faint of heart. The problem is not just that consumers find marketers unsavory, it is also that even within the company marketers get no respect.

Marketing

Brand mimicry

The monarch and the pipevine swallowtail are the Hermès and Louis Vuitton of the butterfly world – other butterflies imitate them. Non-toxic butterflies, through genetic mutation over generations, come to resemble toxic species so that predators are fooled into leaving them alone. The viceroy butterfly, for example, shares the monarch’s colors, and appears at the same time of year in similar habitats.

Marketing

The rich, the lazy, the busy, the ignorant, and the vain

Done well, market segmentation can do so much. It can uncover entirely new markets (see Blue Ocean Strategy), provide new ways of serving existing markets and rejuvenate entire categories and industries (remember Swatch watches?), out-maneuver competitors (Nike segments the market into very small niches so competitors are contained), and offer segment developers first-rights to the new market (The Walkman had a 50% market share at a 20% price premium for a couple of decades).

Marketing

Why we segment

At the heart of everything that marketers do resides a notion so fundamental, so basic, it is the engine that makes the free market tick. This notion is, of course, that every customer is different. Few have said it better than Monty Python in Life of Brian

Marketing

Markets or shareholders?

There is a fine line between professing free-market capitalism and teaching the subversion of those markets that is crossed in business-school classrooms every day.

Marketing

Marketing is context

In 2007 The Washington Post carried an astonishing article describing a social experiment the newspaper had conducted. The Post had asked Joshua Bell to play in the Washington metro during the morning rush hour. As the newspaper describes it, “No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made….in a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”

Marketing

A modest diagnosis of India’s infrastructure woes

I just got back from Hong Kong, and on the way back I stopped in India, as I usually do.

Marketing

Marketing lessons from the financial crisis

The saying “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan” goes back at least as far as Tacitus (around 100 B.C.). So calling the financial crisis of 2008 a financial crisis, has the benefit of finding at least one father for that failure: the field of finance, and its real-world embodiment, Wall Street.

Marketing

GAFA, the new face of marketing

It is a misconception that the dominant businesses of Silicon Valley are technology companies. Sure, when you think of the venerable old names such as Intel and HP, semiconductor chips and hardware based on those chips come to mind. But just as the 1980s saw the Valley shift to software, and in the 1990s the Valley rode the internet boom, the present century has so far been about consumers and marketing.

Marketing

Are business school rankings good for you?

Whether you’re a prospective student, a recruiter, or a donor, use business school rankings with caution.
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Marketing

Fair Trade?

Hardly a week goes by without yet another milestone for “ethically labeled” products. You know, the products that are labeled “Fair Trade,” “Organic,” “Green,” and so on. Here’s a recent report, for example, that says that 10,000 products are now sold with a Fair Trade certification in the U.S., and that sales of such products are up 63% in the last QUARTER! In markets such as the United Kingdom, more than one of every five cups of coffee sold is fair trade labeled.