Vigilant marketing: Catching fleeting opportunities for growth spurts

Abstract

Marketing executives are constantly seeking opportunities to grow their brands, but find the task more challenging as their brands become bigger and the market more mature. In fact, brand sales in established markets tend not to grow gradually, but rather in spurts, ie short periods of growth alternating with longer periods of stability. These growth spurts come with either foreseeable events that businesses usually plan for, or unforeseeable opportunities that often relate to external events such as positive product reviews or celebrity sightings, which make a brand temporarily more attractive to its customers. For businesses to catch these unforeseeable, fleeting opportunities, this paper advocates a vigilant marketing practice, and discusses persistence analysis, a time-series method for it. To be vigilant, businesses need to be managerially prepared with opportunistic spending and analytically equipped with market intelligence tools. Using the aforementioned time-series method, this paper illustrates the unforeseeable opportunities for creating growth spurts and the need for vigilant marketing on several brands in the digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera market.