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The ZenMango blog is taking a hiatus as we focus on writing our upcoming book Marperations®.  ...

If Marketing Ran the Airline World:  As passengers board the plane, marketing would love to create “a moment” to start the experience. The moment could include a video where employees or the president of the airline thank customers for choosing the airline, then present a feel-good section where happy customers and employees showcase the cities around the world that the airlines connects to. At the end of the video a jingle and tag line would play that connect to the customer such as, "Your friendly airline," or "Bringing the world closer," or "You focus on the destination and we take care of the journey".  All these messages would be the airlines ways of making the customer realize that they are part of this big family and larger than life experience. Before the flight takes off, marketing would use the captive audience to sell. After the welcome and feel good messages a...

Written for and distributed at the Marketing Executives Group, Chicago, May 19, 2011;  Published in Restaurant Marketing Group's MEG Consumer Talk   Lane Cardwell President, P.F. Chang’s China Bistro I have had a lot of beginnings lately.  In the past two years I have doubled the number of restaurant companies that I have worked for in the past 32 years.   I was recently the CEO of Boston Market, and have just joined P.F. Chang’s China Bistro as its president.  My other two restaurant companies, going back 30 years, were S & A Restaurant Corp. (Steak and Ale, Bennigan’s) and Brinker International. It gives you a different perspective on our industry when you start fresh with a company after so many years in the business.  Let’s call it “nuanced naivety”.  You are naïve about the way that the new company that you have joined does business; however, you understand the nuances of the way that business is...

As we work in the area of Marperations, it is important to understand the origin of the marketing-operations divide. This understanding will help us figure out why operations cares so much about efficiency and why marketing has an eye single to effectiveness. A look back in history shows that the 18th and beginning of the 19thcentury marked the rise of production. Producers focused their energy on producing more, making efficiency suddenly more important than ever. But the ongoing focus on efficiency came to a point where, in the1940s, production started to surpass demand. The country gradually evolved into a sales era to move surplus inventory. In order to bring more structure to sales, the concepts of marketing evolved and came into being in the 1950s.From the start, marketing primarily came into existence to counter the effectiveness of operations. Since marketing came into being to sell surplus inventory, over promising and setting high expectations became common practice among marketers.Marketing did not come in to build demand, but to work in tandem with operations. Operations had already put...

Ever since the inception of the Marperations concept, I have been searching for  examples where operations completely defines a brand and marketing simply must reflect the differentiated operations. Last weekend I found an example where I would have least expected it. I was in the Cherry Creek area of Denver waiting for a meeting. To kill time I looked for a place to get a cup of coffee. To me, coffee has become synonymous with Starbucks. So naturally I was looking for the nearest Starbucks when I came across a local coffee shop called Aviano Coffee, I walked in and immediately realized that this was a different kind of a coffee shop: the décor was modern, trendy, but unassuming and not in my face. They were not trying too hard. I walked up to the counter and ordered my usual, a small cup of coffee with room for cream. My first surprise...