Final Customer Purchasing from the Product Producer

Acquire Steps: Acquire steps include all activities the customer completes preceding the use or the consumption of the product. These steps include the customer's efforts needed for evaluation and acquisition of the product.

A.
Knowledge: Add knowledge

2.
Relative benefits – Help customers understand the unique benefits of your product

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Warnings and advice

No.	Year	SIC	Note
1	1992	0	Researchers say that an ad's effectiveness is exhausted "alarmingly fast." Money spent to air commercials continually is wasted, because consumers don't pay attention.
2	1991	0	A survey found that 62% of consumers polled in 1990 say they buy only well-known brands, compared with 77% in 1975.
3	2004	0	Most marketers recognize that they should run their brands as a portfolio. Managing brands in a coordinated way helps a company to avoid confusing its consumers, investing in overlapping product-development and marketing efforts, and multiplying its brands at its own rather than its competitors' expense. It's easy to see why marketers resist the portfolio approach to brands. After all, entrepreneurial brand managers, not portfolio managers, built most of the world's great ones–such as Tide (P&G) and Cheerios (General Mills).
4	1989	0	People tend to be most loyal to brands that have distinctive flavors, such as cigarettes and ketchup. Research shows that consumers believe all brands have the same properties in a number of categories, particularly credit cards, paper towels.
5	2001	0000	Top marketing companies all show patterns of free-flowing creativity even in stressful times. Each employs a consistent & long-term strategy in their marketing pitches, and avoids going too broad in their industries in order to ensure their market leadership. Also key to marketing is maintaining close customer contact and communication.
6	2003	2000	The job of a company is to get a consumer to want a given product using advertisements. This is hard to do because 72% of the time, the consumer decides on a product while in the store.
7	1998	2086	In the 1980s, 7UP tried to gain on the giant Sprite by advertising that it had no caffeine. Sales went up temporarily but now 7UP is a distant second to Sprite as caffeine went back in style.
8	1986	2095	In 1986, Maxwell House introduced 100% Arabica whole beans and called it Maxwell House Private Collection. It flopped, since consumers had come to identify Maxwell House with run-of-the-mill canned ground coffee.
9	1989	2111	RJR has little in its brand artillery to go against Phillip Morris' powerhouse Marlboro. Winston, RJR's own flagship brand, has lost much of its image in the numerous advertising shifts in recent years.
10	2002	2389	VF anticipates Levi's move into Wal-Mart by increasing, by double digits, its ad spending on its Lee, Riders and Wrangler brands. VF is the leading seller of jeans in America with a 21% market share.
11	2002	2834	Patients ask doctors about specific brands of drugs and often get prescriptions for that brand. It underscores the role consumer advertising plays in how American physicians are treating illnesses.
12	2001	3571	Apple Computers has long been trying to enhance the appeal of shopping for its products with various methods such as kiosks and posters. However, none of these attempts have been successful. To confront this problem and boost its sluggish sales, the company is going to open over 100 new Apple retail stores across the country. This is partially to insure that a well-trained staff will be representing their products.
13	2002	3652	Since Napster blocked all file trading on July 2, 2001, the record industry has tried to fill the void with online music subscription services like Pressplay and MusicNet, which have been roundly criticized for a limited selection of songs.
14	2003	3711	80% of all cars come with standard features that were exclusively for luxury brands only a few years ago. Consumers won't remain emotionally invested in well established brand if its technical and functional benefits do not attempt to differentiate from the pack.
15	1995	3940	Even though the two top customers (Wal-Mart and Toys R Us) control 33% of the market, unique products and intense advertising allow customer-pull rather than supplier-relationships to dictate what items hit the shelf.
16	1995	5812	After Boston Chicken opened, it caused a splash by being the first fast-food chain to sell rotisserie chicken as a takeout item, but the brand failed to push its new category and then took a dive when it changed its name to Boston Market and widened its selection.
17	1995	7319	A new study by Yankelovich Partners and Gannett's USA Weekend magazine of 1,000 consumers nationwide shows that only 25% of those questioned said a TV ad would induce them to try a new product or brand. Only 15% for newspaper ad, 13% for a magazine.
18	1987	8111	Many law firms under economic pressure turning to marketing tactics once unheard of in the profession. Hiring public-relations firms, lavishing money on brochures, hiring ad agencies. But must not offend old-line clients valuing discretion.

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