Marketing: 7 ideas from MIT Sloan courses

Value created is what a customer will pay, minus what it honestly costs you to deliver. Price sits inside that band. A buyer who would pay 8k for work costing 2k leaves a 6k gap. Don’t mark up hours.

In practice: The gap is only an estimate until a real buyer confirms it.

Marketing Strategy · MIT 15.834 · spring 2003

External fit: does it match a real need and the competition? Internal fit: do your own resources support it? Dynamic fit: does it hold as things change? Most failed launches passed exactly one.

In practice: Internal fit is where small firms win or lose. If a rival can buy your edge tomorrow, your lead is only temporary.

Marketing Strategy · MIT 15.834 · spring 2003

Buyers judge a product on 2 to 4 dimensions, and how it sits in their minds beats its specs. They often can’t judge the technical details, so they buy the benefit. Name, history and message make similar products feel different.

In practice: List 10 features and you fight on axes the buyer ignores. Find the few they weigh, and own a clear spot.

Entrepreneurial Marketing · MIT 15.835 · spring 2002

Golder and Tellis traced 50 categories to the real first mover. 47 percent of pioneers had failed; about 1 in 10 still led. The lasting edge: buyers learn what good looks like from the first product they try.

In practice: In a crowded category, stand out on an axis the leader doesn’t own. Pioneers fail on bad forecasts, like RCA’s VideoDisc.

Entrepreneurial Marketing · MIT 15.835 · spring 2002

A cash-tight owner should neither skip research nor over-buy it. Make small bets, measure, revise. Success is a chain of odds (technical, then commercial, then market), and research lowers the risk at each link.

In practice: A new product has no history, so concept tests beat forecasts. Cheap research that updates beats a binder.

Entrepreneurial Marketing · MIT 15.835 · spring 2002

Positioning decides what you say and to whom. Analytics, like conjoint studies and attribution, shows whether the market responds. A story with no measurement is a guess.

In practice: Most analytics measure the past. They show that a message works, not which one to try next. Use the numbers to kill what fails.

Marketing Management: Analytics, Frameworks, and Applications · MIT 15.810 · fall 2015 (Prof. John Hauser)

People stray from the textbook buyer in steady, measurable ways: loss aversion, anchoring, present bias, framing. You can design an honest offer around them. That gap is where pricing and positioning live.

In practice: Predictable is not the same as exploitable. Use these patterns to lower a buyer’s real uncertainty, never to force a sale.

Psychology and Economics · MIT 14.13 · spring 2020 (Prof. Frank Schilbach)