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The Wal-Mart vs. Amazon battle continues to become increasingly intense (see “Price War Brews Between Amazon and Wal-Mart,” New York Times, November 23, 2009). These two competitors have already engaged in price wars over toys, books, and DVDs this holiday season.  Now Wal-Mart is cleverly using one of their strengths relative to Amazon — their physical stores — to their advantage.  This a nice example of competitive advantage, SWOT, and logistics.  Check out “Wal-Mart Uses Its Stores To Get an Edge Online” (see The Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2009 – subscription required, or search the net using the article title).

Consumer reviews are playing an increasingly important role in buying behavior.  This means that traditional marketing communication vehicles are likely to be less influential.  As a nice supplement to this article (“What Do You Think?  Companies are learning to make the most out of customers’ online reviews of their products,” The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2009), pair it with the results of a July 2009 Nielsen survey that asked consumers how much they trust various sources of information.  As this survey makes clear, 70% of consumers trust online opinions from people they don’t know.  I copied this table (right click on graphic, choose “copy image”) and pasted it into my PowerPoints (right click on the slide and choose “Paste”).  Before showing the results, I asked students which sources of information they trusted the most and the least – choosing a set of five from this list.  The article and survey can lead into discussions about what marketing managers can do with consumer reviews.  For a related story, see “Amazon:  Turning Consumer Opinions into Gold,” (BusinessWeek.com, October 15, 2009).

Here’s another technology product that’s moving quickly from the market introduction to the market growth stage of the product life cycle.  The first Kindle (Amazon’s popular e-book reader) was released on November 19, 2007.  Until I read this article (“Attack of the Kindle Killers:  The Boom in New E-Readers,” Time, October 11, 2009), I did not know there were so many competing e-readers – either on the market or due out shortly.  The article includes a slide show with nine different readers.  Only the Kindle and Sony seem to get significant publicity, but that may change if one of these other readers catches on.  Might be fun to show the slide show to class and ask students to develop a marketing strategy for one of the less well-known readers.