After 17 years of experience as a marketing professor, teaching, doing research, and working with companies, I settled finally on a 9-word imperative to help students understand competitive strategy...
Joe Urbany
Joe is a core marketing faculty member in Notre Dame’s MBA program and past Associate Dean of the Mendoza College of Business with numerous publication credits related to customer decision making and growth strategy.
In 2010, Joe Urbany co-wrote a book entitled Grow by Focusing on What Matters: Competitive Strategy in 3-circles. The premise of the book is that growth and competitive advantage are about effective positioning. The model facilitates speed of understanding and action by focusing strategic attention on what impacts customer decisions. It has been applied in over 800+ MBA projects at Notre Dame. Co-founded in 2013 by Joe, Vennli is based on this proven model. Vennli brings the model to life through the use of collaborative technology and providing a platform that makes an already faster and more intuitive process even more accelerated and streamlined.
Recent Posts
4 min read
Driving Growth With 9 Words (And A Picture)
By Joe Urbany on Sep 14, 2022 12:02:33 PM
4 min read
"Place" and How Tesco Leveraged It in Digital Fashion
By Joe Urbany on May 31, 2016 8:10:04 AM
"Place" is an element of the classic four P's in marketing (product, price, place, and promotion), more commonly referred to as distribution. It refers to the methods, strategy, and structure an organization executes to get its offerings to market and into customers’ hands.
7 min read
Demographic Segmentation Can Cover Up Real Customer Differences: A Case Study
By Joe Urbany on Apr 19, 2016 10:56:11 AM
The goal of market segmentation is to identify groups of customers who differ in their needs and responses to marketing efforts. This allows businesses to target their strategies to increase effectiveness.
Often, demographic variables are used to segment customers. While demographics describe consumers and business customers, they often offer little insight into those customers’ needs, the benefits they seek, or the true drivers of their purchase decisions.
6 min read
How To Use Customer Demographics To Segment Markets (Spoiler Alert: Don't!)
By Joe Urbany on Feb 9, 2016 11:18:50 AM
Effective marketers aim for “the right product, price, and message for the right customer at the right time. Today, technology makes it possible for us to customize and distribute our offerings and messages to very specific, targeted audiences.
4 min read
Stop Relying On Your Gut When It Comes To Consumer Choice
By Joe Urbany on Oct 2, 2015 12:37:55 PM
“Knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity.�? – Miguel de Cervantes
Here’s a case study illustrating why, despite having reasons to be confident in our intuition about how customers view the world, relying on that intuition can lead us astray. (Names have been changed.)