Whole Foods Market in the Hands of Amazon

When Amazon.com acquired the food retail chain Whole Foods Market in the summer of 2017 (for $13.2bn), it stirred bafflement mixed with speculations: What is happening here? To what aim does the giant e-commerce retailer need physical stores of a natural and organic food retail chain? Customers were worried out of concern about what Amazon… Read More

Getting the Balance of Customer-Company Effort Right

One of the more frustrating experiences for a customer occurs when he or she is working hard to try resolve a problem in using a product or service of a company, while seeing that the company is doing only little to help. More and above the time and effort that the customer reluctantly has to… Read More

Who Owns the Brand?

There is an on-going debate on who owns brands. There are some who argue that the company that created a brand is its owner, fully in command of it. This is the formal straightforward view. However, support grows for the claim that customers are the true owners of a brand. Essentially, a brand is still… Read More