TEAMFLY

Praise for Marketing Insights from A to Z
“The bagwan of Marketing strikes again. Leave it to Phil Kotler to revisit all ofour blocking and tackling at just the right time . . . and as all great marketers
know: ‘timing is everything.’”—Watts Wacker
Founder and CEO, FirstMatter
Author, The Deviant Advantage: How Fringe
Ideas Create Mass Markets“Wide-ranging, readable, pithy, and right on target, these insights not only
are a great refresher for marketing managers but should be required reading
for all nonmarketing executives.”—Christopher Lovelock
Adjunct Professor, Yale School of Management
Author, Services Marketing“Kotler tackles the formidable challenge of explaining the entire world of
marketing in a single book, and, remarkably, pulls it off. This book is a chancefor you to rummage through the marketing toolbox, with Kotler looking overyour shoulder telling you how to use each tool. Useful for both pros andthose just starting out.”—Sam Hill
Author, Sixty Trends in Sixty Minutes“This storehouse of marketing wisdom is an effective antidote for those whohave lost sight of the basics, and a valuable road map for those seeking a marketing mind-set.”—George Day
Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor of Marketing,
Wharton School of Business“Here is anything and everything you need to know about where marketing
stands today and where it’s going tomorrow. You can plunge into this tour deforce at any point from A to Z and always come up with remarkable insights
and guidance. Whatever your position in the business world, there is invaluable wisdom on every page.”—Stan Rapp
Coauthor, MaxiMarketing andMax-e-Marketing in the Net Future“A nourishing buffet of marketing wisdom. This is a book to which you will
return many times after the initial reading.”—Leonard BerryDistinguished Professor of Marketing,Texas A&M University
Author, Discovering the Soul of Service

Marketing Insightsfrom A to Z

Marketing Insightsfrom A to Z
80 Concepts Every Manager Needs To Know

Philip Kotler

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Copyright © 2003 by Philip Kotler. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Kotler, Philip.
Marketing insights from A to Z : 80 concepts every manager needs
to know / Philip Kotler.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-471-26867-4
1. Marketing. I. Title.
HF5415 .K63127 2003
658.8—dc21
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Printed in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To all those who have worked inbusiness and marketingwith a passion to satisfy customer needs
and enhance customer and societal well-being.

reface

My 40-year career in marketing has produced some knowledge andeven a little wisdom. Reﬂecting on the state of the discipline, it occurred to me that it is time to revisit the basic concepts of marketing.
First, I listed the 80 concepts in marketing critical today andspent time mulling over their meanings and implications for soundbusiness practice. My primary aim was to ascertain the best principles
and practices for effective and innovative marketing. I found thisjourney to be ﬁlled with many surprises, yielding new insights andperspectives.
I didn’t want to write another 800-page textbook on marketing. And I didn’t want to repeat thoughts and passages that I havewritten in previous books. I wanted to present fresh and stimulatingideas and perspectives in a format that could be picked up, sampled,
digested, and put down anytime. This short book is the result, and it
was written with the following audiences in mind:• Managers who have just learned that they need to know
something about marketing; you could be a ﬁnancial vicepresident, an executive director of a not-for-proﬁt organization, or an entrepreneur about to launch a new product. Youix

x

PrefaceAMFLY

may not even have time to read Marketing for Dummies withits 300 pages. Instead you want to understand some key concepts and marketing principles presented by an authoritative
voice, in a convenient way.
• Managers who may have taken a course on marketing someyears ago and have realized things have changed. You may
want to refresh your understanding of marketing’s essential
concepts and need to know the latest thinking about highperformance marketing.
• Professional marketers who might feel unanchored in thedaily chaos of marketing events and want to regain some clarity and recharge their understanding by reading this book.

TE

My approach is inﬂuenced by Zen. Zen emphasizes learning bymeans of meditation and direct, intuitive insights. The thoughts inthis book are a result of my meditations on these fundamental marketing concepts and principles.
Whether I call these meditations, ruminations, or cogitations, I
make no claim that all the thoughts in this book are my own. Somegreat thinkers in business and marketing are directly quoted, or they
directly inﬂuenced the thoughts here. I have absorbed their ideas
through reading, conversations, teaching, and consulting.

Team-Fly®

ntroduction

Today’s central problem facing business is not a shortage of goods
but a shortage of customers. Most of the world’s industries can produce far more goods than the world’s consumers can buy. Overcapacity results from individual competitors projecting a greater market
share growth than is possible. If each company projects a 10 percent
growth in its sales and the total market is growing by only 3 percent,the result is excess capacity.
This in turn leads to hypercompetition. Competitors, desperate
to attract customers, lower their prices and add giveaways. These
strategies ultimately mean lower margins, lower proﬁts, some failingcompanies, and more mergers and acquisitions.
Marketing is the answer to how to compete on bases other thanprice. Because of overcapacity, marketing has become more important than ever. Marketing is the company’s customer manufacturing
department.
But marketing is still a terribly misunderstood subject in businesscircles and in the public’s mind. Companies think that marketing exists
to help manufacturing get rid of the company’s products. The truth is
the reverse, that manufacturing exists to support marketing. A company
can always outsource its manufacturing. What makes a company

xi

xii Introduction
prosper is its marketing ideas and offerings. Manufacturing, purchasing,research and development (R&D), ﬁnance, and other company functions exist to support the company’s work in the customer marketplace.
Marketing is too often confused with selling. Marketing and selling are almost opposites. “Hard-sell marketing” is a contradiction.
Long ago I said: “Marketing is not the art of ﬁnding clever ways todispose of what you make. Marketing is the art of creating genuine customer value. It is the art of helping your customers become better off. The marketer’s watchwords are quality, service,
and value.”
Selling starts only when you have a product. Marketing starts
before a product exists. Marketing is the homework your company
does to ﬁgure out what people need and what your company should
offer. Marketing determines how to launch, price, distribute, andpromote your product/service offerings to the marketplace. Marketing then monitors the results and improves the offering over time.
Marketing also decides if and when to end an offering.
All said, marketing is not a short-term selling effort but a longterm investment effort. When marketing is done well, it occurs before the company makes any product or enters any market; and it
continues long after the sale.
Lester Wunderman, of direct marketing fame, contrasted sellingto marketing in the following way: “The chant of the Industrial
Revolution was that of the manufacturer who said, ‘This is what
I make, won’t you please buy it?’ The call of the Information
Age is the consumer asking, ‘This is what I want, won’t you
please make it?’ ”1
Marketing hopes to understand the target customer so well thatselling isn’t necessary. Peter Drucker held that “the aim of marketing is to make selling superﬂuous.”2 Mark-eting is the ability to
hit the mark.
Yet there are business leaders who say, “We can’t waste time on
marketing. We haven’t designed the product yet.” Or “We are too suc-

Introduction xiii
cessful to need marketing, and if we were unsuccessful, we couldn’t afford it.” I remember being phoned by a CEO: “Come and teach us
some of your marketing stuff—my sales just dropped by 30 percent.”
Here is my deﬁnition of marketing: Marketing management is
the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, communicating,and delivering superior customer value.
Or if you like a more detailed deﬁnition: “Marketing is thebusiness function that identiﬁes unfulﬁlled needs and wants, deﬁnes and measures their magnitude and potential proﬁtability,
determines which target markets the organization can best serve,
decides on appropriate products, services, and programs to serve
these chosen markets, and calls upon everyone in the organization to think and serve the customer.”In short, marketing’s job is to convert people’s changing needs
into proﬁtable opportunities. Marketing’s aim is to create value by offering superior solutions, saving buyer search and transaction time andeffort, and delivering to the whole society a higher standard of living.
Marketing practice today must go beyond a ﬁxation on transactions that often leads to a sale today and a lost customer tomorrow.
The marketer’s goal is to build a mutually proﬁtable long-term relationship with its customers, not just sell a product. A business isworth no more than the lifetime value of its customers. This calls forknowing your customers well enough to deliver relevant and timely
offers, services, and messages that meet their individual needs.
The function of marketing is typically organized as a department within a business. This is good and bad. It’s good because it
brings together a number of skilled people with speciﬁc abilities forunderstanding, serving, and satisfying customers. It’s bad because
other departments believe that all marketing is done in one department. As the late David Packard of Hewlett-Packard observed,“Marketing is much too important to leave to the marketing department. . . . In a truly great marketing organization, you can’t

xiv Introduction
tell who’s in the marketing department. Everyone in the organization has to make decisions based on the impact on the customer.”
The same thought was well-stated by Professor Philippe Naert:“You will not obtain the real marketing culture by hastily creating a marketing department or team, even if you appoint extremely capable people to the job. Marketing begins with top
management. If top management is not convinced of the need to
be customer minded, how can the marketing idea be accepted
and implemented by the rest of the company?”
Marketing is not restricted to a department that creates ads, selects media, sends out direct mail, and answers customer questions.
Marketing is a larger process of systematically ﬁguring out what to
make, how to bring it to the customer’s attention and easy access,and how to keep the customer wanting to buy more from you.
Furthermore, marketing strategy and actions are not only playedout in customer markets. For example, your company also has to raisemoney from investors. As a result you need to know how to market toinvestors. You also want to attract talent to your company. So you
need to develop a value proposition that will attract the most able
people to join your company. Whether marketing to customers, investors, or talent, you need to understand their needs and wants andpresent a competitively superior value proposition to win their favor.
Is marketing hard to learn? The good news is that marketingtakes a day to learn. The bad news is that it takes a lifetime to master!
But even the bad news can be looked at in a positive way. I take inspiration from Warren Bennis’ remark: “Nothing gives me a greater joy
than learning something new.” (Mr. Bennis is Distinguished Professor
at the University of California and prominent writer on leadership.)The good news is that marketing will be around forever. The bad
news: It won’t be the way you learned it. In the coming decade, marketing will be reengineered from A to Z. I have chosen to highlight 80 of
the most critical concepts and ideas that businesspeople need in waging
their battles in this hypercompetitive and rapidly changing marketplace.

ontents

Advertising1

Brands8

Business-to-Business Marketing

15

Change16

Communication and Promotion

18

Companies

20

Competitive Advantage

22

Competitors

23

Consultants

25

Corporate Branding

26

Creativity

27

Customer Needs

30

Customer Orientation

32

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

34

Customers

36

Customer Satisfaction

41

Database Marketing

43

Design46

xv

xvi Contents
Differentiation49

Direct Mail

52

Distribution and Channels

53

Employees

57

Entrepreneurship

60

Experiential Marketing

61

Financial Marketing

62

Focusing and Niching

64

Forecasting and the Future

66

Goals and Objectives

68

Growth Strategies

70

Guarantees

74

Image and Emotional Marketing

76

Implementation and Control

77

Information and Analytics

80

Innovation

83

Intangible Assets

86International Marketing

87

Internet and E-Business91

Leadership

94

Loyalty

97

Management

99

Marketing Assets and Resources

101

Marketing Department Interfaces

102

Marketing Ethics

106

Marketing Mix

108

Marketing Plans

112

Marketing Research

115

Marketing Roles and Skills

119

Contents xvii
Markets

121

Media

123

Mission124

New Product Development

126

Opportunity

128

Organization

130

Outsourcing

131

Performance Measurement

133

Positioning

135

Price

138

Products

140

Profits

142

Public Relations

145

Quality

147

Recession Marketing

149

Relationship Marketing

151

Retailers and Vendors

154

Sales Force

157

Sales Promotion

160

Segmentation

162

Selling164

Service

167

Sponsorship

169

Strategy

171

Success and Failure

175

Suppliers

176

Target Markets

177

Technology

178

Telemarketing and Call Centers

179

xviii Contents
Trends in Marketing Thinking and Practice

181

Value

183

Word of Mouth

185

Zest

187

Notes

189

Index

195

dvertising

I (and most people) have a love/hate relationship with advertising.
Yes, I enjoy each new Absolut vodka print ad: Where will they hide
the famous bottle? And I enjoy the humor in British ads, and therisqué quality of French ads. Even some advertising jingles andmelodies stick in my mind. But I don’t enjoy most ads. In fact, I actively ignore them. They interrupt my thought processes. Some doworse: They irritate me.
The best ads not only are creative, they sell. Creativity alone is
not enough. Advertising must be more than an art form. But the art
helps. William Bernbach, former head of Doyle, Dane & Bernbach,observed: “The facts are not enough. . . . Don’t forget that
Shakespeare used some pretty hackneyed plots, yet his message
came through with great execution.”
Even a great ad execution must be renewed or it will become
outdated. Coca-Cola cannot continue forever with a catchphrase like
“The Real Thing,” “Coke Is It,” or “I’d Like to Teach the World toSing.” Advertising wear-out is a reality.
Advertising leaders differ on how to create an effective ad campaign. Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates & Company advertising
agency favored linking the brand directly to a single beneﬁt, as in1

2

Marketing Insights from A to Z

TE

AM
FL
Y

“R-O-L-A-I-D-S spells RELIEF.” Leo Burnett preferred to create acharacter that expressed the product’s beneﬁts or personality: theGreen Giant, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Marlboro cowboy, andseveral other mythical personalities. The Doyle, Dane & Bernbach
agency favored developing a narrative story with episodes centeredon a problem and its outcome: thus a Federal Express ad shows aperson worried about receiving something at the promised time
who is then reassured by using FedEx’s tracking system.
The aim of advertising is not to state the facts about a productbut to sell a solution or a dream. Address your advertising to the customers’ aspirations. This is what Ferrari, Tiffany, Gucci, and Ferragamo do. A Ferrari automobile delivers on three dreams: social
recognition, freedom, and heroism. Remember Revlon founderCharles Revson’s remark: “In our factory, we make lipstick. In our
advertising, we sell hope.”3
But the promise of dreams only makes people suspicious of advertising. They don’t believe that their selection of a particular car or
perfume will make them any more attractive or interesting. Stephen
Leacock, humorist and educator, took a cynical view of advertising:“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”Ads primarily create product awareness, sometimes productknowledge, less often product preference, and more rarely, productpurchase. That’s why advertising cannot do the job alone. Sales promotion may be needed to trigger purchase. A salesperson might beneeded to elaborate on the beneﬁts and close the sale.
What’s worse, many ads are not particularly creative. Most are
not memorable. Take auto ads. The typical one shows a new car racing 100 miles an hour around mountain bends. But we don’t havemountains in Chicago. And 60 miles an hour is the speed limit. And
furthermore I can’t remember which car the ad featured. Conclusion: Most ads are a waste of the companies’ money and my time.
Most ad agencies blame the lack of creativity on the client.

Team-Fly®

Advertising3

Clients wisely ask their agencies to come up with three ads, frommild to wild. But then the client typically settles for the mild and safe
one. Thus the client plays a role in killing good advertising.
Companies should ask this question before using advertising:
Would advertising create more satisﬁed clients than if our company spent the same money on making a better product, improving company service, or creating stronger brand experiences? I
wish that companies would spend more money and time on designing an exceptional product, and less on trying to psychologically manipulate perceptions through expensive advertising campaigns. The
better the product, the less that has to be spent advertising it.
The best advertising is done by your satisﬁed customers.
The stronger your customer loyalty, the less you have to spend
on advertising. First, most of your customers will come back without
you doing any advertising. Second, most customers, because of theirhigh satisfaction, are doing the advertising for you. In addition, advertising often attracts deal-prone customers who will ﬂit in and out
in search of a bargain.
There are legions of people who love advertising whether or
not it works. And I don’t mean those who need a commercial toprovide a bathroom break from the soap opera. My late friend andmentor, Dr. Steuart Henderson Britt, passionately believed in advertising. “Doing business without advertising is like winking
at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”
The advertising agency’s mantra is: “Early to bed, early to rise,work like hell, advertise.”
But I still advise: Make good advertising, not bad advertising.
David Ogilvy cautioned: “Never write an advertisement which
you wouldn’t want your own family to read. You wouldn’t telllies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.”4
Ogilvy chided ad makers who seek awards, not sales: “The advertising business . . . is being pulled down by the people who

4Marketing Insights from A to Z

create it, who don’t know how to sell anything, who have neversold anything in their lives . . . who despise selling, whose mission in life is to be clever show-offs, and con clients into giving
them money to display their originality and genius.”5Those who love advertising can point to many cases where it
worked brilliantly: Marlboro cigarettes, Absolut vodka, Volvo automobiles. It also worked in the following cases:• A company advertised for a security guard. The next day it
was robbed.
• If you think advertising doesn’t pay—we understand there are
25 mountains in Colorado higher than Pikes Peak. Can youname one?
Those against too much reliance on advertising are fond of
quoting John Wanamaker of department store fame: “I know that
half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; but I can neverﬁnd out which half.”
How should you develop your advertising? You have to makedecisions on the ﬁve Ms of advertising: mission, message, media,
money, and measurement.
The ad’s mission can be one of four: to inform, persuade, remind, or reinforce a purchase decision. With a new product, youwant to inform and/or persuade. With an old product, like CocaCola, you want to remind. With some products just bought, youwant to reassure the purchaser and reinforce the decision.
The message must communicate the brand’s distinctive value inwords and pictures. Any message should be tested with the target audience using a set of six questions (see box).
The media must be chosen for their ability to reach the target
market cost-effectively. Besides the classic media of newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and billboards, there is a ﬂurry of new media,
including e-mail, faxes, telemarketers, digital magazines, in-store ad-Advertising

5

Advertisement Message Test
1. What is the main message you get from this ad?
2. What do you think the advertiser wants you to know, believe, or do?
3. How likely is it that this ad will inﬂuence you to undertakethe implied action?
4. What works well in the ad and what works poorly?
5. How does the ad make you feel?
6. Where is the best place to reach you with this message—where would you be most likely to notice it andpay attention to it?

vertising, and advertising now popping up in skyscraper elevators andbathrooms. Media selection is becoming a major challenge.
A company works with the media department of the ad agency
to deﬁne how much reach, frequency, and impact the ad campaign
should achieve. Suppose you want your advertising campaign to deliver at least one exposure to 60 percent of the target market consisting of 1,000,000 people. This is 600,000 exposures. But you want
the average person to see your ad three times during the campaign.
That is 1,800,000 exposures. But it might take six exposures for the
average person to notice your ad three times. Thus you need
3,600,000 exposures. And suppose you want to use a high-impact
media vehicle costing $20 per 1,000 exposures. Then the campaign
should cost $72,000 ($20 × 3,600,000/1,000). Notice that yourcompany could use the same budget to reach more people with lessfrequency or to reach more people with lower-impact media vehicles.
There are trade-offs among reach, frequency, and impact.

6Marketing Insights from A to Z

Next is money. The ad budget is arrived at by pricing the reach,frequency, and impact decisions. This budget must take into accountthat the company has to pay for ad production and other costs.
A welcome trend would be that advertisers pay advertising
agencies on a pay-for-performance basis. This would be reasonablebecause the agencies claim that their creative ad campaigns will increase the companies’ sales. So pay the agency an 18 percent commission if sales increase, a normal 15 percent commission if sales
remain the same, and a 13 percent commission with a warning if sales
have fallen. Of course, the agency will say that other forces caused
the drop in sales and even that the drop would have been deeper had
it not been for the ad campaign.
Now for measurement. Ad campaigns require premeasurement
and postmeasurement. Ad mock-ups can be tested for communication effectiveness using recall, recognition, or persuasion measures.
Postmeasurements strive to calculate the communication or sales impact of the ad campaign. This is difﬁcult to do, though, particularly
with image ads.
For example, how can Coca-Cola measure the impact of a picture of a Coke bottle on the back page of a magazine on which thecompany spent $70,000 to inﬂuence purchases? At 70 cents a bottle
and 10 cents of proﬁt per bottle, Coke would have to sell 700,000
additional bottles to cover the $70,000 cost of the ad. I just don’t
believe that ad will sell 700,000 extra bottles of Coke.
Companies must try, of course, to measure results of each ad
medium and vehicle. If online promotions are drawing in more
prospects than TV ads, adapt your budget in favor of the former.
Don’t maintain a ﬁxed allocation of your advertising budget. Movead money into the media that are producing the best response.
One thing is certain: Advertising dollars are wasted whenspent to advertise inferior or indistinct products. Pepsi-Cola spent$100 million to launch Pepsi One, and it failed. In fact, the quickest way to kill a poor product is to advertise it. More people

Advertising

7

will try the product sooner and tell others faster how bad or irrelevant it is.
How much should you spend on advertising? If you spend too
little, you are spending too much because no one notices it. A million dollars of TV advertising will hardly be noticed. And if you
spend too many millions, your proﬁts will suffer. Most ad agencies
push for a “big bang” budget and while this may be noticed, it hardly
moves sales.
It is hard to measure something that can’t be measured. Stan
Rapp and Thomas Collins put their ﬁnger on the problem in thebook Beyond MaxiMarketing. “We are simply emphasizing that research often goes to great lengths to measure irrelevant things,
including people’s opinions about advertising or their memories
of it rather than their actions as a result of it.”6
Will mass advertising diminish in its inﬂuence and use? I think
so. People are increasingly cynical about and increasingly inattentive
to advertising. One of its former major spenders, Sergio Zyman, exvice president of Coca-Cola, said recently, “Advertising, as you
know it, is dead.” He then redeﬁned advertising: “Advertising is a
lot more than just television commercials—it includes branding,packaging, celebrity spokespeople, sponsorships, publicity, customer service, the way you treat your employees, and even theway your secretary answers the phone.”7 What he is really doing is
deﬁning marketing.
A major limitation of advertising is that it constitutes a monologue. As evidence, most ads do not contain a telephone number or
e-mail address to enable the customer to respond. What a lost opportunity for the company to learn something from a customer! Marketing consultant Regis McKenna observed: “We are witnessing theobsolescence of advertising. The new marketing requires a feedback loop; it is this element that is missing from the monologueof advertising.”8

randsEverything is a brand: Coca-Cola, FedEx, Porsche, New York City,
the United States, Madonna, and you—yes, you! A brand is any labelthat carries meaning and associations. A great brand does more: It
lends coloration and resonance to a product or service.
Russell Hanlin, the CEO of Sunkist Growers, observed: “Anorange is an orange . . . is an orange. Unless . . . that orange
happens to be Sunkist, a name 80 percent of consumers know
and trust.” We can say the same about Starbucks: “There is coffee
and there is Starbucks coffee.”
Are brands important? Roberto Goizueta, the late CEO of
Coca-Cola, commented: “All our factories and facilities could
burn down tomorrow but you’d hardly touch the value of thecompany; all that actually lies in the goodwill of our brand franchise and the collective knowledge in the company.” And a booklet by Johnson & Johnson reafﬁrms this: “Our company’s nameand trademark are by far our most valuable assets.”
Companies must work hard to build brands. David Ogilvy insisted: “Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius,
faith and perseverance to create a brand.”The sign of a great brand is how much loyalty or preference it

8Brands

9commands. Harley Davidson is a great brand because Harley Davidson motorcycle owners rarely switch to another brand. Nor do Apple
Macintosh users want to switch to Microsoft.
A well-known brand fetches extra pennies. The aim of branding,according to one cynic, “is to get more money for a product than it isworth.” But this is a narrow view of the beneﬁts that a trusted brandconfers on users. The user knows by the brand name the productquality and features to expect and the services that will be rendered,and this is worth extra pennies.
A brand saves people time, and this is worth money. Niall
Fitzgerald, chairman of Unilever, observed: “A brand is a storehouse of trust that matters more and more as choices multiply.
People want to simplify their lives.”
The brand amounts to a contract with the customer regarding
how the brand will perform. The brand contract must be honest.
Motel 6, for example, offers clean rooms, low prices, and good service but does not imply that the furnishings are luxurious or thebathroom is large.
How are brands built? It’s a mistake to think that advertisingbuilds the brand. Advertising only calls attention to the brand; it
might even create brand interest and brand talk. Brands are built
holistically, through the orchestration of a variety of tools, including
advertising, public relations (PR), sponsorships, events, social causes,
clubs, spokespersons, and so on.
The real challenge is not in placing an ad but to get the media
talking about the brand. Media journalists are on the lookout for interesting products or services, such as Palm, Viagra, Starbucks, eBay. A
new brand should strive to establish a new category, have an interesting
name, and tell a fascinating story. If print and TV will pick up the story,
people will hear about it and tell their friends. Learning about a brandfrom others creates credibility. Learning about it only through paid advertising is easy to dismiss because of the biased nature of advertising.
Don’t advertise the brand, live it. Ultimately the brand is built by10 Marketing Insights from A to Z
your employees who deliver a positive experience to the customers. Did
the brand experience live up to the brand promise? This is why companies must orchestrate the brand experience with the brand promise.
Choosing a good brand name helps. A consumer panel was
shown the pictures of two beautiful women and asked who was more
beautiful. The vote split 50–50. Then the experimenter named one
woman Jennifer and the other Gertrude. The woman named Jennifer
subsequently received 80 percent of the votes.
Great brands are the only route to sustained, above-average
proﬁtability. And great brands present emotional beneﬁts, notjust rational beneﬁts. Too many brand managers focus on rational
incentives such as the brand’s features, price, and sales promotion,
which contribute little to growing the brand-customer relationship.
Great brands work more on emotions. And in the future, greatbrands will show social responsibility—a caring concern for people
and the state of the world.
A company needs to think through what its brand is supposed
to mean. What should Sony mean, Burger King mean, Cadillac

Richard Branson’s Virgin brand is about fun and creativity.
These attributes are projected in all of Virgin’s marketing activities. Some of Virgin Atlantic’s Airways’ ﬂights include
massages, live rock bands, and casinos. Flight attendants
are fun-loving and enjoy joking with the passengers. Branson uses public relations to project his daring, such as attempting to ﬂy around the world in a hot-air balloon. To
launch Virgin Bride (bridal wear), Branson dressed up in
drag as a bride.

Brands 11
mean? A brand must be given a personality. It must thrive on sometrait(s). And the traits must percolate through all of the company’smarketing activities.
Once you deﬁne the attribute(s) of your brand, you need to express them in every marketing activity. Your people must live out thebrand spirit at the corporate level and at the job-speciﬁc level. Thus if
your company brands itself as innovative, then you must hire, train,
and reward people for being innovative. And being innovative must
be deﬁned for every job position, including the production supervisor, the van driver, the accountant, and the salesperson.
The brand personality must be carried out by the company’s partners as well. The company cannot allow its dealers to compromise thebrand by engaging in price-cutting against other dealers. They must
represent the brand properly and deliver the expected brand experience.
When a brand is successful, the company will want to put thebrand name on additional products. The brand name may be put on
products launched in the same category (line extension), in a new category (brand extension), or even in a new industry (brand stretch).
Line extension makes sense in that the company can coast on the
goodwill that it has built up in the category and save the money that it
would otherwise have to spend to create brand awareness of a newname and offering. Thus we see Campbell Soup introducing new soups
under its widely recognized red label. But this requires the discipline ofadding new soups while subtracting unproﬁtable soups from the line.
The new soups can cannibalize the sales of the core soups without
bringing in much additional revenue to cover the additional costs. They
can reduce operational efﬁciency, increase distribution costs, confuse
consumers, and reduce overall proﬁtability. Some line extensions areclearly worth adding, but overuse of line extensions must be avoided.
Brand extension is riskier: I buy Campbell’s soup but I might beless interested in Campbell’s popcorn. Brand stretch is even morerisky: Would you buy a Coca-Cola car?
Well-known companies tend to assume that their great name

12 Marketing Insights from A to Z

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can carry them successfully into another category. Yet whatever happened to Xerox computers or Heinz salsa? Did the HewlettPackard/Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC overtake the Palm handheld or
did Bayer acetaminophen overtake Tylenol? Is Amazon electronics as
successful as Amazon books? Too often the company is introducing ame-too version of the product that ultimately loses to the existing
category leaders.
The better choice would be to establish a new name for a new
product rather than carry the company’s name and all of its baggage.
The company name creates a feeling of more of the same, rather thansomething new. Some companies know this. Toyota chose not to call
its upscale car Toyota Upscale but rather Lexus; Apple Computer
didn’t call its new computer Apple IV but Macintosh; Levi’s didn’t
call its new pants Levi’s Cottons but Dockers; Sony didn’t call its
new videogame Sony Videogame but PlayStation; and Black &Decker didn’t call its upgraded tools Black & Decker Plus but DeWalt. Creating a new brand name gives more opportunity to establish and circulate a fresh public relations story to gain valuable media
attention and talk. A new brand needs credibility, and PR is muchbetter than advertising in establishing credibility.
Yet every rule has its exceptions. Richard Branson has put thename Virgin on several dozen businesses, including Virgin Atlantic
Airways, Virgin Holidays, Virgin Hotels, Virgin Trains, Virgin Limousines, Virgin Radio, Virgin Publishing, and Virgin Cola. Ralph
Lauren’s name is found on numerous clothing products and homefurnishings. Still a company has to ask: How far can the brand namebe stretched before it loses its meaning?
Al Ries and Jack Trout, two keen marketing thinkers, areagainst most line and brand extensions; they see it as diluting thebrand. To them, a Coke should mean an eight-ounce soft drink in
the famous Coke bottle. But ask today for a Coke and you will haveto answer whether you want Coca-Cola Classic, Caffeine Free CocaCola Classic, Diet Coke, Diet Coke with Lemon, Vanilla Coke, orTeam-Fly®

Brands 13
Cherry Coke—and do you want it in a can or a bottle? Vendors used
to know what you wanted when you asked for a Coke.
Brand pricing is a challenge. When Lexus started to make inroads against Mercedes in the United States, Mercedes wasn’t goingto lower its price to match Lexus’ lower price. No, some Mercedes
managers even proposed raising Mercedes’ price to establish that
Mercedes is selling prestige that the buyer can’t get from a Lexus.
But brand price premiums today are shrinking. A leading brand in
the past could safely charge 15 to 40 percent more than the average
brand; today it would be lucky to get 5 to 15 percent more. When
product quality was uneven, we would pay more for the better brand.
Now all brands are pretty good. Even the store’s brand is good. In fact,
it probably is made by the national brand to the same standards. So why
pay more (except for show-off brands like Mercedes) to impress others?
In recessionary times, price loyalty is greater than brand loyalty.
Customer loyalty may reﬂect nothing more than inertia or the absence of something better. As someone observed, “There is nothingthat a 20 percent discount won’t cure.”
A company handles its brands through brand managers. But
Larry Light, a brand expert, doesn’t think that brands are well managed. Here is his plaint: “Brands do not have to die. They can be
murdered. And the marketing Draculas are draining the very
lifeblood away from brands. Brands are being bargained, belittled, bartered and battered. Instead of being brand-asset managers, we are committing brand suicide through self-inﬂicted
wounds of excessive emphasis on prices and deals.”
Another concern is that brand management structures may militate against carrying out effective customer relationship management(CRM) practices. Companies tend to overfocus and overorganize on
the basis of their products and brands, and underfocus on managing
their customers well. Call it brand management myopia.
Heidi and Don Schultz, marketing authors, believe that theconsumer packaged goods (CPG) model for brand building is

14 Marketing Insights from A to Z
increasingly inappropriate, especially for service ﬁrms, technology
ﬁrms, ﬁnancial organizations, business-to-business brands, and evensmaller CPG companies.9 They charge that the proliferation of media
and message delivery systems has eroded mass advertising’s power.
They urge companies to use a different paradigm to build theirbrands in the New Economy.
• Companies should clarify the corporation’s basic values andbuild the corporate brand. Companies such as Starbucks, Sony,
Cisco Systems, Marriott, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric,
and American Express have built strong corporate brands;
their name on a product or service creates an image of quality
and value.
• Companies should use brand managers to carry out the tacticalwork. But the brand’s ultimate success will depend on everyonein the company accepting and living the brand’s value proposition. Prominent CEOs—such as Charles Schwab or Jeff Bezos—are playing a growing role in shaping brand strategies.
• Companies need to develop a more comprehensive brandbuilding plan to create positive customer experiences at every
touch point—events, seminars, news, telephone, e-mail, person-to-person contact.
• Companies need to deﬁne the brand’s basic essence to be delivered wherever it is sold. Local executions can be varied aslong as they deliver the feel of the brand.
• Companies must use the brand value proposition as the key driver of the company’s strategy, operations, services, and productdevelopment.
• Companies must measure their brand-building effectivenessnot by the old measures of awareness, recognition, and recall,but by a more comprehensive set of measures including customer perceived value, customer satisfaction, customer shareof wallet, customer retention, and customer advocacy.

usiness-to-Business
Marketing

Most marketing is business-to-business (B2B) marketing eventhough textbooks and business magazines devote most of their attention to business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. The disproportionate attention to B2C has been justiﬁed by saying that (1) B2C iswhere most of modern marketing concepts ﬁrst arose, and (2) B2B
marketers can learn a lot by adopting B2C thinking. While these twostatements are true, B2B is having its own renaissance, and maybe
B2C marketers have a lot to learn from B2B practices. B2B, in particular, has focused more on individual customers, and B2C is increasingly moving into one-to-one customer thinking.
The sales force is the main driver in B2B marketing. Its importance cannot be overestimated, especially when selling complex customized equipment such as B-47s or power plants or selling to large
national and global accounts. Today’s companies increasingly assign national and global account managers to manage their largest customers.
Account management systems will grow in the future as more of theworld’s business becomes concentrated in fewer but larger companies.
But today B2B companies also are driven to replace high-costsales calls with less expensive contact channels such as tele- andvideoconferencing and Web-based communications, where possible.

1516 Marketing Insights from A to Z
As videoconferencing improves and costs come down, companies will
reduce the number of ﬁeld visits to customers and save on the highcosts of transportation, hotels, dining out, and entertaining.
Another force that might reduce the role of the sales force is thegrowth of Web-based market exchanges. Price differences—especiallyfor commodity materials and components—will become more visible, thus making it harder for salespeople to inﬂuence buyers to pay
more than the market price. (See Sales Force and Selling.)

hange

Change, not stability, is the only constant. Companies today have to
run faster to stay in the same place. Some say that if you remain in
the same business, you will be out of business. Note that companies
such as Nokia and Hewlett-Packard gave up their original businesses.
Survival calls for self-cannibalization.
Your company has to be able to recognize Strategic Inﬂection
Points, deﬁned by Andy Grove of Intel as “a time in the life of abusiness when its fundamentals are about to change.” Banks had
to make changes with the advent of automated teller machines(ATMs), and major airlines have to make changes with the new competition coming from low-fare airlines.
Jack Welch at GE admonished his people: “DYB: Destroy your

Change 17
business. . . . Change or die. When the rate of change inside thecompany is exceeded by the rate of change outside the company,
the end is near.”
Tom Peters’ advice: “To meet the demands of the fastchanging competitive scene, we must simply learn to lovechange as much as we hated it in the past.”
I have noticed that American and European businesspeople respond differently to change. Europeans see it as posing a threat.
Many Americans see it as presenting opportunities.
The companies that fear change most are many of today’s leading
companies. As incumbents, they have invested so much in their present
tangible assets that they tend to either ignore or ﬁght the insurgents.
Because they are big, they think they are built to last. But being big is
no guarantee against becoming irrelevant, as Kmart, A&P, and Western Union discovered. If companies don’t want to be left behind, theymust anticipate change and lead change. The ability to change fasterthan your competitors amounts to a competitive advantage.
Richard D’Aveni, the author of Hypercompetitive Rivalries,10
observed: “In the end, there will be just two kinds of ﬁrms:
those who disrupt their markets and those who don’t survive
the assault.”
But how do you change a company? How do you get your employees to adopt a new mind-set and give up their comfortable activities and learn new ones? Clearly top management must develop a
new compelling vision and mission whose beneﬁts for the various
stakeholders appear far greater than the risk and cost of change. Top
management must gather support and apply internal marketing to
produce change in the organization.
The best defense in the face of change is to create a company
that thrives on change. The company would see change as normal
rather than as an interruption of the normal. And it would attract
people who have positive attitudes toward change. It would instituteopen discussions of policy, strategy, tactics, and organization. The

18 Marketing Insights from A to Z
worst thing is to be a company that dislikes change. Such a company
will attract people who dislike change, and the end is inevitable.
As Reinhold Niebuhr stated: “God, give us grace to accept with
serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change thethings that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish theone from the other.”ommunication
and Promotion

Among the most important skills in marketing are communicationand promotion. Communication is the broader term, and it happens
whether planned or not. A salesperson’s attire communicates, thecatalog price communicates, and the company’s ofﬁces communicate; all create impressions on the receiving party. This explains thegrowing interest in integrated marketing communications (IMC).
Companies need to orchestrate a consistent set of impressions fromits personnel, facilities, and actions that deliver the company’s brandmeaning and promise to its various audiences.
Promotion is that part of communication that consists of company messages designed to stimulate awareness of, interest in, andpurchase of its various products and services. Companies use adver-

Communication and Promotion 19
tising, sales promotion, salespeople, and public relations to disseminate messages designed to attract attention and interest.
Promotion cannot be effective unless it catches people’s attention. But today we are deluged with print, broadcast, and electronic
information. We confront 2 billion Web pages, 18,000 magazines,
and 60,000 new books each year. In response, we have developed
routines to protect ourselves from information overload. We toss
most catalogs and direct mail unopened into the wastebasket; delete
unwanted and unread e-mail messages; and refuse to listen to telephone solicitations.
Thomas Davenport and John Beck point out in The Attention
Economy that the glut of information is leading to attention deﬁcit
disorder (ADD), the difﬁculty of getting anyone’s attention.11 The
attention deﬁcit is so pronounced that companies have to spend
more money marketing than making the product. This is certainly
the case with new perfume brands and many new ﬁlms. Consider thatthe makers of The Blair Witch Project spent $350,000 making theﬁlm and $11 million to market it.
As a result, marketers need to study how people in their target
market allocate their attention time. Marketers want to know thebest way to get a larger share of consumers’ attention. Marketers apply attention-getting approaches such as high-proﬁle movie stars andathletes; respected intermediaries close to the target audience; shocking stories, statements, or questions; free offers; and countless others.
Even then, there is a question of effectiveness. It is one thing tocreate awareness, another to draw sustained attention, and still another to trigger action. Attention is to get someone to spend time focusing on something. But whether this leads to buying action isanother question.

ompanies

It has been observed that there are four types of companies:
1. Those that make things happen.
2. Those that watch things happen and respond.
3. Those that watch things happen and don’t respond.
4. Those that didn’t notice that anything had happened.
No wonder the average company disappears within 20 years. Of
the companies listed as best in the Forbes 100 of 1917, only 18 survived to 1987. And only two of them, General Electric and Eastman
Kodak, were making good money.
And not all existing companies are truly alive. Companies fool
us by merely breathing day to day. General Motors and Sears havebeen losing shares for years even though their hearts are still ticking.
You can enter some companies and tell within 15 minutes whether
they are alive or dead, just by looking at the employees’ faces.
I no longer know what a large company is. Company size is relative. Boeing, Caterpillar, Ford, General Motors, Kellogg, Eastman
Kodak, J. P. Morgan, and Sears are giant companies. But in early

20Companies 21
2000 Microsoft Corporation achieved a market value that exceededthat of all eight companies combined.
What makes some companies great? There’s a whole string ofbooks ready to tell us the answer. Tom Peters and Bob Waterman
started the guessing game with In Search of Excellence in 1982.12 Of
the 70 companies they nominated, many are moribund today. Then
we heard from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last (1994),13
Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema in The Discipline of Market Leaders (1995),14 Arie De Geus in The Living Company (1997),15 andmost recently from Jim Collins again in Good to Great: Why Some
Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t (2001).16
These books point out the many correlations of successful companies. But I have a simple thesis: Companies last as long as they continue to provide superior customer value. They must be
market-driven and customer-driven. In the best cases, they are market-driving. They create new products that people may not haveasked for but afterwards thank them for. Thanks to Sony for yourWalkman, your smaller storage disks, your incredible camcorders,and your innovative computers.
Customer-oriented companies make steady gains in mind shareand heart share, leading to higher market shares and in turn tohigher proﬁt shares.
Tom Siebel, CEO of Siebel Systems, has a simple but comprehensive view of what creates great companies. “Focus on satisfying
your customers, becoming a market leader, and being known asa good corporate citizen and a good place to work. Everythingelse follows.” (See Customer Orientation.)

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Michael Porter popularized the notion that a company wins by building a relevant and sustainable competitive advantage.17 Having acompetitive advantage is like having a gun in a knife ﬁght.
This is true, but today most advantages don’t stay relevant and
few are sustainable. Advantages are temporary. Increasingly, a company wins not with a single advantage but by layering one advantage
on top of another over time. The Japanese have been masters at this,ﬁrst coming in with low prices, then with better features, then with
better quality, and then with faster performance. The Japanese haverecognized that marketing is a race without a ﬁnishing line.
Companies can build a competitive advantage from manysources, such as superiority in quality, speed, safety, service, design,
and reliability, together with lower cost, lower price, and so on. It is
more often some unique combination of these, rather than a single
silver bullet, that delivers the advantage.
A great company will have incorporated a set of advantages that all
reinforce each other around a basic idea. Wal-Mart, IKEA, and Southwest Airlines have unique sets of practices that enable them to charge
the lowest prices in their respective industries. A competitor that copies
only a few of these practices will not succeed in gaining an advantage.
Recognize that competitive advantages are relative, not absolute.

22Team-Fly®

Competitors 23
If the competition is improving by 30 percent and you by 20 percent,you are losing competitive advantage. Singapore Airlines kept improving its quality, but Cathay Paciﬁc was improving its quality faster,
thereby gradually closing the gap with Singapore Airlines.

ompetitors

All ﬁrms have competitors. Even if there were only one airline, theairline would have to worry about trains, buses, cars, bicycles, andeven people who might prefer to walk to their destinations.
The late Roberto Goizueta, CEO of Coca-Cola, recognized
Coke’s competitors. When his people said that Coke’s market share wasat a maximum, he countered that Coca-Cola accounted for less than 2
ounces of the 64 ounces of ﬂuid that each of the world’s 4.4 billion
people drank every day. “The enemy is coffee, milk, tea, water,” hetold his people. Coca-Cola is now a major seller of bottled water.
The more success a company has, the more competition it will
attract. Most markets are brimming with whales, barracudas, sharks,
and minnows. In these waters, the choice is to eat lunch or be lunch.
Or, using computer scientist Gregory Rawlins’ metaphor: “If you’re
not part of the steamroller, you’re a part of the road.”
Hopefully your company will attract only good competitors.
Good competitors are a blessing. They are like good teachers whoraise our sights and sharpen our skills. Average competitors are a nuisance. Bad competitors are a pain to every decent competitor.

24 Marketing Insights from A to Z
A company should never ignore its competitors. Stay alert.
“Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted,” noted Sun Tzu
in the fourth century B.C. And your allies should stay alert. If you aregoing to be an effective competitor, you must also be an effective cooperator. You are not a solo business but a partnership, a network, an
extended enterprise. Competition today is increasingly between networks, not companies. And your ability to spot faster, learn faster,
and work faster as a network is a key competitive advantage.
In the short run, the most dangerous competitors are thosethat resemble your company the most. The customers can’t see thedifference. Your company is a toss-up in their mind. So differentiate,
differentiate, differentiate.
According to marketing guru Theodore Levitt: “The newcompetition is not between what companies produce in their factories, but between what they add to their factory output in theform of packaging, services, advertising, customer advice, ﬁnancing, delivery arrangements, warehousing, and other things
that people value.”18
The way to beat your competitors is to attack yourself ﬁrst. Work
hard to make your product line obsolete before your competitors do.
Watch your distant competitors as well as your close ones. My
guess is that your company is more likely to be buried by a new disruptive technology than by nasty look-alike competitors. Most fatalcompetition will come from a small competitor who burns with apassion to change the rules of the game. IBM made the mistake ofworrying more about Fujitsu than a nobody named Bill Gates who
was working on software in his garage.
As important as it is to watch your competitors, it is more important to obsess on your customers. Customers, not competitors,
determine who wins the war. Most markets are plagued by too manyﬁshermen going after too few ﬁsh. The best ﬁshermen understandthe ﬁsh better than their competitors do.

onsultants

Consultants can play a positive role in helping companies reappraise
their market opportunities, strategies, and tactics. Consultants provide a client company with an outside-in view to correct the company’s tendency to take an inside-out view.
Yet some managers say: “If we are successful, we don’t need
consultants. If we are unsuccessful, we can’t afford them.”
We need fewer consultants and more resultants. Too many consultants give you advice and fail to grapple with the difﬁcult problem
of implementing the recommendations. Keep the consultant and pay
him or her according to results.
Here is a test for ﬁnding a good consultant. Ask each consultant, “What time is it?”
• The ﬁrst consultant says: “It is exactly 9:32 A.M. and 10 seconds.” Hire him if you want an accurate, fact-ﬁlled study.
• The second consultant answers: “What time do you want
it to be?” Hire him if you don’t want advice so much as
corroboration.
• The third consultant answers: “Why do you want to know?”
Hire him if you want some original thinking, such as deﬁn-25

26 Marketing Insights from A to Z
ing the problem more carefully. Peter Drucker says that his
greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a
few basic questions.
There is a lot of cynicism about consultants. As early as the ﬁrst
century B.C., Publilius Syrus, a Latin writer, noted: “Many receive
advice, few proﬁt by it.” Robert Townsend, former CEO of Avis
Rent-A-Car, described consultants as “people who borrow yourwatch and tell you what time it is and then walk off with thewatch.” William Marsteller, of Burson-Marsteller public relations,
added: “A consultant is a person who knows nothing about yourbusiness to whom you pay more to tell you how to run it than
you could earn if you ran it right instead of the way he tells you.”
The cynicism simply means that there are good and bad consultants and your task is to be able to tell the difference.

orporate Branding

There is great payoff in building a strong corporate brand. Sony can
put its name on any electronic device and customers will prefer it to
the competition. Virgin can enter almost any business and be successful because its name means brings a fresh approach to that business.
The major requirement for corporate branding is for the company to stand for something, whether it is quality, innovation,
friendliness, or something else. Take Caterpillar, the heavy con-

Creativity 27
struction equipment manufacturer. Caterpillar’s brand personality
triggers such associations as hardworking, resilient, tough, bold,and determined. So Caterpillar has been able to launch Cat jeans,sandals, sunglasses, watches, and toys, all designed with the same
traits in mind.
A strong corporate brand needs good image work in terms of atheme, tag line, graphics, logo, identifying colors, and advertisingdollars. But the company shouldn’t overrely on an advertising approach. Corporate image is more effectively built by company performance than by anything else. Good company performance plus goodPR will buy a lot more than corporate advertising.

reativity

Companies formerly won their marketing battles through superior
efﬁciency or quality. Today they must win through superior creativity.
One does not win through better sameness; one wins through uniqueness. Winning companies such as IKEA, Harley Davidson, and Southwest Airlines are unique.
Uniqueness requires developing a culture that honors creativity.
There are three ways to increase your company’s creativity:
1. Hire more naturally creative people and give them free rein.
2. Stimulate creativity in your organization through a myriad ofwell-tested techniques.

28 Marketing Insights from A to Z
3. Contract for creativity help. Go to Brighthouse in Atlanta,
Faith Popcorn in New York, or Leo Burnett in Chicago, forexample, and get help in ﬁnding a breakthrough idea.
See the box for descriptions of some of the leading creativity techniques that can be used in-house.

Creativity Techniques• Modiﬁcation analysis. With respect to some product orservice, consider ways to adapt, modify, magnify, minify,
substitute, rearrange, reverse, or combine.
• Attribute listing. Deﬁne and modify the attributes of the
product. For example, in seeking to build a better mousetrap, consider ways to improve bait, method of execution,
method of hearing execution, method of removal, shape,material, price.
• Forced relationships. Try out new combinations. For example, in trying to build a new type of ofﬁce furniture, consider combining a desk and a bookcase, or a bookcase
and a ﬁling system.
• Morphological analysis. Play with the basic dimensions of
the problem. For example, in trying to move something fromone point to another, consider the type of vehicle (cart,
chair, sling, bed), the medium in which/by which the vehicle
operates (air, water, oil, rollers, rails), and the power source(compressed air, engine, steam, magnetic ﬁeld, cable).
• Product problem analysis. Think of all the problems that a
speciﬁc product has. For example, chewing gum loses its

Creativity 29

ﬂavor too quickly, may cause dental cavities, and is hardto dispose of. Think of solutions to these problems.
• Decision trees. Deﬁne the set of decisions that are to be
made. For example, to develop a new grooming aid, decide on the user (men or women); type of aid (deodorant,
shaving product, cologne); type of package (stick, bottle,
spray); market (commercial, gift); and channel (vending
machines, retailers, hotel rooms).
• Brainstorming. Gather a small group and pose a problem,
such as, “Find new products and services that homes
might need.” Encourage freewheeling thinking, stimulate
a maximum number of ideas, try new combinations, andavoid criticism at the beginning.
• Synectics. Pose a generic problem, such as how to open
something, before posing the real one, hoping that it
broadens the thinking.

A major source of ideas can come from futurists such as Alvin
Tofﬂer, John Naisbet, and Faith Popcorn and the trends they havespotted. Faith Popcorn became famous for her creative labeling oftrends, including anchoring (religion, yoga), being alive (vegetarianism, meditation), cashing out, clanning, cocooning, down-aging, fantasy adventure, 99 lives (multitasking), pleasure revenge, small
indulgences, and vigilant consumers. She would consult on howaligned a company’s strategy is with these major trends, and often tella company that it is off-trend in several ways.
Smart companies set up idea markets. They encourage their employees, suppliers, distributors, and dealers to offer suggestions thatwill save costs or yield new products, features, and services. They es-

30 Marketing Insights from A to Z
tablish high-level committees that collect, evaluate, and choose thebest ideas. And they reward those who suggest the best ideas. Alex
Osborn, the developer of brainstorming, said: “Creativity is so delicate a ﬂower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.”
It is sad that creativity probably peaks at age 5 and then children
go to school only to lose it. The educational emphasis on left brain
cognitive learning tends to undernurture the creative right brain.

ustomer Needs

Marketing’s original mantra is to “ﬁnd needs and ﬁll them.” Thecompany ﬁnds needs by listening to or interviewing customers andthen prepares an appropriate solution to each need. Today, however,there are few needs that companies don’t know about or address.
Pietro Guido, an Italian marketing consultant, wrote a book called
The No-Need Society to make this point.
But there is another answer to the “no-need society”—that is,
to create new needs. Sony’s Akio Morita, in his Made in Japan, said:“We don’t serve markets. We create markets.” Consumers neverthought of videotape recorders, video cameras, fax machines, Palms,
and so on, until they were made.
Of course, new needs will emerge even if the old ones are satis-

Customer Needs 31
ﬁed. Events can create new needs. The tragedy of September 11,
2001, increased the need for greater security in the air, food supply,
and transportation and the country rapidly responded with new security measures. Trends can create new needs, such as the interest in“Down-Aging.” As people get older they want to feel and lookyounger, and this leads to buying sports cars, having plastic surgery,and using exercise equipment. So we can distinguish between existingneeds and latent needs. Smart marketers will attempt to anticipate thenext need and not only conﬁne their attention to today’s need.
Sometimes a need is obscured because a company has taken too
limited a view of customers. Certain dogmas get set in concrete, suchas the cosmetics industry dogma that women basically use cosmetics
in order to be more attractive to men. Along came Anita Roddick,who started The Body Shop with the assumption that many women
want products that will give good care to their skin. She added another value: that many women care about social issues and will patronize a company that cares.19
Greg Carpenter and Kent Nakamoto have challenged a core assumption of marketers that buyers initially know what they want.20
Instead they learn what they want. And companies play a strong rolein teaching buyers what to want. Different brand competitors add
new features to their computers, cameras, and cellular phones thatbuyers may not have known of or asked for, and in the process, buyers form a better idea of what they want. Such companies are not justmarket driven (by customer needs), but are market driving (by innovation). In this sense, competition is less a race to meet consumer
needs and more a race to deﬁne these needs.
One reason that early market entrants (such as Xerox or Palm)
often gain sustained market leadership is because the attributes they
initially build into their products deﬁne the wants that were otherwise ill-deﬁned. Consumers see the attributes as deﬁning the category. Late-entry competitors are forced to supply the same attributes
at a minimum as well as innovate new ones.

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ustomer OrientationTE

How do you get your whole company to think and breathe customer?
Jan Carlzon, former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS), wrote
Moments of Truth, in which he described how he got his whole workforce to focus on the customer.21 He would emphasize at meetings thatSAS handled 5 million customers a year and the average customer met
about ﬁve SAS employees in connection with a single journey. This
amounted to 25 million moments of truth, moments to deliver a positive
brand experience to customers, whether delivered in person, over thephone, or by mail. Carlzon went further. He embarked on changing
the company’s structure, systems, and technology to empower theworkforce to take any steps necessary to satisfy its target customers.
Today’s CEOs must show employees, in ﬁnancial terms, howmuch more afﬂuent they and the ﬁrm would be if everyone focusedon delivering great value to customers. The customers would spend
more and cost the ﬁrm less to serve. Everyone would beneﬁt, andspecial rewards would go to employees who rendered outstanding
customer service.
The task begins with hiring the right people. You have to assess
whether job candidates have not only the right skills but also the rightattitudes. I was always struck by the fact that most people chose to ﬂy
Delta Air Lines from Chicago to Florida when they could have chosen

32Team-Fly®

Customer Orientation 33
Eastern Airlines, which offered the same ﬂight schedule. The difference: Delta hired its ﬂight crews from the Deep South where friendliness is the norm; Eastern hired its ﬂight crew from New York City.
Those whom you hire need good training. Disney runs a training
program that lasts a week in order to convey what experience the company wants customers to have at Disneyland. A customer mind-set
doesn’t just happen. It has to be planned, implemented, and rewarded.
Yet companies tend to give two conﬂicting messages to their people. L. L. Bean and other companies train their people to value every
customer: The customer comes ﬁrst. Meanwhile they recognize that
customers differ in their value to the company (i.e., what they add torevenue) and should therefore receive different levels of treatment.

American Airlines treats its customers differently beyond assigning different size seats and different cuisine. Passengers
who have accumulated millions of miles get Executive Platinum Advantage treatment: they enter a shorter line at checkin, board earlier, get frequent upgrades, and receive surprise
gifts such as interesting books and crystal Tiffany glassware.

The conclusion: Treat every customer with care but not necessarilyequally.
To be truly customer-oriented, the ﬁrm should be run by customer managers (or customer group managers), not brand managers.
They will ﬁnd out the set of company products and services that theircustomers would care about and then work with the product andbrand managers to deliver them.
Too many companies are product driven rather than customer
centered. Their thinking goes like this:34 Marketing Insights from A to Z
Assets → Inputs → Offerings → Channels → Customers
Being product driven and heavily invested in assets, they pushtheir offerings to every conceivable customer and fail to notice customer differences and values. Not knowing much about individual
customers, they cannot efﬁciently cross-sell or up-sell. Both processes
require capturing transaction and other information on individual
customers and inferring what else they might be interested in. A customer-oriented company visualizes a different approach, called senseand-respond marketing:Customers → Channels → Offerings → Inputs → Assets
By starting with an understanding of customers, the company isin a much better position to develop appropriate channels, offerings,
inputs, and assets.

ustomer RelationshipManagement (CRM)

Everyone is talking about customer relationship management (CRM)
as the new panacea. Yet it is an empty term until it is deﬁned. Somepeople deﬁne it as the application of technology to learning more
about each customer and being able to respond to them one-to-one.
Others don’t see it as a technology issue but rather a humane issue:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 35
treating each customer with empathy and sensitivity. One cynic said
that CRM is an expensive way to learn what otherwise might belearned by chatting with customers for ﬁve minutes.
Customer relationship marketing, in practice, involves the purchase of hardware and software that will enable a company to capture
detailed information about individual customers that can be used forbetter target marketing. By examining a customer’s past purchases,
demographics, and psychographics, the company will know more
about what the customer might be interested in. The company will
send speciﬁc offers only to those with the highest possible interest andreadiness to buy, and will save all the mailing or contact costs usually
lost in mass marketing. Using the information carefully, the company
can improve customer acquisition, cross-selling, and up-selling.
Yet CRM has not worked out that well in practice. Large companies sometimes spend $5 million to $10 million on CRM systems only
to ﬁnd disappointing results. Less than 30 percent of CRM-adopting
companies report achieving the expected return from their CRM investments. And the problem isn’t software failure (only 2 percent of
the cases). CRM-Forum reported the following causes of failure: organizational change (29 percent), company politics/inertia (22 percent),lack of CRM understanding (20 percent), poor planning (12 percent),lack of CRM skills (6 percent), budget problems (4 percent), software
problems (2 percent), bad advice (1 percent), other (4 percent).23
Too many companies see technology as a silver bullet that will
help them overcome their bad habits. But adding new technology toan old company only makes it a more expensive old company. Companies should not invest in CRM until they reorganize to become
customer-centric companies. Only then will they and their employees
know how to use CRM properly.
Frederick Newell goes further and accuses CRM of falling far
short of the answer to serving customers well.24 CRM puts the company in the driver’s seat with a hunting gun instead of putting thecustomer in the driver’s seat with a hunting gun. He wants companies to empower customers, not target them. Instead of companies

36 Marketing Insights from A to Z
just sending mailings to sell their products (a product-centered approach), they need to ask their customers what they are interested in(and not interested in), what information they would like, what services they would want, and how, when, and how often they would
accept communications from the company. Instead of relying on information about customers, companies can rely on information from
customers. With this information, a company would be in a muchbetter position to make meaningful offers to individual customers
with much less waste of company money and customer time. Newelladvocates replacing customer relationship marketing (CRM) with customer management of relationships (CMR).
My belief is that the right kind of CRM or CMR is a positive
development for companies and for society as a whole. It will humanize relationships. It will make the market work better. It will deliver better solutions to customers. (Also see Database Marketing.)

ustomers

We now live in a customer economy where the customer is king. Thisis a result of production overcapacity. It is customers, not goods, thatare in short supply.
Companies must learn how to move from a product-making focus to a customer-owning focus. Companies must wake up to the factthat they have a new boss—the customer. If your people are notCustomers 37
thinking customer, they are not thinking. If they are not directly
serving the customer, they’d better serve someone who is. If they
don’t take care of your customers, someone else will.
Companies must view the customer as a ﬁnancial asset thatneeds to be managed and maximized like any other asset. Tom Peters
sees customers as an “appreciating asset.” They are the company’s
most important asset, and yet their value is not even found in thecompany’s books.
Recognizing the value of this asset will hopefully lead companies
to redesign their total marketing system toward capturing customer
share and customer lifetime value through their products/services
portfolio and branding strategies.
Over 30 years ago, Peter Drucker emphasized the importance ofcustomer thinking to the success of a ﬁrm. He said that the purpose of acompany is “to create a customer. Therefore the business has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results: all the rest are costs.”22
L. L. Bean, the outdoor mail order ﬁrm, wholeheartedly practices a customer-oriented credo: “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us—we are
dependent on him. He is not an outsider in our business—he is apart of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him . . . he isdoing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.”
Products come and go. A company’s challenge is to hold on toits customers longer than it holds on to its products. It needs towatch the market life cycle and the customer life cycle more than the
product life cycle. Someone at Ford realized this: “If we’re not customer driven, our cars won’t be either.”
Regrettably, companies spend most of their effort in acquiring
new customers and not enough in retaining and growing businessfrom their current customers. Companies spend as much as 70 percent of their marketing budget to attract new customers while 90 percent of their revenues come from current customers. Many companies
lose money on their new customers during the ﬁrst few years. By

38 Marketing Insights from A to Z
overfocusing on acquiring new customers and neglecting current customers, companies experience a customer attrition rate of between 10
and 30 percent a year. Then they waste further money on a neverending effort to attract new customers or win back ex-customers to
replace those they just lost.
Companies emphasize customer acquisition at the expense ofcustomer retention in several ways. They set up compensation
systems that reward getting new customers and do not reward
salespeople as visibly for maintaining and growing existing accounts. Thus salespeople experience a thrill from winning a new
account. Companies also act as if their current customers will stayon without special attention and service.
What should our aim be with customers? First, follow theGolden Rule of Marketing: Market to your customers as you would
want them to market to you. Second, recognize that your success depends on your ability to make your customers successful. Aim to
make your customers better off. Know their needs and exceed their
expectations. Jack Welch, retired CEO of GE, put it this way: “Thebest way to hold your customers is to constantly ﬁgure out how
to give them more for less.” And remember, customers are increasingly buying on value, not on relationship alone.
It isn’t enough to just satisfy your customers. Being satisﬁed is
no longer satisfying. Companies always lose some satisﬁed customers.
These customers switch to competitors who can satisfy them more. A
company needs to deliver more satisfaction than its competitors.
Exceptional companies create delighted customers. They createfans. Take a lesson from Harley Davidson and the customer who said
that he would rather give up smoking and other vices than be without a Harley.
Tom Monaghan, billionaire founder of Domino’s Pizza, wants
to make fans out of his customers. “Whenever I see a new customer
walk through the door, I see $10,000 burnt into their forehead.”
How do you know if you are doing a good job for the cus-

Customers 39

A German bank operated many branches throughout Germany. Each branch was deliberately kept small. Eachbranch manager had one task: to help clients increase theirwealth. The branch manager did not simply take their deposits and make loans. The branch manager taught them
how to save better, invest better, borrow better, and buy better. Each branch carried magazines on these subjects andoffered free investment seminars to its customers, all to givethem the skills to accumulate more wealth.

tomer? It is not shown in your proﬁts this year but in your share of
the customer’s mind and heart. Companies that make steady gains inmind share and heart share will inevitably make gains in market shareand proﬁtability.
Marketing thinking is shifting from trying to maximize thecompany’s proﬁt from each transaction to maximizing the proﬁt
from each relationship. Marketing’s future lies in database marketing, where we know enough about each customer to make relevant
and timely offers customized and personalized to each customer. Instead of seeing a customer in every individual, we must see the individual in every customer.
But while it is important to serve all customers well, this does
not mean that they must all be served equally well. All customers areimportant, but some are more important than others. Customers canbe divided into those we enjoy, those we endure, and those we detest. But it is better to divide them into ﬁnancial categories: platinum, gold, silver, iron, and lead customers. The better customers
should be given more beneﬁts, both to retain them longer and to
give other customers an incentive to migrate upward.

40 Marketing Insights from A to Z
One bank runs a club to which it invites only its high-asset depositors. Quarterly meetings are held, part social, part educational.
The members hear from ﬁnancial gurus, entertainers, and personalities. They would hate to lose their memberships by switching banks.
A company should classify its customers another way. The ﬁrst
group consists of the Most Proﬁtable Customers (MPCs), who deserve
the most current attention. The second group are the Most Growable
Customers (MGCs), who deserve the most long-run attention. The
third group are the Most Vulnerable Customers (MVCs), who require
early intervention to prevent their defection.
Not all customers, however, should be kept. There is a fourth category called Most Troubling Customers (MTCs). Either they are unproﬁtable or the proﬁts are too low to cover their nuisance value.
Some should be “ﬁred.” But before ﬁring them, give them a chance toreform. Raise their fees and/or reduce their service. If they stay, they
are now proﬁtable. If they leave, they will bleed your competitors.
Some customers are proﬁtable but tough. They can be a blessing. If you can ﬁgure out how to satisfy your toughest customers, itwill be easy to satisfy the rest.
Pay attention to customer complaints. Never underestimate thepower of an irate customer to damage your reputation. Reputations
are hard to build and easy to lose. IBM calls receiving complaints ajoy. Customers who complain are the company’s best friends. A complaint alerts the company to a problem that is probably losing customers and hopefully can be ﬁxed.

ustomer Satisfaction

Most companies pay more attention to their market share than to theircustomers’ satisfaction. This is a mistake. Market share is a backwardlooking metric; customer satisfaction is a forward-looking metric. If
customer satisfaction starts slipping, then market share erosion willsoon follow.
Companies need to monitor and improve the level of customer
satisfaction. The higher the customer satisfaction, the higher the retention. Here are four facts:
1. Acquiring new customers can cost 5 to 10 times more than thecosts involved in satisfying and retaining current customers.
2. The average company loses between 10 and 30 percent of its
customers each year.
3. A 5 percent reduction in the customer defection rate can increase proﬁts by 25 to 85 percent, depending on the industry.
4. The customer proﬁt rate tends to increase over the life of theretained customer.25
One company bragged that 80 percent of its customers are satisﬁed or highly satisﬁed. This sounded pretty good until it learned4142 Marketing Insights from A to Z

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that its leading competitor attained a 90 percent customer satisfaction score. The company was further dismayed to learn that thiscompetitor was aiming for a 95 percent satisfaction score.
Companies that achieve a high satisfaction score should advertise
it. J. D. Powers gave the Honda Accord the number one rating incustomer satisfaction for several years, and this helped sell more Accords. Dell achieved the highest satisfaction ratings for its computer
service and advertised this in its ads, giving prospects conﬁdence thatthey could trust ordering a computer sight unseen from Dell.
The importance of aiming for high customer satisfaction is underscored in company ads. Honda says: “One reason our customers
are so satisﬁed is that we aren’t.” Cigna advertises, “We’ll never be
100% satisﬁed until you are, too.” But don’t make too big a claim.
Holiday Inns ran a campaign a few years ago that promised “No Surprises.” Guest complaints were so high that the slogan “No Surprises”
was mocked, and Holiday Inn quickly canceled this slogan.
Customer satisfaction is a necessary but not sufﬁcient goal. Customer satisfaction only weakly predicts customer retention in highly
competitive markets. Companies regularly lose some percentage of
their satisﬁed customers. Companies need to focus on customer retention. But even retention can be misleading, as when it is based on
habit or an absence of alternative suppliers. A company needs to aim
for a high level of customer loyalty or commitment. Loyal packagedgoods customers, for example, generally pay 7 percent to 10 percent
more than nonloyal customers.
The company should therefore aim to delight customers, notsimply satisfy them. Top companies aim to exceed customer expectations and leave a smile on customers’ faces. But if they succeed, thisbecomes the norm. How can a company continue to exceed expectations after these expectations become very high? How many more
surprises and delights can a company create? Interesting question!

Team-Fly®

atabase Marketing

At the heart of CRM is database marketing. Your company needs todevelop separate databases on customers, employees, products, services, suppliers, distributors, dealers, and retailers. The databases
make it easier for marketers to develop relevant offerings for individual customers.
In building the customer database, you have to decide on what
information to collect.
• The most important information to capture is the transaction
history of each buyer. Knowing what a customer has purchased in the past affords many clues as to what he or she
might be interested in buying next time.
• You could beneﬁt by collecting demographic information
about each buyer. For consumers, this means age, education,
income, family size, and other attributes. For business buyers,
this means job position, job responsibilities, job relationships,
and contact addresses.
• You may want to add psychographic information describing theactivities, interests, and opinions (AIO) of individual customers
and how they think, make decisions, and inﬂuence others.

4344 Marketing Insights from A to Z
The second challenge is to get this information. You train yoursalespeople to gather and enter useful information into the customer’s ﬁle after each sales visit. Your telemarketers can gather additional information by phoning customers or credit rating agencies.
The third challenge is to maintain and update the information.
About 20 percent of the information in your customer database canbecome obsolete each year. You need telemarketers to phone a sample of customers each working day to update the information.
The fourth challenge is to use the information. Many companies fail to use the information they have. Supermarket chains havemountains of scanner data on individual customer purchases but failto use these data for one-to-one marketing. Banks collect rich transaction information that mostly goes unanalyzed. At the very least,
these companies need to hire a person skilled in data mining. By applying advanced statistical techniques, the data miner might detect
interesting trends, segments, and opportunities.
With all these beneﬁts, why don’t more companies adopt
database marketing? All this costs money. Consultant Martha
Rogers of Peppers & Rogers Group does not deny the costs: “Establishing a rich data warehouse can cost millions of dollars
for the technology and the associated implementation andprocess changes. Throw in a few hundred thousand for strategic consulting, a little more for various data integration andchange management issues, and voilà, you’ve got yourself one
hefty investment.”26
Clearly one-to-one marketing is not for everyone. It is not forcompanies that sell a product purchased once in a lifetime, such as a
grand piano. It is not for mass marketers like Wrigley to gather individual information about the millions of its gum-chewing customers.
It is not for companies with small budgets, although the investment
costs can be scaled down somewhat.
However, companies such as banks, telephone companies, business equipment ﬁrms, and many others normally collect lots of infor-

Database Marketing 45
mation on individual customers or dealers. The ﬁrst company in eachof these respective industries to exploit database marketing could
achieve a substantial competitive lead.
There is a growing threat to effective database marketing that iscoming from the inherent conﬂict between customer and company
interests (see box).

What Customers Want
• We want companies not to have extensive personal information about us.
• We would be willing to tell some companies what wemight like to be informed about.
• We would want companies to reach us only with relevant
messages and media at proper times.
• We would want to be able to reach companies easily byphone or e-mail and get a quick response.

What Companies Want
• We want to know many things about each customer andprospect.
• We would like to tempt them with offers, including thosethat they might not have awareness of or initial interest in.
• We would like to reach them in the most cost-effective
way regardless of their media preferences.
• We want to reduce the cost of talking with them live on
the phone.

46 Marketing Insights from A to Z
The irony is that as companies learn more about each customer
in order to make more relevant offers, customers see this as an invasion of privacy. The matter is made worse by intrusive junk mail, junkphone calls, and junk e-mail. As privacy concerns rise and lead to legislation curtailing what companies may know about individual customers and how the companies can reach customers, companies will
be forced to return to less efﬁcient mass marketing and transactionoriented marketing.
One answer is for companies to practice permission marketing,as promoted by Seth Godin.27 You should ask your customers what
information they will volunteer, what messages they would accept,
and what contact media they would prefer.

esign

Design is a big idea, covering product design, service design,
graphic design, and environmental design. Design provides a setof tools and concepts for preparing successful products and services. Yet too few managers know what design is or value it. At
best, they equate design with style. Style is important, of course:
We must accept that the Jaguar automobiles’ success in the past
was based on style. It certainly wasn’t based on dependability,

Design 47
since most Jaguars had to be repaired frequently. An acquaintanceof mine always owned two Jaguars, because one was usually in the
repair shop.
Style, or appearance, does play a major role in many products:
Apple’s new computers, Bang & Olufsen’s stereo equipment,
Montblanc’s writing instruments, Coca-Cola’s famous bottle, andso on. Style can play a major role in differentiating your productfrom other products.
But design is a larger idea than how a product looks. A welldesigned product, in addition to being attractive, would meet thefollowing criteria:• Easy to open the packaging.
• Easy to assemble.
• Easy to learn how to use.
• Easy to use.
• Easy to repair.
• Easy to dispose of.
Just consider “Easy to learn how to use.” I recently purchased
HP/Compaq’s iPAQ, the personal digital assistant handheld computer. I couldn’t remove a cellophane covering (not mentioned in
the booklet) nor open the device’s protective plastic cover nor ﬁgureout how to switch the cover to the other side. I couldn’t ﬁgure out
how to switch the data from my Palm handheld to my new iPAQ,
something that most new buyers would want to do. After ﬁnallyswitching the data with the help of a friend, I encountered numerous
screens that were hard to understand or perform operations on. The
booklet, whose print could be read only under a microscope, was ofno help. The whole product was a design ﬁasco, committed by engineers who thought they were selling it to engineers. I returned quietly to my beloved Palm and let the iPAQ languish.
This boils down to the fact that great design requires thinking

48 Marketing Insights from A to Z
through all of the customer’s activities in acquiring, using, and disposing of the product. The most basic thing is to know who thetarget customer is. I remember a company that designed a ﬂoorcleaning machine to be used after hours to clean ofﬁces. The machine looked great and had nice features. But the machine didn’tsell. The machine could easily be pushed by the average man but
was too heavy to be pushed by most women. It turned out thatmany of the users would be women, and this had been overlookedby the designers.
Toyota is smarter about deﬁning the customer and thinking likethe customer. In designing new doors for a car targeted largely toward women, Toyota engineers put on long ﬁngernails to see how
this would affect opening and closing the doors.
Some companies—Gillette, Apple, Sony, Bang & Olufsen—
have appointed a high-level vice president of design to add value toevery product their companies create. By establishing this position,
they are announcing to everyone the importance of design to thesuccess of their products.
Design applies to service businesses as well as products. Walk
into Starbucks for coffee and you will appreciate the role of environmental design. Dark wood counters, bright colors, ﬁne textures. Walk into a Ritz-Carlton hotel and appreciate the lobby’s
regal quality.

ifferentiation

The stock market is a perfect example of an undifferentiated market.
If you want to buy 100 shares of IBM, you will buy it at the lowest
price. There may be 1,000 people ready to sell shares of IBM. All you
care about is who will charge the least. No characteristic of theseller—how long he/she has held the shares, whether he/she cheats
on income tax or spouse, what his/her religion is—matters to you.
We say that a product market resembles a commodity market
when we don’t care whose product or brand we take (“They are all thesame”) or we don’t need to know anything about the seller. Thus wewould say that oranges in a supermarket amount to a commodity if they
all look alike and we don’t care to know the grower or the orchard.
But there are three things that could violate the assumption ofan undifferentiated market.
• First, the products may look different. In the case of oranges,
they may come in different sizes, shapes, colors, and tastes, andwith different prices. We can call this physical differentiation.
• Second, the products may bear different brand names. We callthis brand differentiation. Oranges carry brand names such as
Sunkist or Florida’s Best.

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50 Marketing Insights from A to Z
• Third, the customer may have developed a satisfying relationship with one of the suppliers. We call this relationship differentiation. For example, although the brands are well known,
one company may have provided better and faster answers to
the customer’s questions.
Harvard’s Theodore Levitt threw down the gauntlet when hesaid: “There is no such thing as a commodity. All goods and services are differentiable.”28 He saw commodities as simply products
waiting for a redeﬁnition. Frank Perdue, who produces one of themost popular brands of chicken, would boast: “If you can differentiate a dead chicken, you can differentiate anything.” No wonder
one professor tells his MBA class that any student who uses the word“commodity” during a case discussion would be ﬁned $1.
Yet some companies believe they can win through pure will
power. Some years ago, the runner-up razor blade manufacturer inBrazil challenged Gillette, the market leader. We asked the challenger
if his company offered the consumer a better razor blade. “No” wasthe reply. “A lower price?” “No.” “A better package?” “No.” “A
clever advertising campaign?” “No.” “Better allowances to thetrade?” “No.” “Then how do you expect to take share away from
Gillette?” “Sheer determination” was the reply. Needless to say, theoffensive failed.
Tom Peters broadcasts the mantra: “Be distinct or extinct.”
But not every difference is distinctive. Establish “meaningful differences, not better sameness.”
Differentiation can be achieved in many ways (see box).
Jack Trout’s book, Differentiate or Die, shows dozens of ways
companies have managed to produce a differentiated product, service, experience, or image in the minds of customers.29
Greg Carpenter, Rashi Glazer, and Kent Nakamoto, don’t evenhold that the differentiation needs to be meaningful.30 For someproducts, such as detergents, all the valuable attributes may have al-Differentiation 51

How to Differentiate• Product (features, performance, conformance, durability,
reliability, repairability, style, design).
• Service (delivery, installation, customer training, consulting, repair).
• Personnel (competence, courtesy, credibility, reliability,
responsiveness, communication skill).
• Image (symbols, written and audio/video media, atmosphere, events).

ready been discovered and exploited. They argue that “meaninglessdifferentiation” can work. For example, Alberto Culver makes ashampoo called Natural Silk to which it does add silk, despite admitting in an interview that silk does nothing for hair. But this kind of
attribute attracts attention, creates a distinction, and implies a betterworking formula.

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irect MailTE

When direct mail is at its worst, it consists of a cold mailing to a listof names and addresses with the hope of hitting a 1 to 2 percent response. The response is low because the message doesn’t go to people with a need for the product or arrive at the time they need it.
Hence the term “junk mail.”When direct mail is reﬁned, the company segments the list,
ﬁnds the best prospects, and limits the mailing to them. In this way,
the company saves money with a smaller mailing and achieves ahigher response rate.
Most mailings focus on achieving a single sale. They lack anything
related to building a customer relationship and an emotional bond.
The best case is where the company’s offers satisfy the customers and where the company mails neither too frequently nor too
infrequently and becomes a respected supplier of a certain set of satisfying products and services.
What I can’t understand is why I receive the same catalogs over
and over even though I never buy anything. Don’t they notice this?
Why don’t they send an e-mail asking whether I want to continue receiving their catalog? This is the essence of permission marketing,and it would save these catalog companies a lot of money.

52
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istribution
and Channels

For many companies, making the product doesn’t cost as much as
bringing it to the market! Farmers know this well when they see how
small a percentage of the ﬁnal retail price they receive for their crops.
Marketing in many cases now averages 50 percent of total company
costs. Producers would like to eliminate the middleman, whom they
see as charging too much. But while you can eliminate the middleman, you cannot eliminate the functions he performs. You and/or
the customer would have to perform the same functions and probably wouldn’t do them as well.
How can a company bring its new products into the market?
Every company has to ﬁgure out a go-to-market strategy. In simpler
times, the company would hire salespeople to sell to distributors,
wholesalers, retailers, or directly to ﬁnal users. Today the number of
go-to-market alternatives has exploded:
Field sales reps
Strategic allies
Business partners
Master or local distributors
Integrators
Value-added resellers

Intranet
Extranet
Web sites
E-mailBusiness-to-business exchanges
Auctions53

54 Marketing Insights from A to Z
Manufacturers’ agents
Brokers
Franchises
Telemarketers
Telesales agents

Fax machines
Direct mail
Newspapers
Television

No wonder Peter Drucker said: “The greatest change will bein distribution channels, not in new methods of production or
consumption.” Choosing the right channels, convincing them tocarry your merchandise, and getting them to work as partners is amajor challenge. Too many companies see themselves as selling to
distributors, instead of selling through them.
How many marketing channels should a company use to distribute its products and services? The higher the number of channels,
the greater the company’s market coverage and rate of growth of its
sales. This principle is well illustrated by Starbucks Coffee Company.
Starbucks started with only one channel, namely company-owned
stores that were staffed carefully and operated proﬁtably. Later Starbucks franchised operations in other venues: airports, bookstores,
and college campuses. The company recently signed a licensing
agreement with Albertson’s food chain to open coffee bars in its supermarkets. Not only is Starbucks coffee served in these venues, butother Starbucks products are sold along with coffee. A comedianquipped about Starbucks: “I don’t know how fast they are growing
but they just opened one in my living room.” Adding more channels
creates rapid growth.
But at least two problems can arise in adding new market channels. First, product or service quality may suffer because the company
gained market coverage at the expense of market control. Does Starbucks coffee served on a United Air Lines ﬂight taste as good as acup made and served in a Starbucks store? Do all vendors remember
to dispose of Starbucks coffee if it isn’t sold within two hours? Secondly, the company may encounter growing problems of channel

Distribution and Channels 55
conﬂict. Some Starbucks outlets may complain that the company
franchised nearby outlets to also sell Starbucks coffee, thus hurting
their sales. Or that some outlets are charging less for Starbucks coffee
than other outlets. In both cases, Starbucks would have gained increased market coverage but lost some market control.
The alternative is to stick to one channel and develop it withvery tight controls. For example, the Rolex Watch Company could
easily place its famous watches in many more outlets. Instead it restricts its coverage to only high-end jewelers who are spaced geographically and who agree to carry a certain level of inventory, use
certain display patterns, and place speciﬁc levels of annual local advertising. Rolex thus has achieved high market control and does not facepoor service problems or channel conﬂict problems. But its market
growth is slower.
Whatever the number of market channels a company uses, it
must integrate them to achieve an efﬁcient supply system. Most companies rely on a high percentage of their business results comingfrom their channel partners. They need to systematize partner relationship management (PRM) through adopting PRM software. The
software can improve the information ﬂow and reduce the cost ofcommunication, ordering, transactions, and payment.
Manufacturers who use distributors to reach retailers give up
some control of the retailers and the ﬁnal customers. Yet if the manufacturer sold direct to either the retailers or the ﬁnal customers, itwould have to carry on the same channel functions of selling, ﬁnancing, information gathering, servicing, risk taking, transportation, andstorage. If distributors can do this better and add value, then the distributor channel is justiﬁed. The key point is that all the channel
functions must be performed and allocated efﬁciently among thechannel partners.
A company operating multiple channels must operate them withsimilar policies. A bookstore chain such as Borders must have its
brick-and-mortar stores be prepared to also accept returned books

56 Marketing Insights from A to Z
purchased from Borders online. Nor can Borders charge lower prices
online without hurting its store sales.
Here are two excellent examples of integrated channels:• Charles Schwab, the ﬁnancial powerhouse, delivers an excellent branded experience to its customers whether reached online, over the telephone, or in its walk-in branches.
• Hewlett-Packard (HP) has an excellent web site where customers can ﬁnd information about any HP product or service.
Customers can place an order online or by phoning HewlettPackard. They will receive postsale support by contacting HP
and being directed to the nearest local business partner.
Another option is to set up special channels for favored customers. Many banks provide private banking channels to customers
with large deposits. Dell provides a separate extranet for each highvalue business customer. Schwab’s premier customers are assigned toa dedicated account team that can always be reached through a tollfree phone number.
Your company must not only develop and operate efﬁcient marketing channels but be prepared to add new ones and drop failingones. Distribution channels are dynamic. They can create a competitive advantage when used right, but become a competitive liability
when used poorly.

mployees

Your employees are your business! They can make or break your marketing plans. Hal Rosenbluth, owner of a major travel agency,
stunned the marketing world with the title of his book, The Customer
Comes Second.31 Then who comes ﬁrst? Employees, he said. His point
is particularly applicable to service businesses. Service businesses involve intensive people contact. If the hotel clerk is sullen, if the waitress is bored, if the accountant doesn’t return phone calls, thenclients will take their business elsewhere. So companies like Rosenbluth Travel, Marriott, and British Airways operate on the following
formula: First train the employees to be friendly, knowledgeable, andreliable; this will lead to satisﬁed customers who will return again;
and this will create a growing proﬁt stream for the shareholders.
Anita Roddick, who founded The Body Shop, agrees: “Ourpeople [employees] are my ﬁrst line of customers.” By viewing her
employees as customers, she aims to understand and meet their needs.
Walt Disney held the same view: “You’ll never have great customer
relations till you have good employee relations.” The way youremployees feel is ultimately the way your customers are going to feel.
Some companies go to great lengths to ﬁnd the right employees.
There isn’t a people shortage so much as a talent shortage. The people5758 Marketing Insights from A to Z
that you hire today create your future tomorrow. Using a tight deﬁnition of the personality and character traits that it seeks in employees,
Southwest Airlines hires only 4 percent of its 90,000 applicants eachyear. Then it makes sure to give them a career, not just a job.
A company that pays little to its employees will get back little in
return. If you pay your people in peanuts, you will get monkeys. It
will cost you lots of money to replace employees who leave. Finding
talented and motivated employees and retaining them is a key tobusiness success.
Smart companies pay generously. They attract the best people
who outperform average people by a higher multiple than the higher
pay. They experience less employee turnover and lower costs of hiring (because people ﬂock to this company) and of training (because
they hire people with more capabilities).
Pay is only part of the answer to good employee management.
Companies are human and social organizations, not just economic
machines. Employees need to feel that they belong to a worthwhileorganization doing worthwhile work and making a worthwhile contribution. Gary Hamel said, “Create a cause, not a business.”
Companies must prepare a compelling value proposition not
only for their customers but also for their employees. The aim of internal marketing is to treat the employees as a customer group. Great
organizations give even the lowest workers a good feeling. Consider
the following:• Bill Pollard, retired chairman of ServiceMaster, had a credothat included “We should treat everybody with dignity andworth.” At a board meeting, coffee was accidentally spilled on
the carpet and a janitor was called in. Bill took the cleaning
solvent from the janitor and knelt down to clean the carpet
himself to spare the janitor from having to do so in front of all
the board members. “You get respect by giving it.” (Sara
Lawrence-Lightfoot, Harvard Graduate School of Education)

Employees 59• One day a vice president said to Herb Kelleher, then CEO of
Southwest Airlines, “It is harder for me to see you than [it isfor] a ticket handler at our company.” “Yes,” said Herb. “Thereason is that he is more important.” Herb Kelleher went on
to rename the Personnel Department the People Department.
He also renamed the Marketing Department the Customer
Department.
A company’s people can be the strongest source of competitive
advantage. John Thompson of Heidrick & Struggles advises: “Getfewer, smarter people to deliver more value to customers faster.”
Jeff Bezos of Amazon says: “We look for people who have a natural inclination to be intensely focused on the customer.”Companies need to inculcate their brand values into their employees. Intel wants to inculcate “risk-taking,” Disney “creativity,”
3M “innovativeness.” Some companies include in the employee’s remuneration a certain percentage for company values performance.
General Electric links 50 percent of its incentive remuneration tovalue performance. Cisco bases 20 percent of bonuses on the employees’ customer satisfaction scores. A company should go further andhonor outstanding employee performance through recognition programs, newletters, CEO awards, and the like. John Kotter and Jim
Heskett, in Corporate Culture and Performance,32 empirically demonstrated that companies with strong cultures based on shared values faroutperform companies with weak cultures by a huge margin.
A company must make sure that its employees understand thatthey are not working for the company. They are working for the customer. Jack Welch of GE would repeatedly tell his employees: “Nobody can guarantee your job. Only customers can guarantee yourjob.” Sam Walton of Wal-Mart echoed the same sentiment: “The customer is the only one who can ﬁre us all.” Larry Bossidy, chairmanof Honeywell International, Inc., sent out the same message: “It’s not
management who decides how many people are on the payroll.

60 Marketing Insights from A to Z
It’s customers.” Some companies include a note in the employee’s
paycheck envelope: “This check is brought to you by the customer.”
Sam Walton of Wal-Mart required the following employee
pledge: “I solemnly swear and declare that every customer thatcomes within 10 feet of me, I will smile, look them in the eye,and greet them, so help me Sam.” Lands End instructs its employees: “Don’t worry about what’s good for the Company—worry
about what’s good for the Customer.” (See Innovation.)

ntrepreneurship

Businesses begin with an idea in the head of an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is ﬁlled with passion and energy to create something new.
The entrepreneur is the modern equivalent of pioneers searching for
new frontiers. Entrepreneurs take risks against high odds. Their goal
is not making money so much as making something new. And when
they succeed, they create jobs and incomes for more people.
But according to a Chinese saying: “To open a business is very
easy; to keep it open is very difﬁcult.” And the hours are long. “Being in your own business is working 80 hours a week so that you
can avoid working 40 hours a week for someone else.” (Ramona
E. F. Arnett)
If the entrepreneur succeeds, the business grows. Comfort takes

Experiential Marketing 61
over and routine sets in. The business focuses on operations and efﬁciency and becomes a well-oiled machine. What is lost is the entrepreneurial passion. The big danger is that the ﬁrm’s products andservices may become increasingly irrelevant in a changing marketplace. The big need is to keep a spirit of entrepreneurship alive.
Your company can nurture an intrapreneurial spirit in a numberof ways. Encourage ideas. Reward good ideas. Set up a collection system for new ideas. Set up a skunk works. Every 90 days gather all theemployees at an “idea bragging session,” where employees describe
how they got their new ideas.

xperiential Marketing

We talk about marketing goods and services, but Joe Pine and James
Gilmore think that we should be talking about marketing
experiences33—or designing experiences around our goods and services.
The idea has many sources. Great restaurants are known for their experience as much as their food. Starbucks charges us $2 or more to experience coffee at its ﬁnest. A restaurant such as Planet Hollywood andHard Rock Café is speciﬁcally set up as an experience. Las Vegas hotels,
anxious to distinguish themselves, take on the character of ancient
Rome or New York City. But the master is Walt Disney, who createdthe opportunity to experience the cowboy West, fairyland castles, pirate

62 Marketing Insights from A to Z

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ships, and the like. The aim of the experiential marketer is to add drama
and entertainment to what otherwise might pass as stale fare.
Thus we enter Niketown to buy basketball shoes and confront a
15-foot photo of Michael Jordan. We then proceed to the basketballcourt to see whether the shoes help us score better. Or we enter REI,an outdoor equipment chain store, and test out climbing equipmenton the store’s climbing wall, or test out a rainproof coat by going under a simulated rainfall. Or we enter Bass Pro to buy a ﬁshing rod
and test it by casting in the store’s pool of ﬁsh.
All merchants offer services; your challenge is to escort yourcustomer through a memorable experience.

inancial Marketing

I have always urged marketers to be strong in ﬁnancial thinking. This
is not a natural inclination of marketers. They are marketers because
they are more interested in people than in numbers.
Yet few marketers will rise to the top of an organization unlessthey have a good grasp of ﬁnancial thinking. They need to understand income statements, cash ﬂow statements, balance sheets, andbudgets. Concepts such as asset turnover, return on investment(ROI), return on assets (ROA), free cash ﬂow, economic value added

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Financial Marketing 63(EVA), market capitalization, and cost of capital must be as familiar
to them as sales, market share, and gross margins.
Companies today are focusing on shareholder value. The CEO
is not satisﬁed when the marketing vice president shows that the recent marketing initiatives have resulted in increased customer awareness, knowledge, satisfaction, or retention. The CEO wants to knowmarketing’s impact on ROI and stock prices. Clearly marketers must
start linking their marketing metrics to ﬁnancial metrics.
Corporate cost cutters are now carefully scrutinizing marketingrelated costs. Marketers must now justify every item in their marketing budgets and be able to show how each contributes toshareholder value.
One useful step is for companies to appoint marketing controllers. These are skilled ﬁnancial people who understand the marketing process and what it takes to win. They know that advertising,sales promotion, and other marketing initiatives are necessary. Theirtask is to make sure that the money is spent well.
You can improve marketing’s ﬁnancial returns in two basic ways:• Increase your marketing efﬁciency. Marketing efﬁciency involves reducing the costs of activities that the company mustcarry out. Suppose the company needs point-of-purchasedisplays and goes to only one display ﬁrm and orders them.
Had the company invited competitive bids, it might havefound a lower price for the same or better quality. Or a company might perform its own marketing research for X dollars, only to ﬁnd that equivalent or even better quality
research might have been outsourced to a marketing research ﬁrm for fewer dollars. Other examples: hunting down
excessive communication and transportation expenses, closing unproductive sales ofﬁces, cutting back on unprovenpromotional programs and tactics, and putting advertising
agencies on a pay-for-performance basis.

64 Marketing Insights from A to Z
• Increase your marketing effectiveness. Marketing effectiveness
represents the company’s search for a more productive marketing mix. A company might increase its marketing effectiveness by replacing higher cost channels with lower costchannels, shifting advertising money into public relations,adding or subtracting product features, or adopting technology that improves the company’s information and communication effectiveness.
The aim of marketing is to maximize not just your sales but
your long-term proﬁts. While salespeople focus on sales, marketersmust focus on proﬁts. Show me a top marketer, and you will beshowing me a person who is ﬁnancially well-versed.

ocusing and Niching

Wise companies focus. An old saying is that if you chase two monkeys, both will escape.
The mass market is made up of many niches. The problem ofbeing a mass marketer is that you will attract nichers who will takebetter aim at speciﬁc customer groups and meet their needs better.
As these groups are pulled away, the mass marketer’s market shrinks.
Your choice therefore is whether to be a “gorilla” or a “guer-

Focusing and Niching 65
rilla.”—to be niched or be a nicher. I would argue that there areriches in niches. The customers in a niche are happy that someone ispaying attention to their needs. And if your company serves themwell, you will own the niche. Although the volume is low in a niche,
the margin is high. Competitors will keep out because the niche is
too small to support two players.
What does a successful nicher do for a second act? What thenicher should not do is become a generalist and go after the mass
market. There are three sound strategies:
1. Sell more products and services to the same niche. USAA, thegiant insurance company, originally sold only auto insurance
to military ofﬁcers. Then it added life insurance, credit cards,
mutual funds, and other ﬁnancial products to sell to militaryofﬁcers.
2. Look for latent or adjacent members in the niche. USAA recognized that it would eventually run out of enough military ofﬁcers to sell to. So it decided to extend its target market toinclude all members of the military.
3. Look for additional niches. Every niche is vulnerable to attack
or decay. The best defense against the vulnerability of a single
niche is to own two or more niches. In this way, the company
not only enjoys a high margin from its good service to theniche, but it also enjoys high volume through owning a portfolio of niches. A good example is Johnson & Johnson,
which aside from being a strong force in a few mass consumer markets, is the technical or market leader in hundredsof specialized business-to-business markets.
Nichers are not necessarily small companies. Professor Hermann
Simon, in his Hidden Champions,34 lists scores of midsize German
companies that enjoy over 50 percent market shares in well-deﬁned
global niches. Examples include Steiner Optical with 80 percent of

66 Marketing Insights from A to Z
the world’s military ﬁeld glasses market; Tetra Food making 80 percent of the food for feeding tropical ﬁsh; and Becher producing 50
percent of the world’s oversized umbrellas. These and other companies pursue well-deﬁned niches in the global marketplace, and although they are less visible to the public, they are highly proﬁtable.

orecasting andthe Future

The company that doesn’t see trouble ahead is headed for real trouble. That’s why it hires economists, consultants, and futurists.
Yet people must be cautious about predicting the future. Ben
Franklin said, “It is easy to see; hard to foresee.” An old saying isthat those who live by the crystal ball will eat ground glass.
So many eminent observers have made wildly erroneous predictions.
• Thomas Edison opined that “the phonograph is of no commercial value.”• Irving Fisher, eminent Yale economics professor, said in September 1929, just before the Wall Street crash, “Stock prices
have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”

Forecasting and the Future 67• Thomas J. Watson of IBM said in 1947: “I think there is aworld market for about ﬁve computers.”• Ken Olson, former CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation,
said in 1977, “There is no reason for any individual to have acomputer in their home.”• Jack Welch, the retired chairman of GE, admitted to three
forecasting errors during his career. When U.S. inﬂation was
running at 20 percent, he forecasted that inﬂation would remain in the double digits. When oil hit $35 a barrel, he predicted that oil’s price would rise to $100. When Japan was inits prime, he predicted that the Japanese would continue totake over more American industries.
All of these show the weakness of using today’s situation to predict tomorrow’s situation. The story is told about an auto company
that increased its production of green cars after noticing a spike intheir sales. The company didn’t realize that dealers were slashingprices to get rid of green cars.
John R. Pierce of Bell Labs beautifully explained why so many
predictions fail: “The trouble with the future is that there are somany of them.”
The inimitable Yogi Berra said that “prediction is very hard,
especially of the future.” He also despaired: “The future ain’t
what it used to be.”The most truthful prediction is that business will be either better or worse. The same can be said for the economy.
Woody Allen commented on how to handle bad times: “Morethan anytime in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One pathleads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
Businesses have relied on economists to predict the future.
There are two types of economists: those who can’t predict the future and know it, and those who can’t predict the future and don’t68 Marketing Insights from A to Z
know it. After asking different economists for an opinion, Harry Truman ﬁnally gave up and requested a one-handed economist. He did
not want to hear the words: “On the other hand.” Basically, economists exist to make astrologers look good.
In spite of this, in order to be in front your business needs to forecast where customers and the economy are moving. Wayne Gretzky,
the brilliant hockey star, when asked how he is always in the right position, said: “It isn’t where the puck is; it’s where the puck will be.”Yet watch out for experts who give a forecast in the form of anumber or a date, but not both.
The truth is that the future is already here; it has already happened. The task is to ﬁnd and study what the small percentage of
future-deﬁning customers want. The future is already here but is unevenly distributed in different companies, industries, and countries.
Dennis Gabor, the business strategist, is less concerned withpredicting the future. He believes: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Your company faces an inﬁnite number of futures and must decide on which one it wants.

oals and Objectives

The most generic goal of business is to earn more than the cost of capital. The goal is to make today’s investment worth more tomorrow. If
this happens, the company has achieved economic value added (EVA).

Goals and Objectives 69
Companies may add other goals, but they must be thought
through carefully:• Corporate growth. Companies need to grow, but it must be
proﬁtable growth. Too many companies go on acquisition
binges or geographical expansions only to grow their top lines
at a terrible cost to their bottom lines. They are buying
growth rather than earning it.
• Market share. Too many companies aim to collect as manycustomers as possible. But more market share often means
picking up more unreliable customers. These companies
would be smarter to focus on nurturing loyal customers, getting to know them better, and ﬁnding more goods and services they may need or want.
• Return on sales. Some companies focus on achieving or maintaining a certain margin. But the margin is meaningless without matching it to the sales volume generated per dollar ofassets (asset turnover).
• Earnings per share growth. Companies set targets for theirearnings per share (EPS). But EPS does not necessarily reﬂect
the return on capital because companies can raise EPS by buying back shares, writing off certain costs, and employing various creative accounting measures.
• Reputation. Companies should strive for a good reputation. A
company’s main reputational goals should be fourfold: to be(1) the supplier of choice to customers, (2) the employer ofchoice to employees, (3) the partner of choice to distributors,and (4) the company of choice to investors. Its reputational
capital will contribute to its primary goal, earning a higher return than the cost of capital.
After a company clariﬁes its goal(s), it needs to develop speciﬁc
objectives for the corporate level, the business divisions, and the70 Marketing Insights from A to Z
various departments. These objectives drive the planning process
and carry incentives and rewards. Peter Drucker, who fathered theidea of management by objectives, nevertheless lamented: “Management by objectives works if you know the objectives. Ninety
percent of the time you don’t.”
Yogi Berra, the colorful New York Yankees catcher, warned:“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re liable toend up someplace else.” But then how do you set an objective?
His answer didn’t help: “When you come to a fork in the road,take it.”Think carefully about your goals and objectives. For example,
speed is useful only if you are running in the right direction. A pilot
got on the intercom and said: “I’ve got good news and bad news.
The bad news ﬁrst: I don’t know where we’re going. The good news:
We’re getting there fast.”rowth Strategies

It is not enough to be proﬁtable. Companies must also grow. In fact,
if you don’t grow, you won’t be proﬁtable for long. Staying with thesame customers, products, and markets is a recipe for disaster.
Investors want to see a growing top line; employees want toGrowth Strategies 71
have more advancement opportunities; and distributors want toserve a growing company. Growth is energizing. An old maxim says:“If you stand still, you get shot.”Companies often excuse their lack of growth by saying that they
are in a mature market. All they are expressing is a lack of imagination. Larry Bossidy, CEO of Honeywell, observed: “There’s no suchthing as a mature market. We need mature executives who canﬁnd ways to grow. . . . Growth is a mind-set.” If the car market
was mature, how come the minivan sent Chrysler into a growth
spurt? If the steel industry is mature, how do we explain Nucor? If
Sears thought that there was no growth in retailing, how do we explain Wal-Mart or Home Depot?
Companies have tried several paths to growth: cost and pricecutting, aggressive price increases, international expansion, acquisition, and new products. Each has problems. Price cuts are usuallymatched and neutralized. Price increases are difﬁcult to pass on during sluggish economic times. Most international markets are now
highly competitive or protected. Company acquisitions are expensive and have not proven very proﬁtable. And the numbers of new
product winners are few.
What companies fail to realize is that their markets are rarely
fully penetrated. All markets consist of segments and niches. American
Express recognized this and created the Corporate Card, the Gold
Card, and the Platinum Card. To grow, a company can make four
segment moves:
1. Move into adjacent segments. Nike’s ﬁrst success was making
superior running shoes for serious runners. Later it moved
into shoes for basketball, tennis, and football. Still later, it
moved into aerobic shoes.
2. Do a ﬁner segmentation. Nike found that it could segment
the basketball shoe market into ﬁner segments: shoes for theaggressive player, the high-jumping player, and so on.

72 Marketing Insights from A to Z
3. Skip into new segments (categories). Nike moved into selling
clothing tied to the various sports.
4. Resegment the whole market. Nike’s competitor, Reebok, resegmented the market by introducing stylish shoes for theleisure market that could be worn every day without a sportin mind.

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Another growth approach is to redeﬁne the market in whichyour company operates. GE’s Jack Welch told his people: “Redeﬁne
your market to one in which your current share is no more than
10 percent.” Instead of thinking that your company has a 50 percent
market share, it should see itself as operating in a larger market where
it enjoys less than 10 percent of that market. Here are some examples:TE• Nike now deﬁnes itself as being in the sports market rather
than the shoe and clothing market. It is considering selling
sports equipment and even offering services such as managing
athletes’ careers.
• The late Roberto Goizueta told his company, Coca-Cola, thatwhile Coca-Cola had a 35 percent share of the soft drink market, it had only a 3 percent share of the total beverage market
and it needed to increase its share.
• Armstrong World Industries, Inc., moved from ﬂoor coverings to ceilings to total interior surface decoration.
• Citicorp thought that it had a substantial share of the banking
market but realized that it had only a small share of the total
ﬁnancial market, which includes much more than banking.
• AT&T stopped thinking of itself as a long distance telephonecompany and moved into carrying voice, image, text, and dataon telephone lines, cable, cellular phones, and the Internet.
• Taco Bell went from an in-store fast-food restaurant to “feeding people everywhere,” including kiosks, convenience stores,
airports, and high schools.

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Growth Strategies 73
Management can search for growth opportunities using the following framework:• Sell more of the current products to the current customers. Encourage customers to consume more per occasion or consume
on more occasions.
• Sell additional products to the current customers. Identify otherproducts that the current customers might need.
• Sell more of the current products to new customers. Introduce
your current products into new geographical areas or into
new market segments.
• Sell new products to new customers. Acquire or build new businesses that cater to new markets.
Achieving growth requires developing a growth mentality inthe company’s personnel and partners. Watch for needs not being
currently satisﬁed. Instead of starting from the company’s current
products and competencies (inside-out thinking), seek growth bysensing the untapped needs of existing and new customers (outside-in thinking). Look at the end users’ needs, then your immediate customers’ needs, and ﬁnally decide which needs you can meet
proﬁtably.
Adrian Slywotzky and Richard Wise proposed that companies
have “hidden assets” that they could apply to satisfying “higher order” needs in their markets. “Most executives have spent years learning to create growth using products, factories, facilities, and working
capital. They have spent much less time thinking about how to use acombination of relationships, market position, networks, and information—their hidden assets—to create value for customers andgrowth for investors.”35

uarantees

Guarantees are getting more fashionable. Guarantees can be powerful builders of corporate value and credibility. They may promisemoney back, compensation, or product replacement. But they must
be relevant, unconditional, believable, and easy to understand. Ignore those who promise to help you use 30 pounds in a week, speak
French in a day, or cure baldness.
Here are companies whose powerful guarantees have createdstrong followings:• Hampton Inn guarantees that its rooms will give “complete
satisfaction or your night’s stay is free.”• Loblaws (Canada) offers to replace its private-label food itemswith national brands if customers don’t consider Loblaws abetter value.
• Xerox will replace any Xerox product within three years until
the customer is fully satisﬁed.
• A. T. Cross will replace its pens and pencils for life. The customer mails the broken pen or pencil to the company and it isrepaired or replaced free and mailed back.

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Guarantees 75• Saturn will take its new car back within 30 days if the customer is not satisﬁed.
• Allied Van Lines will pay $100 for each day of delay in moving
a customer’s goods.
• BBBK Pest Control will refund customer money if it fails toeradicate all pests and will pay for the next exterminator.
Here is how L. L. Bean words its well-known guarantee: “Allof our products are guaranteed to give 100% satisfaction in
every way. Return anything purchased from us at any time if itproves otherwise. We will replace it, refund your purchaseprice or credit your credit card, as you wish. We do not want
you to have anything from L. L. Bean that is not completely
satisfactory.”
There are always some companies, however, that are more readyto proclaim guarantees than to honor them. Their lawyers word theguarantees with hidden conditions and special requirements thatmake them into nonguarantees. But in the process, the company creates a growing band of angry people bent on discrediting the company to whoever will listen.

mage andEmotional Marketing

Companies are increasingly turning to image and emotional marketing to win customer mind share and heart share. Although this hasgone on from the beginning of time, today it is accelerating. The oldmarketing mantra advised companies to outperform competitors onsome beneﬁt and to promote this beneﬁt: “Volvo is the safest car”;“Tide cleans better than any other detergent”; “Wal-Mart sells at thelowest prices.” Going under the name of beneﬁt marketing, it assumed that consumers were more inﬂuenced by rational arguments
than by emotional appeals. But in today’s economy, companies
rapidly copy any competitor’s advantage until it no longer remains.
Volvo’s beneﬁt of making the safest car means less when customers
start seeing most cars as safe.
More companies are now trying to develop images that movethe heart instead of the head. Those addressed to the head tend tostate the same beneﬁts. So companies are trying to sell an attitude
like Nike’s “Just do it.” Celebrities are shown wearing “milk mustaches.” Prudential wants people to have a “piece of the rock.” These
campaigns work more on affect than cognition.
Companies are turning to anthropologists and psychologists
to develop messages that touch emotions more deeply. One ap-

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Implementation and Control 77
proach is to build the image of the product around some deep archetype—the hero, antihero, siren, wise old man—that resides in
the collective unconscious.
You can readily ﬁnd out how your customers and noncustomers see your company and your competitors. A marketing research ﬁrm would ask: “How old a person is this company?” (Theanswer may be a “teenager” in the case of Apple Computer and a“grandfather” in the case of IBM.) Or “What animal does this company remind you of?” (Hope for a lion or a monkey, not an elephantor a dinosaur.)

mplementation
and Control

There is a constant debate about whether strategy or execution ismore important. Peter Drucker observed that “a plan is nothing
unless it degenerates into work.” Yet a poor plan with great implementation is no better than a good plan with poor implementation.
The truth is that both are necessary for success.
Implementation snafus are legion. Kodak’s ads for a new camera
drew people into stores only to ﬁnd that the cameras hadn’t arrived.

78 Marketing Insights from A to Z
A major bank announced a new savings plan in the newspapers but
hadn’t explained the plan to its branch managers. An engineeringﬁrm made a decision to sell its services in the Middle East but could
not ﬁnd any capable person who spoke Arabic and would be willingto transfer there. A hotel decided to make service its major value
proposition but let service be run by a weak manager with a small
budget and an insufﬁcient staff.
Good implementation needs buy-in from those who are tocarry out the plan. The best way to get their buy-in is to have them
participate in the plan’s development. Thus salespeople are more
likely to accept the marketing plan if a sales representative participated in its development and if the target volumes and prices areplausible. So the planner’s ﬁrst need is to sell the plan inside, notoutside.
Control is the way that we catch failures in implementation or
strategy. The company may have implemented poorly, set the wrong
marketing mix, aimed at the wrong target market, or done poor initial research. Control is not a singular thing but a host of tools formaking sure that the company is on track. The tools fall under fourtypes of control shown here.36
Types of Marketing Control
Type of Control
I. Annual-plancontrol

Prime
ResponsibilityTopmanagement;
middlemanagement

Purpose ofControl
To examine
whether theplanned results
are beingachieved

Approach• Sales analysis• Market-shareanalysis• Sales-to-expense
ratios• Financial
analysis• Market-based
scorecard
analysisImplementation and Control 79
Prime
Responsibility
Marketingcontroller

Purpose ofControl
To examine
where thecompany ismaking andlosing money

III. Efﬁciency
controlLine and staff
management;
marketingcontroller

IV. Strategic
controlTopmanagement;
marketingauditorTo evaluate
and improve
the spending
efﬁciency
and impact
of marketing
expenditures
To examine
whether thecompany ispursuing its
bestopportunities
with respect
to markets,
products,
and channels

Type of Control
II. Proﬁtability
control

ApproachProﬁtability by:• Product• Territory• Customer• Segment• Trade channel• Order size
Efﬁciency of:• Sales force• Advertising• Sales promotion• Distribution• Marketing
effectivenessrating
instrument• Marketingaudit• Marketing
excellence
review• Company
ethical andsocialresponsibility
review

The processes of planning, implementation, and control constitute a virtuous feed forward/feed back system. If your company is
not achieving its goals, either you are implementing your plan poorly
or your plan has become irrelevant and needs ﬁxing.

nformation
and Analytics

A former CEO of Unilever said that if Unilever only knew what it
knows, it would double its proﬁts. The meaning is clear: Many companies sit on rich information but fail to mine this information. This
has led to an explosion of interest in knowledge management: organizing a company’s information so that it is easily retrievable andlearning can be extracted from it.
Many companies, especially those resulting from mergers or acquisitions, have ended up with incompatible data systems. Before
they can get a whole view of their customer, competition, and distribution, they have to streamline and integrate their data into a single
data system.
Marketing is becoming more based on information than onbrute sales power. Thanks to the computer and the Internet, nosalesperson can say to the boss that he or she didn’t know theprospect’s industry, company, problems, or potentials. Using sales
automation software, a salesperson can record each prospect’s andcustomer’s needs, interests, opinions, and hot buttons. The salesperson can answer questions in the prospect’s ofﬁce by connecting withthe company’s mainframe or other resources on his or her laptop.
The salesperson, after negotiating, can print out a customized con-80

Information and Analytics 81
tract for the prospect to sign. And afterward, the salesperson canlook up what any customer bought and ﬁgure out further opportunities for cross-selling or up-selling.
Besides sales automation software, companies need marketing
automation software to help their marketers gain efﬁciency andeffectiveness.
One form is real-time inventory management, where a marketer
can tell what the company and its competitors sold yesterday, including features and prices. This not only facilitates more synchronous
production planning but also allows real-time tactical responses.
• Some people deﬁne Wal-Mart as an information system company more than a retailer. Wal-Mart knows the sales of eachproduct in each store at the end of the day, making it easier toorder the right replacement stock for the next day. The result:
Wal-Mart carries lower inventory and therefore needs lessworking capital. Its ordering is driven by real demand, not by
forecasted demand. It has synchronized its ordering with thedemand ﬂow.
• 7-Eleven in Japan is another retailer making data-driven decisions. 7-Eleven replenishes its stock three times a day in response to orders from individual store managers of what they
expect to sell in the next few hours. 7-Eleven not only trains
its store operators to capture customer and sales information
but also teaches them how to use it.
Another form is real-time selling, where a company has programmed in rules suggesting other products and services that might
be mentioned to a prospect or customer on the spot.
• Suppose a couple in their late forties comes into a bank for ahome repair loan. Such customers are likely to have college-age
children, and the bank might mention a college loan as well.

82 Marketing Insights from A to Z
• A business traveler checks into a hotel that knows from herrecord that she is a frequent traveler. The hotel clerk mightoffer to arrange for her stays at sister hotels for known future dates.

AM
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Still another form is marketing process automation, where acompany has codiﬁed its marketing processes that its product, brand,
and segment managers need to know to operate more effectively.

TE• A brand manager needing to do a concept test turns on his
computer and looks up the six steps in a concept test; he receives tips and best-of-class examples. A brand manager needing to choose an appropriate sales promotion turns to her
computer to get world-class advice.
Yet another form is an assortment of software packages that facilitate handling such processes as new product development, advertising campaigns, marketing projects, and contract management.
They are being developed by Emmperative, E.piphany, Unica, andseveral other marketing automation ﬁrms.
In all battles—military, business, and marital—victory goes tothe party that has the better information. Arie De Geus, former
strategist for Royal Dutch/Shell, observed: “The ability to learn
faster than our competitors may be our only sustainable competitive weapon.”At the same time, managers often must make decisions before
they have all the facts. If they wait too long, the opportunity may
be gone.

Team-Fly®

nnovation

Firms face a dilemma. If they don’t innovate, they will die. And if they
do innovate—and their innovations are not successful—they may alsodie. Given that only 20 percent of consumer packaged goods introductions are successful and maybe 40 percent of new business-tobusiness products are successful, the odds are discouraging.
Yet innovation is a safer bet than standing still. The key is to
manage innovation better than your competitors. Innovation andimagination must be made into a capability, as it is at 3M, Sony, Casio, Lexus, Braun, and Honda. These companies have been called“product juggernauts” in that they run product development as an
ongoing and interactive process, with the manufacturer, sales force,and customer all working together to develop, reﬁne, adapt, and improve products.37
The innovation process has to be managed carefully as a set ofprocesses, including idea development, idea screening, concept development and testing, business analysis, prototype development and testing,test marketing, and commercialization. The company needs to build
in or acquire the competencies needed in each step of the process.
And it must appoint a well-seasoned leader of the innovation process.
Gary Hamel holds that innovation can be a strategic capability,83

84 Marketing Insights from A to Z
just like in some companies quality is a discipline.38 Innovation is notachieved by a two-day brainstorming session. Success requires developing three markets within the ﬁrm: an idea market, a capital market, and a talent market. The company must encourage and reward
new ideas; it must set aside a pool of money to ﬁnance investments inpromising new ideas; and it must attract the talent necessary to implement these ideas. And those who contributed the ideas, capital,
and talent should be rewarded.
Innovation is not limited to new products or services. It includes
thinking up new businesses and business processes. Nestlé sells coffee
in the groceries but it was Starbucks that thought up a new way to retail coffee. Barnes & Noble thought up a new concept for a physicalbookstore, and Amazon thought up a brilliant system for sellingbooks online. All of the following were major business innovations:Club Med, CNN, Dell Computer, Disney, Domino’s Pizza, Federal
Express, IKEA, McDonald’s, watchmaker Swatch, Wal-Mart.
A company needs to pursue both continuous improvement anddiscontinuous innovation. Continuous improvement is essential, but
discontinuous innovation would be even better. A greater sustainable
competitive advantage can come from discontinuous innovation, albeit at a much greater cost and risk. The risk comes from several
facts: The technology is evolving, there are competing technologies,
the market is ill-deﬁned, there is no delivery infrastructure, and timing of completion is difﬁcult. Furthermore, marketing research is oflittle value. Discontinuous innovation hurts the bottom line in the
short term, and it may not help the bottom line in the long term.
The conventional new product process works well for continuous improvements but does not work for discontinuous innovations.
Where should companies go to get new product ideas? A marketer’s normal answer is to ask customers what they need. Done right,
this can yield useful ideas, but probably incremental rather thanbreakthrough ideas. Consumers would not have answered that theywanted a PC, Palm, Walkman, wireless phone, or camcorder. Akio

Innovation 85
Morita, Sony’s late CEO, said: “There was no need for market research. The public does not know what is possible. We do.”39
The truth is that ideas can come from anywhere, and not only
from customers or the lab. Every ﬁrm is a potential hotbed of ideas,
except the company fails to stimulate them or lacks a net to catchthem. Why not appoint a high-level idea manager to whom salespeople, distributors, suppliers, and employees could send their ideas?
The idea manager has a committee that ﬁnds the better ideas and rewards those whose ideas the company implements. The Dana Corporation, for example, expects every employee to place two ideas amonth into the company’s suggestion box on any improvements theemployee senses, whether in selling, purchasing, energy use, travel,or other areas.
Companies that expect mild improvements can usually getthem. The trick is to ask for a huge improvement. Instead of a 10
percent reduction in costs, ask for a 50 percent reduction in costs.
Instead of a 10 percent improvement in productivity, ask for a tenfold improvement. The effect of this is to force everyone to reexamine the operation and design a better operation, instead of only
squeezing out a little more from the present operation.
Every business should examine its innovation index. This describes the proportion of its sales derived from products less than
three years old. No company will survive with a zero innovation index. A traditional business will have a hard time if its innovation index
isn’t at least 20 percent. High-fashion clothing businesses need atleast a 100 percent innovation index to succeed. The message: Innovate or evaporate. (Also see Creativity, New Product Development.)

ntangible Assets

The modern balance sheet is a lie! It omits the company’s most important assets. Probably 80 percent of a company’s value lies in its intangible assets; but they are not on the books. The value of acompany’s plant, equipment, inventory, and working capital hardly
reﬂects a true value of a company.
For example, where is Coca-Cola’s brand value on the company’s balance sheet? Coca-Cola’s brand value is estimated at $70 billion. Where is the value of its customer base? It’s the satisﬁed customers
who repeatedly purchase from the ﬁrm who constitute a major asset.
Where is employee value? Having better employees than the competition will spell the difference between having superior proﬁts and average proﬁts. Where is partners value? Loyal suppliers and distributors
can make a company, and disloyal ones can break a company. Where isknowledge and intellectual capital value? Patents, copyrights, trademarks, and licenses can be one of the company’s major assets.
No wonder there is often a huge gap between a company’s market capitalization and its book value. The gap reﬂects the value of theintangibles. For example, AmericaOnline’s book value in 1999 was
only 3.3 percent of its market capitalization. Thus 97 percent of
AOL’s value was not on the balance sheet.

86International Marketing 87
Companies would be wise if they start identifying and assessing
all their marketing assets such as their brands, customer relationships,
employee relationships, channel relationships, supplier relationships,
and intellectual capital. The company should choose marketing activities that build the value of their market-based assets.
Should your company even consider owning physical assets? Owning physical property can be a liability. All a company needs is access tophysical assets. To operate as a lean company may call for decapitalizing—outsourcing activities and shrinking working capital. The Sara Lee
Corporation, for one, thinks that it is better to own brands (Champion,
Coach, Hanes, Playtex, Hillshire Farm, and others) than factories.

nternational Marketing

A company that masters only its domestic market will eventually lose
it. Strong foreign competitors will inevitably come in and challenge
your company. It is now business without borders.
One of the best growth paths for a business is to go regional or
global. But most companies hesitate to go abroad. They see obstacles
and risks stemming from tariffs, language differences, cultural differences, devaluation and exchange control risk, and bribery.
But there are also gains. By going abroad, companies actually
diversify their risks by not depending on only one country’s market.

88 Marketing Insights from A to Z
In fact, the market for their products and services may be mature athome and growing abroad. Furthermore, these companies will be
stimulated to improve their products as they compete in new situations against new competitors.
But companies must adapt their products and marketing mix
when they go abroad. Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) uses the slogan:“We are a global ﬁrm local everywhere.” Royal Ahold, the giant
Dutch food retailer, has the brand philosophy, “Everything the customer sees we localize. Everything they don’t see, we globalize.”
When naming its new products, a company must make sure its
name will travel internationally. Chevrolet named its new car Nova,
not realizing that in Latin America no va means “doesn’t go.”Companies usually evolve globally through ﬁve stages: (1) passively exporting, (2) actively exporting using distributors, (3) opening sales ofﬁces abroad, (4) setting up factories abroad, and (5)establishing regional headquarters abroad.
In expanding abroad, companies tend to exercise loose administrative controls initially, preferring to put their faith in their entrepreneurial country managers. Later they start imposing somestrategic controls aimed at standardizing global planning and decision processes.
Companies must choose foreign distributors carefully. They
need to deﬁne distributor performance very clearly and be aware ofhost country laws regarding distributor treatment. The distributors need to be given adequate incentives to grow the market as
fast as possible.
Companies succeed best when they recognize a large target
market whose needs are not being met by the current sellers. By inventing new values for this target market that are difﬁcult to replicate
and by building a strong company culture to serve this market, thecompany has a good chance to succeed.
Companies entering developing countries should offer new
beneﬁts or introduce their products at a lower price, rather thanInternational Marketing 89
come in with the same offerings made at home. They must be conscious of liability for the potential misuse of their products due tolow literacy and the poor quality of intermediary channels, as well as
counterfeiting possibilities.
Two issues arise when a company appoints regional managers.
The ﬁrst is whether to locate regional management at headquarters
or in a capital city of the region. The second is whether regional
managers should represent the interests of headquarters or of the region’s country managers. The regional headquarters location will inﬂuence its orientation.
Although a company may grant high autonomy to its country
managers, it can still achieve a fair measure of coordination
through corporate information exchange systems, company guidelines and regulations, regional line managers, and headquarters
product directors.
Country managers are not all equal. Usually the country managers in the larger markets have more autonomy and inﬂuence. The
larger markets are often chosen as centers of excellence in the handling of research and development (R&D) and new productlaunches. They also have a large inﬂuence on the country managers
in the smaller surrounding countries.
Multinational corporations face tough decisions on which
products to emphasize in which countries. The allocation of products and advertising money to the different countries must be
guided by consumer preferences and purchasing power, distribution strength, competitor positions, and economic future conditions in each country.
Highly efﬁcient export-oriented companies are likely to gain
market share in other countries. This will set up resistance by entrenched interests in the form of high tariffs and dumping charges.
Ultimately these exporters may be wise to move production into
countries that are resisting these imports.
A multinational that abandons troubled countries will have to90 Marketing Insights from A to Z
eventually abandon all countries. The company should think more ofshrinking its presence in a troubled country than abandoning it.
Global countries must learn to use countertrading. Many countries are poor but they will barter. You’d better learn to take somegoods in exchange or forget selling to that country. Pepsi-Cola had
to promise Russia that it would help sell Russian vodka abroad in exchange for selling Pepsi-Cola in Russia.
When companies fail abroad, the most common factors are:• Failure to take enough time to observe, absorb, and learn the
new market.
• Failure to get reliable statistical information about the newmarket.
• Failure to deﬁne the target user.
• Failure to adapt the product and/or marketing mix.
• Failure to offer adequate service.
• Failure to ﬁnd good strategic partners.

nternet and E-Business

The Internet offers radically new possibilities for conducting businessmore efﬁciently. Just look at what you can do now that you couldn’t
have done (or done easily) before:• You can display much more information about your company
and products—and sell them—on a web site operating 24
hours a day, 7 days a week.
• You can purchase more effectively because you can use the Internet to identify more suppliers, put out requisitions online,
buy on market exchanges, and hunt for bargains on online
auction markets and used goods markets.
• You can place orders, transact, and make payments to suppliers and distributors faster and at a lower cost by setting up extranets with your partners.
• You can recruit more effectively using online job listing services and e-mail interviews.
• You can supply better information and training to employees
and to your dealers through the Internet.
• You can set up an intranet to facilitate communication among
your employees, as well as between them and headquarters
and your mainframe computer. The intranet can feature

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92 Marketing Insights from A to Z

TE

AM
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newsletters, personnel information, product information, elearning modules, company calendars, and so on.
• You can promote your products over a much broader geographical area.
• You can more efﬁciently research markets, customers,
prospects, and competitors by tapping into the wealth of information on the Internet and by carrying out focus groups
and surveys on the Internet.
• You can send ads, coupons, samples, and information to requesting or targeted customers.
• You can customize offerings, services, and messages to individual customers.
• You can substantially improve your logistics and operations
using the Internet.
The Internet provides a brilliant new platform for communicating, buying, and selling. Its beneﬁts will only grow over time. Business leaders have lauded its potentials:• Jack Welch of GE admonished his people to produce morethan a web site: “Embrace the Net. Bring me a plan how
you are going to transform your business beyond adding
an Internet site.”• John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, aims to Web-ify Cisco’s entire
business: “Every customer interaction provided by a Cisco
employee that does not add value to the business ought tobe replaced by a Web-based function.”• Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, sees the Internet as indispensable to companies: “The Internet is not just anothersales channel. The future company will operate with a digital nervous system.”
By embracing the Internet early, companies have greatly reduced their costs compared to late-adopting competitors:

Team-Fly®

Internet and E-Business 93• Dell, by selling customized computers through low-cost
telecommunications and Web channels, has a much lower costof doing business than HP/Compaq, IBM, and Apple. Dell
has grown at twice the rate of the rest of the industry and is
now the leading personal computer seller in the United States.
• GE claims to have saved hundreds of millions of dollars of its
purchasing budget by establishing its Trading Process Network and requisitioning products over the Internet.
• Oracle ran an ad claiming to have saved over a billion dollars byusing its Internet-based systems in running its own business.
Although the main beneﬁts of the Internet are many and varied,
it was e-commerce and not the other applications that caught most of
the public’s attention. E-commerce meant the opportunity to convert
the Internet into a selling channel. E-commerce dot.coms started byselling books, music, toys, electronics, stock buying, insurance, and airline tickets, and soon added furniture, large appliances, home banking,home food delivery, consulting, and almost everything else. The new
dot.coms instilled fear in every store-based retailer. Would the availability of online products spell the kiss of death for stores?
Smart store-based retailers such as Barnes & Noble, WalMart, and Levi’s took no chances and set up separate online sales
channels. Instead of staying only “brick and mortar,” they moved
to “brick and click.”But many dot.coms collapsed in the late 1990s, having madethe mistake of collecting “eyeballs” instead of revenues. One
dot.com start-up told the venture capital supplier: “Revenues are a
distraction that I cannot afford.” These dot.coms lacked not only ane-business strategy but even a business strategy.
No wonder so many dot.coms turned into dot.bombs. Whenthe dot.com bubble burst, many store-based businesses gave a sigh ofrelief. Yet smart retailers and businesses did not ignore the potentialsof the Internet and added an online presence.

94 Marketing Insights from A to Z
Every company needs a web site today that reﬂects the company’s quality. One warning: Don’t let your web site be designed bya techie who wants to illustrate his or her technical prowess. Customers can’t wait for all the downloading of pretty pictures. They
want information, not show time. They want a fast download, a clear
and uncluttered initial screen, easy passage to other screens, clear information, an easy ordering procedure, and no intrusive advertising.

eadership

All managers should be leaders, but most are administrators. If you
are spending most of your time on budgets, organization charts,
costs, compliance, and detail, you are an administrator. To become aleader, you need to spend more time with people, scanning opportunities, developing a vision, and setting goals.
Your chief executive ofﬁcer (CEO) should be the ﬁrm’s architect; and your chief operating ofﬁcer (COO) should be the ﬁrm’s engineer who optimizes within the ﬁrm’s architecture. To do theirrespective jobs well, both should have selling skills. They need to sell
their ideas to their investors, peers, and staff. Leaders need to beteachers and teach others to be leaders.
Bad managers, in contrast, rely on command and control to gettheir ideas carried out.

Leadership 95
A business leader’s job is “to make meaning” (John Seely Brown,
chief scientist of Xerox Corporation). The leader needs vision. Vision is“the art of seeing things invisible” (Jonathan Swift). Vision is theability to conjure up a picture of great opportunities to inspire the employees and the company’s stakeholders. The vision must burn in theleader’s breast if it is to ignite a passion in others. At the same time, bewarned that there is a big difference between vision and hallucination.
The leader must be able to gain respect for his vision and as aperson. The followers must believe that the leader is serving them,that he or she is a servant-leader. Napoleon said that “A leader is adealer in hope.” Robert Townsend, former CEO of Avis Rent-ACar, observed: “True leadership must be for the beneﬁt of thefollowers, not the enrichment of the leaders.” Leadership works
best when there are committed followers.
Some think that great leaders need charisma, and point to people such as Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. They are forgetting Harry Truman. The leader does not need charisma to beeffective. Charismatic leaders are often suspect. Some of the greatest
business leaders went about their work in a quiet way touching theminds and hearts of their staff. They are friendly, approachable, andcaring. They act as role models. Charles R. Walgreen III transformed
Walgreen Co. into a company whose cumulative stock returns since1975 have beaten the general stock market by over 15 times. Yet henever takes credit, pointing instead to his great team, and he pins his
success on being “lucky.” Katherine Graham of The Washington Post
was another quiet leader who built a great newspaper into a greater
one. The Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu said: “A leader is best whenpeople barely know that he exists.”40
The best leaders want to surround themselves with talented
managers. They revel in ﬁnding managers who are smarter than theyare. CEO Tom Siebel wants the executives in his organization to besigniﬁcantly smarter than he is in their particular areas. The chief ﬁnancial ofﬁcer (CFO) should be better at managing ﬁnances than the96 Marketing Insights from A to Z
CEO, and the head of marketing should be better at marketing thanthe CEO. The CEO’s main task is to build a team of experts who arealigned with each other and the primary goals of the company.
And good leaders don’t want yes-men. Be ready to ﬁre those
who agree with you. Good leaders want the honest views of their colleagues. They encourage constructive debates and out-of-the-box
thinking. They invite big-picture ideas. They tolerate honest mistakes. And when they make the ﬁnal decision, they inspire their people to do their best.
And the best leaders don’t spend too much time poring overnumbers. They get out and meet the troops. And they devote a lot oftime to major customers. Jack Welch of GE spent 100 days a year
talking with major customers. So did Lou Gerstner of IBM.
At the same time, the job of a leader is daunting. It isn’t allabout playing golf with other business leaders. One CEO said, “I am
only comfortable when I am uncomfortable.” When Dick Ferris,former CEO of United Air Lines, was asked how he sleeps in tumultuous times, he said, “Just like a baby—I wake up every two hours
and cry.”
Yet the leader must be more of an optimist than a pessimist. He
must see the cup as half full rather than half empty. He is mostly
tested when the times are tough. It is a rough sea that can make agreat captain. Clearly the leader lives with risks. Followers are lucky
because all they have to do is carry out the orders.
Leaders can be corrupted by success. If they are not careful,egotism seeps in. As someone observed: “Egotism is the qualitythat causes a person to think he’s in the groove when he’s actually in a rut.”
With regard to marketing, too many CEOs see marketing expenditures as just an expense and fail to see that a large part of it is aninvestment. There are two types of CEOs: those who know that they
don’t understand marketing and those who don’t know that they
don’t understand marketing.

oyalty“Loyalty” is an old-fashioned word describing being deeply committed to one’s country, family, or friends. It came into marketing withthe term brand loyalty. But can people be loyal to a brand? Tony
O’Reilly, former CEO of H. J. Heinz, proposed this test of brandloyalty: “My acid test . . . is whether a housewife, intending tobuy Heinz tomato ketchup in a store, ﬁnding it to be out ofstock, will walk out of the store to buy it elsewhere.”That some people will be exceptionally loyal to some brands isincontrovertible. The Harley Davidson motorcycle owner won’t
switch even if convinced that another brand performs better. Apple
Macintosh users won’t switch to Microsoft even if they could gain
some advantages. BMW fans won’t switch to Mercedes. We say that acompany enjoys high brand loyalty when a sizable number of its customers won’t switch.
Brand loyalty is roughly indicated by the company’s customer
retention rate. The average ﬁrm loses half its customers in less thanﬁve years. Firms with high brand loyalty may lose not more than 20
percent of their customers in ﬁve years. But a high retention rate may
indicate other things than loyalty. Some customers stay on because ofinertia or indifference or being held hostage to long-term contracts.

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98 Marketing Insights from A to Z
Building loyal customers requires a company to discriminate.
We are not talking about racial, religious, or gender discrimination.
We are talking about discriminating between proﬁtable and unprofitable customers. No company can be expected to pay the same attention to an unproﬁtable customer as to a proﬁtable customer.
Smart companies deﬁne the types of customers they are seeking who
would most beneﬁt from the ﬁrm’s offerings; these customers are themost likely to stay loyal. And loyal customers pay back the company
in long-term cash ﬂows and in generating a stream of referrals.
Some companies believe that they win customer loyalty by offering a loyalty award program. A loyalty program may be a good
feature as part of a customer relationship management program, butmany loyalty schemes do not create loyalty. They appeal to the customer’s rational side of accumulating something free but do not necessarily create an emotional bond. How can frequent-ﬂier miles win
customer loyalty in the face of canceled ﬂights, overcrowded planes,
lost baggage, and indifferent cabin crews? Some programs are disloyalty programs, as when an airline says the points will be lost unlessthe customer ﬂies within two months.
Companies should reward their loyal customers. Too often,
however, companies give a better deal to new customers than to theirold customers. Thus a telecom company may offer brand-new handsets and a reduced-price call plan to attract new customers while oldcustomers are stuck with outdated handsets and pay more. Why notoffer a trade-in plan for old equipment and a call plan that cost lesseach year that the customer stays with the company? State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance does this, where each year the insured automobile owner gets a reduced rate if there are no claims.
While every company should aim to build loyal customers, loyalty is never so strong that customers can resist a competitor who
shows up with a much stronger value proposition that gives customers everything they now have and more.

anagement

Management is the task of making trade-offs and juggling contradictions. Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter observed: “The ultimate corporate balancing act: Cut back and grow. Trim down
and build. Accomplish more, and do it in new areas, withfewer resources.”
Everyone in a company has a different agenda. The advertising
manager sees the company’s salvation as being in more advertising;
the sales manager wants more salespeople; the sales promotion
manager wants more money for incentives; and the R&D department wants more money for product improvement and new product development.
The problem is that if every department only does its own
job well, the company will fail. Departments have individual agendas, not company agendas. The gift of reengineering thinking is
to switch the focus away from departments toward managing
core processes. Each core process—product development, customer attraction and retention, order fulﬁllment—requires teamwork from several departments. Increasingly major company
initiatives are launched as interdisciplinary team projects, not department projects.

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Management must never relax its vigilance. Business is arace without a ﬁnishing line. Andrew Grove, former CEO ofIntel, postulated Grove’s Law, “Only the paranoid survive.” But
the Japanese see management’s task more positively and callit kaizen: “Improving everything all the time by everyone.”
They would rather improve their business every day than pray foran occasional breakthrough. The company that stops getting better gets worse.
At the same time, improving the efﬁciency of the current operations is not enough. Deﬁning good management in this way hascaused many businesses to fold. Management puts the company atrisk by staying indoors and not wandering out. In viewing the business from inside out rather than from outside in, they miss changes incustomers, competitors, and channels. They miss threats and opportunities. John Le Carré observed: “A desk is a dangerous placefrom which to view the world.”
Most companies are managed by committees. Richard Harkness, a journalist, deﬁned a committee as “a group of the unwilling, picked from the unﬁt, to do the unnecessary.” Others saythat committees are a ﬁne device when you don’t want to accomplish anything. Peter Drucker observed: “Ninety percent of what
we call ‘management’ is making it difﬁcult to get things
done.”
Every committee meeting should end in 45 minutes, or at least
the attendees should take a vote to continue. Some say that the optimum size of a committee is zero. Former U.S. Senator Harry Chapman gave this advice about being on a committee:
1. Never arrive on time; this [punctuality] stamps you as a beginner.
2. Don’t say anything until the meeting is half over; this stamps
you as being wise.

Marketing Assets and Resources 101
3. Be as vague as possible; this avoids irritating the others.
4. When in doubt, suggest that a subcommittee be appointed.
5. Be the ﬁrst to move for adjournment; this will make you
popular; it’s what everyone is waiting for.

arketing Assets
and Resources

Companies think that they have a complete list of their assets on
their balance sheets: physical assets, accounts receivable, working
capital, and the like. But their real assets are off balance sheet items
such as the value of their brands, employees, distribution partners,
suppliers, and intellectual knowledge including patents, trademarks,
and copyrights.
You need to go further and list your core competencies and core
processes as assets. Any special skills and proprietary processes areassets. Strategy is essentially the way a company chooses to link its
competencies, core processes, and other assets to win marketplace
battles.
At the same time, don’t limit your search for opportunities bystarting with your assets and resources. First look outside the ﬁrm for102 Marketing Insights from A to Z

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your opportunities, and then see if you have or can attract the needed
resources and competencies. I have always been impressed with 3M’s
willingness to go after a promising opportunity even if it lacked therequisite resources. You can always buy or outsource them.

TEarketing
Department Interfaces

Each company department carries images or stereotypes of the otherdepartments. Most often they are not ﬂattering. Furthermore, thedepartments compete for the available resources, each making thecase that it can spend the money better. All this interferes with harmonious working relations between departments.
Some members of other departments will stereotype the marketing department as consisting of fast-talking salespeople who cajole
a large budget from management without providing any evidence of
its impact, as con men who snare customers with a dishonest pitch,or as hucksters pressing R&D for new bells and whistles rather thanfor real product improvements.
One engineer complained that the salespeople are “always protecting the customer and not thinking of the company’s interest!”
He also blasted customers for “asking for too much.”

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Marketing Department Interfaces 103
Marketers, in turn, are critical of other departments:• Marketers have difﬁculties with engineers. Engineers tend to
be exact in their thinking, seeing black and white and missing
shades of gray. They tend to describe the product in highly
technical terms rather than in language that most customers
would understand.
In high-tech companies, the engineers are king. The engineers look askance at any engineers who went into sales, concluding that they must be poorly trained. If they went into
customer service, they were really losers.
• Marketers see their immediate enemy as the ﬁnance people
who demand that marketers justify each expense item, andwho hold back as much funds from marketing as possible. Finance people think mainly of current-period performance andfail to understand that a large part of marketing expenditures
are investments, not expenses, that build long-term brandstrength. When the company hits a slump, ﬁnance people’s
ﬁrst step is to cut the marketing budget, implying that thefunds aren’t necessary. The antidote is to work closely with ﬁnance to develop ﬁnancial models of how marketing investments impact revenues, costs, and proﬁts.
• Marketing people complain about the purchasing people ifthey buy cheaper inputs that result in the product not having
the quality promised in the value proposition. True, the purchasing people must keep input costs low, but controls mustbe established to ensure sufﬁcient quality.
I advise marketers to work more closely with the purchasing
people not only to ensure good quality but to learn fromthem about selling. Purchasing people are experts at whatmakes good salesmanship. Why? Because purchasing people
are approached all day long by salespeople and can tell stories
about the difference between effective and poor selling styles.

104 Marketing Insights from A to Z
It would be good training for marketers to work in purchasing for a while to learn how to deal with salespeople.
General Electric once developed a game to be played between its own purchasing and sales personnel to see who
would be more effective. The purchasing people won hands
down. GE’s management then said: “If our salespeople cannot
sell effectively to our own purchasing people, how can they selleffectively to our customers’ purchasing people?”• Marketers have only a few issues with the manufacturing people. They hope that the manufacturing people produce theproducts at the speciﬁed quality level so that the customers
aren’t disappointed. They also ask manufacturing to makespecial short runs or add custom features, but here they encounter some resistance. Manufacturing costs rise when production changes must be frequently made.
• Marketers ﬁnd it hard to communicate with information technology (IT) people. The marketers talk sales, market share,
and margin, while the IT people talk COBOL, Java, Linus,
and tetrabytes. The big mistake is when marketing asks IT todevelop a database marketing system, only to regret commissioning it in the ﬁrst place once it is ﬁnished. Yet marketingneeds database software and supply chain software if customers are to be served well. Clearly, marketing departments
need to add a technical marketer who understands information technology and can mediate between the two groups.
• Marketers get upset with the credit department when credit
refuses to approve a transaction on the grounds that theprospect might default. The salesperson worked hard to get
the sale only to ﬁnd that he or she can’t put it through andget recognition for the sale.
• Marketers are annoyed with the accountants who are slow inanswering customer questions about their invoices. Marketers

Marketing Department Interfaces 105
would also like the accountants to give them better measuresof the proﬁtability of different geographical areas, market segments, channels, and individual customers. This information
would help marketers allocate their efforts closer to the areasof greater proﬁt.
• Even within the larger marketing group, there are frictions
between marketing, the sales force, and customer service.
Marketing began as a function to help the sales force sell better. Marketing helped by getting leads through advertising,brochures, and other communications. Later, marketing gathered information to estimate market potential, assign sales
quotas, and develop sales forecasts. Salespeople often havecomplained about marketing setting sales quotas or company
prices too high, saying that more money should go to thesales force (and less to advertising) to raise their compensationor to hire more salespeople. When marketing and sales get
into conﬂict, sales often wins because salespeople are responsible for short-term results.
As for customer service, this has typically been treatedas less important than getting the sale. When customers
complained to customer service, salespeople could resent the watchdog role customer service plays, althoughgood customer service is in their best interest in the longrun.
The fact is that these departments are in active competition for alimited budget, each making the case that they can spend the money
better. Each department also wants to feel important and respectedby the other groups.
The challenge is how to break down departmental walls andharmonize the efforts of different departments to work as a team.
Here are two approaches:106 Marketing Insights from A to Z
1. Companies would hold meetings of two departments at atime to express their views of each other’s strengths andweaknesses and offer their suggestions for how to improvetheir relationship.
2. Companies are increasingly managing processes rather thanfunctions and putting together cross-disciplinary teams to
manage these processes. The various members begin to appreciate each other’s point of view, and hopefully this produces better understanding.

arketing Ethics

Companies often must choose between taking the high road andmaking the decent decision versus taking the low road and breaching
their customers’ trust. Tylenol took the high road when someone
tampered with its pills. It immediately recalled and destroyed its
stock. Intel took the middle road because it hesitated to replace achip that had a minor defect. Ford on occasions has taken the low
road by denying faults with some of its cars.
Business practices are often under attack because business situations routinely pose tough ethical dilemmas. One can go back to
Howard Bowen’s classic questions about the responsibilities of abusinessperson:

Marketing Ethics 107
Should he conduct selling in ways that intrude on the privacy ofpeople, for example, by door-to-door selling . . . ? Should he use
methods involving ballyhoo, chances, prizes, hawking, and othertactics which are at least of doubtful good taste? Should he employ“high pressure” tactics in persuading people to buy? Should he try
to hasten the obsolescence of goods by bringing out an endless succession of new models and new styles? Should he appeal to and attempt to strengthen the motives of materialism, invidiousconsumption, and “keeping up with the Joneses”? 41
The most admired companies abide by a code of serving people’s interests, not only their own. The Reputation Institute andHarris Interactive collect ratings by the public on the companies
they admire the most. The top 15 in 2001 (in order) are Johnson& Johnson, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Intel, 3M, Sony, HewlettPackard, FedEx, Maytag, IBM, Disney, General Electric, Dell,
Procter & Gamble, and United Parcel Service (UPS). These companies are notable for their products, service levels, and corporate
philanthropy. Their reputations and trustworthiness add to theirpocketbooks.

arketing Mix

Marketing mix describes the set of tools that management can use toinﬂuence sales. The traditional formulation is called the 4Ps—product, price, place, and promotion.
From the very beginning questions were raised about the 4P
formulation of the marketing mix.
• Perfume companies wanted packaging to be added as a ﬁfth P.
4P guardians said that packaging is already in the scheme, under product.
• Sales managers asked whether the sales force was left out because it began with an S. No, said the guardians, sales force isa promotion tool, along with advertising, sales promotion,
public relations, and direct marketing.
• Service managers asked where services were in the marketing
mix, or whether they, too, were excluded because the ﬁrst letter was S. Here the guardians said services are part of the
product. As services grew more important, service marketerssuggested adding three Ps to the original 4Ps, namely personnel, procedures, and physical evidence. Thus a restaurant’s performance will depend on its staff, the process by which it108

Marketing Mix 109
serves food (buffet, fast food, tablecloths, etc.), and its physical looks and features as a restaurant.
• Others suggested adding personalization to the marketingmix. The marketer has to decide how personalized to makethe product, the price, the place, and the promotion.
• In my own case, I suggested adding politics and public relations to the 4Ps, because these can also inﬂuence a company’s
ability to sell.
• At one time, I had also proposed escaping from the prison of
the letter P by redeﬁning the essential function of each P:
Product= ConﬁgurationPrice= ValuationPlace= Facilitation
Promotion = Symbolization

A more basic criticism has been that the 4Ps represent theseller’s mind-set, not the buyer’s mind-set. Robert Lauterborn suggested that sellers should ﬁrst work with 4Cs before setting the 4Ps.42
The 4Cs are customer value (not product), customer costs (not pricealone), convenience (not place), and communication (not promotion). Once the marketer thinks through the 4Cs for the target customer, it becomes much easier to set the 4Ps.
The Ps can substitute for each other in driving sales. A car dealer
sold cars with 10 salespeople and normal markups. His sales werepoor. Then he cut his staff to ﬁve salespeople and lowered his car
prices signiﬁcantly. He did a land-ofﬁce business. Similarly, Jeff Bezos,
CEO of Amazon, reduced his advertising expenditures and lowered
his book prices, and Amazon’s sales shot up signiﬁcantly.
Setting the 4Ps is difﬁcult because of their interactions. Takeproduct and place:• Suppose product is 0 and place is 1. How much is 0 × 1?
Answer = 0.

110 Marketing Insights from A to Z
• Suppose product is 1 and place is 0. How much is 1 × 0?
Answer = 0.
• Suppose product is 1 and place is 1. How much is 1 × 1?
Answer = 3.
One selects marketing tools that are appropriate to the stage ofthe product’s life cycle. For example, advertising and publicity willproduce the biggest payoff in the introduction stage of a product;
their job is to build consumer awareness and interest. Sales promotions and personal selling grow more important during a product’s
maturity stage. Personal selling can strengthen customers’ comprehension of your product’s advantages and their conviction that theoffering is worthwhile. Sales promotions are most effective for trig-

The marketing vice president of a major European airline
wanted to increase the airline’s trafﬁc share. His strategy
was to build up customer satisfaction through providing better food, cleaner cabins, better trained cabin crews, andlower fares. Yet he had no authority in these matters. The
catering department chose food that kept down food costs;
the maintenance department used cleaning services that
kept down cleaning costs; the human resources department
hired ﬂight crew people without regard to whether they
were naturally friendly; the ﬁnance department set thefares. Because these departments generally took a cost or
production point of view, the vice president of marketing
was stymied in creating an integrated marketing mix.

Marketing Mix 111
gering purchases today. In the decline stage, the company should
keep pushing sales promotions but reduce advertising, publicity, andpersonal selling.
The choice of tools is also inﬂuenced by company size. Market leaders can afford more advertising and use sales promotion
more sparingly. Smaller competitors, in contrast, use sales promotion more aggressively.
Consumer marketers tend to emphasize advertising over personal selling, and business marketers do the reverse. But both tools
are required in both types of markets. Consumer marketers who emphasize push strategies need their sales force to convince retailers or
dealers to carry, promote, and sell the company’s product to end
users. By contrast, consumer marketers who emphasize pull strategies
rely heavily on advertising and consumer promotions to draw customers into stores.
For marketing to work, you must manage the marketing mix in
an integrated fashion. Yet in many companies, responsibility for different elements of the marketing mix are in the hands of different individuals or departments.

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arketing Plans

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Your company needs a vision, the vision demands a strategy, thestrategy requires a plan, and the plan requires action. A Japanese
proverb says: “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”You need to prepare a detailed marketing plan. But it makes
more sense to call it a battle plan. Your plan should give you conﬁdence that you will win the war before you engage in the ﬁrst battle.
If you aren’t introducing something better, newer, faster, or cheaper,
you shouldn’t enter the market.
A marketing plan consists of six steps: situational analysis, objectives, strategy, tactics, budget, and controls.
1. Situational analysis. Here the company examines the macro
forces (economic, political-legal, social-cultural, technological) and the actors (company, competitors, distributors, andsuppliers) in its environment. The company carries out a
SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, andthreats). But it should really be called a TOWS analysis(threats, opportunities, weaknesses, and strengths) because
the ordering should be from the outside in rather than the112
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Marketing Plans 113
inside out. SWOT may place an undue emphasis on internal
factors and limit the identiﬁcation of threats and opportunities to only those that ﬁt the company’s strengths.
2. Objectives. Based on identifying its best opportunities fromits situational analysis, the company ranks them and sets goals
and a timetable for achieving them. The company also sets
objectives with respect to stakeholders, company reputation,technology, and other matters of concern.
3. Strategy. Any goal can be pursued in a variety of ways. It is
the job of strategy to choose the most effective course of action for attaining objectives.
4. Tactics. The strategy must be spelled out in great detail regarding the 4Ps and the actions that will be taken in calendar
time by speciﬁc individuals who are to carry out the plan.
5. Budget. The company’s planned actions and activities involve
costs that add up to the budget that it needs to achieve theits objectives.
6. Controls. The company must set review periods and measuresthat will reveal whether it is making progress toward thegoal. When performance lags, the company must revise its
objectives, strategies, or actions to correct the situation.
To facilitate the planning process, your company should workout a standard plan format to be used by all the divisions and productgroups. This will make it possible for the plans to be reviewed, compared, and evaluated by the planning or strategy ofﬁce. One large
multinational corporation has a planning ofﬁce that scores the various plans before they are approved. The ofﬁce applies such criteria as:• Is the situational analysis fairly complete?
• Are the goals reasonable and reachable in the light of the situational analysis?
• Does the strategy seem adequate to deliver the stated goals?

114 Marketing Insights from A to Z
• Are the tactics well aligned with the stated strategy?
• Is the expected return on investment sufﬁcient and credible?
Deﬁcient plans are returned to division or product groups forrevision along suggested lines. The use of a standard software planning program enables the planners to quickly revise their plans in response to criticism or unforeseen circumstances. In an advanced case,a company builds a model to estimate how hypothetical revisions in
its advertising budget, sales force size, or prices will affect sales andproﬁts. The Hudson River Group, for example, has developed marketing strategy simulators for different companies to help guide theallocation of marketing resources to their best uses.
The beneﬁt of planning may lie less in the plan than in theprocess of planning. Dwight Eisenhower observed: “In preparing
for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning
is indispensable.”
No battle plan survives the ﬁrst battle. It will need constant revision as the battle proceeds. You may have to redesign your airplane
while you are in the air.
Make sure that you are not spending more time preparing plans
than achieving results. Professor James Brian Quinn noted: “A gooddeal of corporate planning . . . is like a ritual rain dance. It has
no effect on the weather that follows.” The battle plan is nothing
unless it progresses into work. Plan your work and work your plan.
Marketing plans will not produce a dollar of proﬁt if you don’t implement them. But don’t confuse motion with action.
Winning companies are those that do more of the right things(effectiveness) and do them better (efﬁciency).

arketing ResearchMarketing research in the early days was aimed more at ﬁnding
techniques to increase sales than to understand customers. Researchers applauded the development of store audits, warehouse
withdrawals, and consumer panels to provide needed information
on product movement.
Over time, marketers increasingly recognized the importance ofunderstanding buyers. Focus groups, questionnaires, and surveys
came into vogue. Today the marketer’s mantra is about the importance of understanding buyers at either the segment or the individuallevel. According to an old Spanish saying, “To be a bullﬁghter, youmust ﬁrst learn to be a bull.”Today’s marketers use a whole bevy of marketing researchtechniques to understand customers and markets and their own
marketing effectiveness. Here are some of the major research techniques in use:
• In-store observation. Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy,runs Environsell to study in-store customer behavior.43 His
researchers use clipboards, track sheets, and video equipment to record the movements of shoppers. They are “retail115116 Marketing Insights from A to Z
anthropologists” studying over 70,000 shoppers a year in
their “natural habitat.” The ﬁndings include:• Shoppers almost invariably walk to the right.
• Women are more likely to avoid narrow aisles than men.
• Men move faster than women through store aisles.
• Shoppers slow down when they see reﬂective surfaces andspeed up when they see blanks.
• Shoppers don’t notice elaborate signs in the ﬁrst 30 feet ofthe entrance.
• In-home observation. Companies send researchers into homes
to study household behavior toward products. Whirlpool
arranged for an anthropologist to visit several homes to study
how household members use large appliances. Ogilvy &Mather sent researchers with handheld videocameras into
homes to prepare a 30-minute “highlight reel” of in-homebehavior toward different products.
• Other observation. Observation can take place anywhere. Japanese carmakers stood in supermarket parking lots watching
American women strain to lower their groceries into their car
trunks and came up with a better trunk design. McDonald’s executives once a year “work the counters” to experience customers ﬁrsthand. Marketers can learn a great deal by “staplingthemselves to a customer.”• Focus group research. Companies frequently recruit one ormore focus groups to talk about a product or service under
the direction of a skilled moderator. The focus group may
number 6 to 10 members who spend a few hours responding
to the moderator’s questions and to each other’s comments.
The session is usually videotaped and discussed later by amanagement team. While focus groups are an important
preliminary step in exploring a subject, the results lack projectability to the larger population and should be treatedcautiously.

Marketing Research 117• Questionnaires and surveys. Companies gather more representative information by interviewing a larger sample of thetarget population. The sample is drawn using statistical techniques, and the persons are reached either in person or byphone, fax, mail, or e-mail. The questionnaires typically ask
questions that are codable and countable so as to yield aquantitative picture of customer opinions, attitudes, and behavior. By including personal questions, the surveyor cancorrelate the answers with different demographic and psychographic characteristics of the respondents. In using theﬁndings, the company should be aware of possible biases resulting from a low response rate, poorly worded questions, or
faults in the interviewing process and setting.
• In-depth interviewing techniques. Questionnaires are considered by some to be naive “nose counting” and their preference is to go deeper into the minds and motivations ofconsumers (often called “head shrinking”). Years ago, Ernest
Dichter, who was trained as a Freudian, set a pattern of “motivational research” where he would enter into deep discussions with respondents to discern unconscious or repressed
motivations. His ﬁndings, though interesting, were sometimes bizarre. For example, he concluded that consumers resist prunes because prunes are wrinkled and remind people ofold age; therefore advertisers should feature “happy young
prunes.” And women don’t trust cake mixes unless adding an
egg is required so that homemakers can feel that they are giving “birth” to a “live cake.” Dichter’s ﬁndings lacked “scientiﬁc evidence” and “projectibility” but were always of interest
to marketers and advertisers.44
A more recent technique, the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), developed by Professor Gerald
Zaltman, seeks to bypass the verbal left brain and dip into theright brain and unconscious. ZMET asks small groups of

118 Marketing Insights from A to Z
consumers to collect pictures, create collages, and discussthese in an interview. ZMET claims to achieve insight into
product themes and concerns that do not emerge throughverbal research.45• Marketing experiments. The most scientiﬁc way to researchcustomers is to present different offerings to matched customer groups and analyze differences in their responses. Using split cable television or mail, companies are able to feature
different ad headlines, prices, or promotions to see whichone(s) draw better. To the extent that extraneous variables arecontrolled, the company can attribute response differences tooffering differences.
• Mystery shopper research. Companies hire mystery shoppers tocheck on how well sales clerks handle difﬁcult questions from
customers, how well telephone operators answer phone calls,
how easy it is to locate merchandise in a store, and manyother uses. Mystery shopping is used to evaluate a company orcompetitor’s marketing effectiveness rather than to understand customers’ needs or wants.
• Data mining. Companies with large customer databases canuse statisticians to detect in the mass of data new segments or
new trends that the company can exploit.
Remember, marketing research is the ﬁrst step and the foundation for effective marketing decision making. Herbert Baum, CEO of
Hasbro Inc., said: “Market research is crucial to a corporation’s
marketing process. I don’t think anybody ought to be making
marketing decisions without some form of research, because you
can waste a lot of time and money.”arketing Roles
and Skills

The marketing department’s role in too many companies has been
limited to carrying out marketing communications. R&D invents the
product, and marketing writes the press releases and does the advertising. Too many CEOs think marketing comes into play only after
the product has been made and must be sold. Marketing is run like a
one-night stand instead of a long affair.
In this case, it would be better to operate two marketinggroups, one doing strategy and the other doing tactics. Unless marketing is set up to have an effect on corporate strategy, its promise
won’t be fulﬁlled. In fact, I would argue that marketing’s main rolein the company is to be the driver of corporate strategy and the enforcer of the company’s promises to its customers.
For this to happen, companies must move from tactical to holistic marketing.
• The company needs to enlarge its view of its customers’ needs
and lifestyles. The company should stop seeing the customer
only as a consumer of its current products and start visualizing
broader ways to serve its customers.

119120 Marketing Insights from A to Z
• The company needs to assess how all of its departments impact
on customer satisfaction. Customers are adversely affected
when their products arrive late or are damaged, when invoices
are inaccurate, when customer service is poor, or when otherfoul-ups occur.
• The company needs to take a larger view of the company’s industry, its players and its evolution. Today many industries areconverging (e.g., telecommunications, entertainment, cable,
the media, and software), presenting new opportunities andnew threats to each industry player.
• The company needs to assess the impact of its actions on all
the company’s stakeholders—customers, employees, distributors, dealers, and suppliers—not only its shareholders. Anyalienated stakeholder group can cause disruption to the company’s plans and progress.
So what should be the major roles of marketers with respect tocustomers? At least the following:• Detecting and evaluating new opportunities.
• Mapping customer perceptions, preferences, and requirements.
• Communicating customer wants and expectations to productdesigners.
• Making sure that customer orders are ﬁlled correctly and delivered on time.
• Checking that customers have received proper instructions, training, and technical assistance in the use of the
product.
• Staying in touch with customers after the sale to ensure thatthey are satisﬁed.
• Gathering customer ideas for product and service improvements and conveying them to the appropriate departments.

Markets 121
What marketing skills do marketers need in order to carry out
their role? J. S. Armstrong, a professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, lists the following skills: forecasting, planning, analyzing, creating, deciding, motivating, communicating, andimplementing. These skills make up what we call marketing ability,
and it is marketing ability that companies look for in their search for amarketing vice president.

arketsMarkets can be deﬁned in different ways. Originally a market was aphysical place where buyers and sellers gathered. Economists describe a market as a collection of buyers and sellers who transact (inperson, over the phone, by mail, whatever) over a particular productor product class. Thus economists talk about the car market or the
housing market. But marketers view the sellers as the “industry” andthe buyers as the “market.” Thus marketers will talk about markets of“35 to 50-year-old low-income homemakers” or “auto company
purchasing agents who buy paint for their companies.”
Clearly markets can be deﬁned broadly or narrowly. The“mass market” is the broadest deﬁnition and describes the billions
of people who buy and consume basic products (e.g., soap, softdrinks). Much of U.S. economic growth has resulted from Ameri-

122 Marketing Insights from A to Z

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can companies mastering mass production, mass distribution, andmass marketing.
At the other extreme we can talk about a “market of one” todescribe a speciﬁc individual or company that a marketer may be concerned with. IBM would be called a market of one for consultants
who spend all of their time selling their services only to IBM.
The key point is that the marketer needs to deﬁne the target
market as carefully as possible. The “mass market” is too vague. It
is hard to make a product that everyone will want. It is easier tomake a product that some will love. This has led businesses topursue niches and mini-markets. But the downside is that as markets become sliced into ﬁner segments, the resulting low volume
in each will permit only one or a few companies to survive inthat market.
Markets are often contrasted to hierarchies as a way of getting
things done. Markets involve people entering into voluntary agreements that will leave both parties better off. Hierarchies, on theother hand, consist of people of high rank ordering those of lower
rank to perform actions. Relying on markets rather than hierarchies is thought by many to be the best way to build a sustainableself-regulating economy. Command-and-control economies have
not worked.
Marketing is a democratizing force. There are only four ways toobtain something that you want: steal, borrow, beg, or exchange. Using exchange (giving something to get something) is the most moral
and efﬁcient way and is the heart of marketing.
One thing is sure: Markets change faster than marketing. Buyers
change in their numbers, wants, and purchasing power in response tochanges in the economy, technology, and culture. Companies often
don’t notice these changes and maintain marketing practices thathave lost their edge. The marketing practices of many companies today are obsolete.

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edia

A company must use media. If your company doesn’t use media, forall practical purposes your company doesn’t exist.
The major media include television, radio, newspapers, magazines, catalogs, direct mail, telephone, and online. Each medium has
its advantages and disadvantages in terms of cost, reach, frequency,
and impact. An advertising agency devotes a major department to
the work of ﬁnding the best media for attaining a given level ofreach, frequency, and impact for a given budget. (See Advertising.)
At one time a company was able to reach 90 percent of the U.S.
audience by advertising only on ABC, NBC, and CBS. Today it islucky if these three media channels can reach 50 percent of the audience. Companies have to parcel out their budgets over dozens of media channels and vehicles. That’s why targeting is critical. The mass
market cannot be reached inexpensively anymore.
Media people are always searching for new media vehicles that are
more cost-effective or attention-getting. They are now putting your ads
on blimps and racing cars, and in elevators, bathrooms, and next to gas
pumps. Yet as ads proliferate, they are in danger of being less noticed.
Your media efﬁciency can be greatly enhanced by moving toward database marketing. Not only can you send offers to selected123124 Marketing Insights from A to Z
members in your customer database, but you can buy additional
names from list brokers. These brokers offer thousands of lists, suchas “women executives earning over $100,000,” “business professors
teaching marketing,” and “motorcycle owners.” You can test a sample of names from a promising list. If the response rate is high, buy
more names on the list; if low, don’t use that list. You can reach thechosen prospects by phone, mail, fax, or e-mail. The good news isthat you can measure the return on your advertising investment.
The future of media lies not in more broadcasting, but in morenarrowcasting.

issionCompanies are set up to achieve a mission. They word their mission
in various ways:• Dell’s mission: “To be the most successful computer company in the world at delivering the best customer experience in the markets we serve.”• Mars Company’s mission: “The consumer is our boss, quality is our work, and value is our goal.”• McDonald’s mission: “Our vision is to be the world’s best‘quick service restaurant.’ This means opening and run-Mission 125
ning great restaurants and providing exceptional quality,
service, cleanliness and value (QSCV).”
Virgin Atlantic Airways’ success is partly due to redeﬁning its
business as entertainment, rather than just transportation. Virgin
helps its passengers avoid a boring ﬂight by supplying personal
videos, massages, ice cream, and other treats only later imitated by its
major competitors.
Johnson & Johnson prefers to prioritize its goals: Its ﬁrst responsibility is to its customers, its second to its employees, its
third to its community, and its fourth to its stockholders. Thisordering of priorities is the best way to ensure proﬁts for the stockholders, as J&J has proved over the years.
Most mission statements contain the right phrases: “People are
our most important asset.” “We will be the best at what we do.” “We
aim to exceed expectations.” “We aim to make above average returns
for our shareholders.” The lazy way to prepare the mission statement
is to assemble these in any order.
Print your mission statement on the back of your business card
to remind your people, your prospects, and your customers of what
your company stands for.

ew ProductDevelopment

William H. Davidow, former Vice President of Strategy at Intel, got
it right: “While great devices are invented in the laboratory, great
products are invented in the Marketing Department.” A productmust be more than a physical device: It must be a concept that solves
someone’s problems.
And the product must eventually leave the laboratory and enter
the market. Therefore it needs “landing gear as well as wings.”
A high percentage of a new product’s probable success can be
determined before development is begun by answering three questions: “Do people need the product? Is it different and better than thecompetitors’ offerings? Would people be willing to pay the price?” If
the answer to any question is no, don’t start the development project.
Never enter a battle before you are sure that you can win the war.
The chances that the new product will be a hit are greatly enhanced if it represents a new product that deﬁnes a new category,such as the Palm, the Razor scooter, or Viagra. These products comewith a ready-made story that will get the media talking about it.
These products should be launched with PR, not with expensive “bigbang” advertising. Media talk has much more credibility than any
paid-for ads.

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New Product Development 127
Ingvard Kamprad, who founded IKEA, added another consideration: “A new idea without an affordable price tag is never acceptable.” Space Adventures offers to send you into space as an
astronaut. Great! What’s the price? $20 million! So far, there havebeen only two buyers.
Even with the right price tag, the money might really bemade by a follow-on product. Earl Wilson, the columnist, observed: “Benjamin Franklin may have discovered electricity,
but it was the man who invented the meter who made themoney.” By analogy, it was Xerox in its Palo Alto Research Center(PARC) that invented Ethernet, the graphical user interface, andthe laser printer and yet it was Netscape, Apple, and HewlettPackard that made the money.
If it takes more than three years to develop a new product, it
may not be the right product. Unfortunately, most companies cannot resist throwing good money after bad.
Who should ultimately design the product? R&D? Engineering? Manufacturing? Marketing? No! All of them, with the customer’s help.
Customers expect improved products as well as new ones. Yet
companies ask: “Why ﬁx a product before it is broken?” My answer
is that every competitor is scouting your product to ﬁnd its weaknesses. It’s important to ﬁx your product before they do. Everycompany should obsolete its products before competitors do.
Companies tend to pay too much attention to the cost of doing
something when they should pay more attention to the cost of notdoing it.
Who should be held accountable for a new product’s results?
Probably the research and development department and the marketing department—certainly not the sales department.

pportunity

The world abounds in opportunities, large and small. We are still
waiting for a cure for cancer, tasty nonfattening foods, weight-loss
schemes that work, and ﬂying cars to avoid congested roads. While
waiting, we can focus on trying to make our present products andservices better in a hundred ways.
Look for problems. People complain about it being hard to
sleep through the night, get rid of clutter in their homes, ﬁnd an affordable vacation, trace their family origins, get rid of garden weeds,
and so on. Each problem can spark several solutions. As the late John
Gardner, founder of Common Cause, observed: “Every problem isa brilliantly disguised opportunity.”
Look for trends. Surely you can get some ideas from Faith Popcorn’s list of 16 trends, including cocooning, down-aging, and cashingout. Cocooning refers to people spending more time in their homes
because the outside world is getting rough; therefore, think of ways tomake the home more pleasant through furnishings, electronics, andentertainment. Down-aging captures the fact that older people want
to feel young; hence the explosion of wrinkle creams, plastic surgery,and Jaguar sales. And cashing out means that people want to lead aless hectic existence and seek simpler lifestyles and smaller towns.

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Opportunity 129
Don’t just talk about opportunities. Success happens when
preparation meets opportunity. A company has to either make history or become history. Someone compared market demand to aswiftly running stream: If you don’t throw your line in fast enough,you won’t catch the ﬁsh. Mark Twain learned this from bitter experience: “I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it hadceased to be one.”
One of the greatest opportunities today is to invent businesses that can charge signiﬁcantly lower prices than competitorsand still be proﬁtable. This has been the secret of Wal-Mart,Southwest Airlines, IKEA, and Dollar General. They reinvented
their respective industries so as to be able to offer signiﬁcantly
lower prices than their competitors. Given the vast and growing
number of low-income families, these retailers attracted millions ofloyal customers.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in her When Giants Learn to Dance, observed: “The years ahead will be best for those who learn to balance dreams and discipline. The future will belong to those who
embrace the potential of wider opportunities but recognize therealities of more constrained resources, and ﬁnd new solutions
that permit doing more with less.”46
Said Ralph Waldo Emerson: “This time, like all times, is agreat time if we but know what to do with it.”rganization

Who should headquarters work for? The ﬁeld people, of course.
The job of headquarters is to help the ﬁeld people be the very best
they can be. Robert Potter, past president of Monsanto Chemical
Company, said: “The division managers pay for the headquarters services from their own budgets. If they think they’re paying too much for support staff, we simply eliminate the[headquarters] job.”
The sales department isn’t the whole company, but the whole
company had better be the sales department. Not everyone in a company is a marketing manager, but everyone should be in marketing
management. This point is mentioned by Hiroyuki Takeuchi about
Japanese companies: “Fifty percent of Japanese companies do nothave a marketing department, and ninety percent have no special
section for marketing research. The reason is that everyone isconsidered to be a marketing specialist.”
Companies are organized vertically, but processes are horizontal. This is the mismatch that reengineering hopes to correct by appointing cross-disciplinary teams to manage key processes. (SeeMarketing Department Interfaces.)
Multidivisional companies tend to be product-oriented rather

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Outsourcing 131
than industry- or customer-oriented. Yet the divisions may makeproducts that go to the same industry or customer. Siemens recently developed a focus on four industries: hospitals, airports, stadiums, and university campuses. Siemens has assigned for eachindustry a single senior-level manager to have authority and accountability to orchestrate interdivisional cooperation regarding
each industry.

utsourcing

Your company can be great at only a few things. For the other things,
hire those who can do these things better. Outsourcing originally applied only to the company’s noncore activities, such as ofﬁce cleaning
and landscaping. But today’s mantra is that a company should outsource everything that other parties can do better or more cheaply.
Outsourcers are able to offer lower costs and better results because of
their scale and specialization. Thus Nike decided not to manufacture
its own shoes; Nike hires Asian ﬁrms that can produce shoes morecheaply and better.
Companies need to know which marketing activities to keep inhouse versus outsourcing them. They usually outsource advertising
services and marketing research. Some are now outsourcing direct
mail services and telemarketing. A few are outsourcing new product132 Marketing Insights from A to Z

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development and a sales force. I know of companies that have outsourced their entire marketing department.
A company hired me to help management decide what to outsource. After examining all of their activities, I delivered a report tothe board. “Gentlemen, you should outsource everything. You are
not good at anything.” They were stunned. “Are you saying that weshould go out of business?” “No,” I said. “I am telling you how tomake more money. Your costs will go way down. The only competence you need is to manage outsourcers.” Essentially I was proposing that they become a virtual organization.
Yet a company may go too far in outsourcing. What makes agreat company is that it has created a set of core competencies thatlink ingeniously and would be difﬁcult to imitate in total. This iswhat companies such as IKEA, Wal-Mart, and Southwestern Airlines have done. They have outsourced some activities, but whatmakes these companies great is they have reserved for themselves
an interrelated set of competencies and capabilities that defy readyimitation.

Team-Fly®

erformance
Measurement

Marketers have traditionally focused on a company’s sales, market share,
and margin to set its objectives and judge its performance. But gains inmarket share, while desirable, need further examination. Did you gain
the right or wrong kinds of customers? Are they the staying or theswitching kind? Are you “buying” share or “earning” it? Are you gaining a greater share of a shrinking market? Consider the following:• Years ago General Electric ﬁred a division manager because hegrew his share of the vacuum tube market when he shouldhave pursued the transistor market.
• Jack Welch said when he retired from GE that he had been
wrong about needing to be number one or two in every business because “it leads management teams to deﬁne their markets narrowly . . . and has caused GE to miss opportunities
and growth.”
Focusing on margins can also be misleading. U.S. automakers
resisted making good small cars because the margins were small. The
Japanese went after this market knowing that they could capture thehearts of new young customers who would eventually buy larger
Japanese cars.

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134 Marketing Insights from A to Z
Your company needs a whole set of additional measures to set
its goals and gauge its performance (see box).
Your company must set more speciﬁc performance goals andmeasures for different marketing areas. For service support, you canuse “on-time, ﬁrst-time ﬁx” to know the percentage of times the service person arrived on time and ﬁxed the product perfectly. For order

Goals and Performance Measures• Percentage of new customers to average number of customers.
• Percentage of lost customers to average number of customers.
• Percentage of win-back customers to average number ofcustomers.
• Percentage of customers falling into very dissatisﬁed, dissatisﬁed, neutral, satisﬁed, and very satisﬁed categories.
• Percentage of customers who say they would repurchasefrom the ﬁrm.
• Percentage of customers who say they would recommend
the ﬁrm to others.
• Percentage of customers who say that the company’s
products are the most preferred in its category.
• Percentage of customers who correctly identify the company’s intended positioning and differentiation.
• Average perception of company’s product quality relative
to chief competitor.
• Average perception of company’s service quality relative
to chief competitor.

Positioning 135
fulﬁllment, you can measure the percentage of “orders ﬁlled completely and accurately.”
Every company must set appropriate incentives for the achievement of different goals. Companies must avoid setting incentives thatcreate short-term proﬁt but long-term customer loss. Paying automobile salespeople a commission leads them to manipulate the customer in order to make the sale. Stockbrokers on commission havean incentive to churn the customer’s holdings. Insurance claims representatives try to pay as little as possible. Telemarketers are paid forspeed over service and this can hurt long term relationship building.
Incentive systems must be carefully monitored to avoid abuse.

ositioning

Thanks to Al Ries and Jack Trout, “positioning” entered the marketing vocabulary in 1982 when they wrote Positioning: The Battle forYour Mind.47 Actually the word had been used earlier in connection
with placing products in stores, hopefully at the eye-level position.
However, Ries and Trout gave a new twist to the term: “But positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you
do to the mind of the prospect.” Thus Volvo tells us that it makes“the safest car”; BMW is “the ultimate driving machine”; andPorsche is “the world’s best small sports car.”

136 Marketing Insights from A to Z
A company can claim to be different and better than anothercompany in numerous ways: We are faster, safer, cheaper, more convenient, more durable, more friendly, higher quality, better value . . .
the list goes on. But Ries and Trout emphasized the need to choose
one of these so that it would stick in the buyer’s mind. They saw positioning as primarily a communication exercise. Unless a product is
identiﬁed as being best in some way that is meaningful to some set ofcustomers, it will be poorly positioned and poorly remembered. We
remember brands that stand out as ﬁrst or best in some way.
But the positioning cannot be arbitrary. We wouldn’t be able toget people to believe that Hyundai is “the ultimate driving machine.”
In fact, the product must be designed with an intended positioningin mind; the positioning must be decided before the product is designed. One of the tragic ﬂaws in General Motors’ car lineup is that it
designs cars without distinctive positionings. After the car is made,GM struggles to decide how to position it.
Brands that are not number one in their market (measured bycompany size or some other attribute) don’t have to worry—theysimply need to select another attribute and be number one on that
attribute. I consulted with a drug company that positioned its new
drug as “fastest in relief.” Its new competitor then positioned its
brand as “safest.” Each competitor will attract those customers who
favor its major attribute.
Some companies prefer to build a multiple positioning insteadof just a single positioning. The drug company could have called its
drug the “fastest and safest drug on the market.” But then anothernew competitor could co-opt the position “least expensive.” Obviously, if a company claims too many superior attributes it won’t beremembered or believed. Occasionally, however, this works, as when
the toothpaste Aquafresh claimed that it offered a three-in-one beneﬁt: ﬁghts cavities, whitens teeth, and gives cleaner breath.
Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema distiguished among threemajor positionings (which they called “value disciplines”): productPositioning 137
leadership, operational excellence, and customer intimacy.48 Some customers value most the ﬁrm that offers the best product in the category;others value the ﬁrm that operates most efﬁciently; and still others
value the ﬁrm that responds best to their wishes. They advise a ﬁrm tobecome the acknowledged leader in one of these value disciplines andbe at least adequate in the other two. It would be too difﬁcult or expensive for a company to be best in all three value disciplines.
Recently Fred Crawford and Ryan Mathews suggested ﬁve
possible positionings: product, price, ease of access, value-added service, and customer experience.49 Based on their study of successfulcompanies, they concluded that a great company will dominate on
one of these, perform above the average (differentiate) on a second, and be at industry par with respect to the remaining three. As
an example, Wal-Mart dominates on price, differentiates on product (given its huge variety), and is average at ease of access, valueadded service, and the customer experience. Crawford andMathews hold that a company will suboptimize if it tries to be bestin more than two ways.
The most successful positioning occurs with companies thathave ﬁgured out how to be unique and very difﬁcult to imitate. No
one has successfully copied IKEA, Harley Davidson, Southwest Airlines, or Neutragena. These companies have developed hundreds ofspecial processes for running their businesses. Their outer shells canbe copied but not their inner workings.
Companies that lack a unique positioning can sometimes makea mark by resorting to the “number two” strategy. Avis is remembered for its motto: “We’re number two. We try harder.” And 7Up is remembered for its “Uncola” strategy.
Alternatively, a company can claim to belonging to the exclusive
club of the top performers in its industry: the Big Three auto ﬁrms,
the Big Five accounting ﬁrms. They exploit the aura of being in theleadership circle that offers higher-quality products and services thanthose on the outside.

138 Marketing Insights from A to Z
No positioning will work forever. As changes occur in consumers, competitors, technology, and the economy, companies
must reevaluate the positioning of their major brands. Somebrands that are losing share may need to be repositioned. This
must be done carefully. Remaking your brand may win new customers but lose some current customers who like the brand as it is.
If Volvo, for example, placed less emphasis on safety and more on
slick styling, this could turn off practical-minded Volvo fans.

rice

Oscar Wilde saw a major difference between price and value: “Acynic is a person who knows the price of everything and thevalue of nothing.” A businessman told me that his aim was to get ahigher price for his product than was justiﬁed.
How much should you charge for your product? An old Russian
proverb says: “There are two fools in every market—one asks too
little, another asks too much.”
Charging too little wins the sale but makes little proﬁt. Furthermore, it attracts the wrong customers—those who will switch to savea dime. It also attracts competitors who will match or exceed the pricecut. And it cheapens the customer’s view of the product. Indeed,those who sell for less probably know what their stuff is worth.

Price 139
Charging too much may lose both the sale and the customer.
Peter Drucker adds another concern: “The worship of premium
prices always creates a market for a competitor.”
The standard approach to setting a price is to determine thecost and add a markup. But your cost has nothing to do with the customer’s view of value. Your cost only helps you to know whether you
should be making the product in the ﬁrst place.
After you set the price, don’t use the price to make the sale. You
use the value to make the sale. As Lee Iacocca observed: “When the
product is right, you don’t have to be a great marketer.” Jeff Bezos of Amazon said: “I am not upset with someone who charges 5
percent less. I am concerned with someone who might offer abetter experience.”
So how important is price? Christopher Fay of the Juran Institute said: “In over 70 percent of businesses studied, price scored#1 or #2 as the feature with which customers are least satisﬁed.
Yet among switchers, in no case were more than 10 percent motivated by price!”
Globalization, hypercompetition, and the Internet are reshaping markets and businesses. All three forces act to increase downward
pressure on prices. Globalization leads companies to move their production to cheaper sites and bring products into a country at prices
lower than those charged by the domestic vendors. Hypercompetition amounts to more companies competing for the same customer,
leading to price cuts. And the Internet allows people to more easily
compare prices and move toward the lowest cost offer. The marketing challenge, then, is to ﬁnd ways to maintain prices and proﬁtability
in the face of these macro trends.
The main answers seem to be better segmentation, stronger
branding, and superior customer relationship management. These
are discussed elsewhere in this book.

roducts

Most companies deﬁne themselves by a product. We are a “car manufacturer,” a “soft drink manufacturer,” and so on. Theodore Levitt,
former Harvard Business School faculty member, pointed out years
ago the danger of focusing on the product and missing the underlying need. He accused the railroads of “marketing myopia” by failingto deﬁne themselves as being in the transportation business and overlooking the threat of trucks and airplanes. Steel companies did not
pay enough attention to the impact of plastics and aluminum because
they deﬁned themselves as steel companies, not materials companies.
Coca-Cola missed the development of fruit-ﬂavored drinks, healthand energy drinks, and even bottled water by overfocusing on thesoft drink category.
How do companies decide what to sell? There are four paths:
1. Selling something that already exists.
2. Making something that someone asks for.
3. Anticipating something that someone will ask for.
4. Making something that no one asked for but that will give
buyers great delight.

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Products 141
The last path involves much higher risk but the chance of muchhigher gain.
Don’t just sell a product. Sell an experience. Harley Davidson
sells more than a motorcycle. It sells an ownership experience. It delivers membership in a community. It arranges adventure tours. It
sells a lifestyle. The total product far exceeds the motorcycle.
And help the buyer use the product. Explain how it works, how
it can be used safely, how its life can be extended. If I pay $30,000
for a car, I would like to buy it from a company that helps me stretch
the most value from its use. Carl Sewell preached this message in his
book (with Paul Brown), Customers for Life.50 He not only sold cars,
but assumed responsibility for ﬁxing them, cleaning them, offeringloaners, and so on.
It costs more to build and sell bad products than good products.
The late Bruce Henderson, who was head of the Boston Consulting
Group, noted: “The majority of the products in most companies
are cash traps. . . . They are not only worthless but a perpetualdrain on corporate resources.” In slow economies in particular,
companies need to concentrate their investments in a smaller group of
power brands that command a price premium, high loyalty, and aleading market share, and are stretchable into related categories.
Unilever decided to prune its 1,600 brands and focus its huge advertising and promotion budget on 400 power brands.
Too many companies carry a poorly constructed product portfolio. My advice is that your company must participate in several
parts of any market that it wants to dominate. Marriott’s major rolein the hotel marketplace is based on its use of different price brands
from Fairmont to Courtyard to Marriott to Ritz-Carlton. And Kraft
conquered the frozen pizza market by creating four brands: Jack’s
aims at the low-price end; Original Tombstone competes with the
midprice frozen brands; DiGiorno’s competes in quality with freshly
delivered pizzas; and California Pizza Kitchen aims at the high end,
charging three times the price per pound of the lower-end offerings.

142 Marketing Insights from A to Z

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At the same time, it is not always the best product that wins themarket. Many users regard Apple’s Macintosh software as better than
Microsoft’s software, but Microsoft owns the market. And Sony’s
Betamax offered better recording quality than Matsushita’s VHS, but
VHS won. Sometimes it is the better marketed product, not the better product, that wins. Professor Theodore Levitt of Harvard observed: “A product is not a product unless it sells. Otherwise it ismerely a museum piece.”

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roﬁts

Should a company aim at maximizing current proﬁts? No! Companies
formerly thought that they would make the most proﬁt by paying theleast to their suppliers, employees, distributors, and dealers. This iszero-sum thinking, namely that there is a ﬁxed pie and the company
keeps the most by giving its partners the least. This is a fallacy; thecompany ends up attracting poor suppliers, poor employees, and poor
distributors. Their outputs are poor, they are demoralized, many
leave, replacement costs are high, and the company is impoverished.
Today’s winning companies work on the positive-sum theory ofmarketing. They contract with excellent suppliers, employees, distributors, and dealers. They operate together as a team seeking a winwin-win outcome. And the company ends up as a stronger winner.

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Proﬁts 143
A company that is short-run proﬁt driven will not make longrun proﬁts. The Navajo Indians are smarter. A Navajo chief does notmake a decision unless he has considered its possible effects on seven
generations hence.
Some companies hope to increase proﬁts by cutting costs. But
as Gary Hamel observed: “Excessive downsizing and cost cutting
is a type of corporate anorexia . . . getting thin all right, but notvery healthy.” You can’t shrink to greatness.
Here’s the story of one company that thought that its proﬁts lay
in cost cutting.

The company, a manufacturer of hospital devices, sufferedfrom ﬂat sales and proﬁts. The CEO was intent on improving
the company’s proﬁts and share price. So he ordered
across-the-board cost cuts. Proﬁts rose, and he waited forthe stock price to rise as well. When it didn’t, he went toWall Street to ﬁnd out why. The analysts told him that his
bottom line had improved but not his top line—they didn’t
see any revenue growth. So the CEO decided to cut productprices to increase top line growth. He succeeded, but thebottom line now slipped. The moral: Investors favor companies that can increase both their growth (top line) and their
proﬁtability (bottom line).

Ram Charan and Noel M. Tichy believe companies can achieve
growth and proﬁtability together, and present that view in their
Every Business Is a Growth Business: How Your Company Can Prosper
Year after Year.51 This is a bold claim, given that top management always faces trade-offs. But they make a compelling case.

144 Marketing Insights from A to Z
Some companies have proven that they can charge low prices
and be highly proﬁtable. Car rental ﬁrm Enterprise has the lowest
prices and makes the most proﬁt in its industry. This can also be saidof Southwest Airlines, Wal-Mart, and Dell.
To understand the source of the proﬁts of these “low price”
companies, recognize that return (R) is the product of margin × velocity; that is:R=

Income
Sales

×

Sales
Assets

A low-price ﬁrm makes less income on its sales (because its price islower) but generates considerably more sales per dollar of assets (because more customers are attracted by its lower price). This works when
the low-price ﬁrm gives good quality and service to its customers.
Proﬁts come from ﬁnding ways to deliver more value to customers. Peter Drucker admonished: “Customers do not see it as
their job to ensure manufacturers a proﬁt.” Companies have toﬁgure out not only how to increase sales but how to earn customers’
repeat business. The most proﬁt comes from repeat sales.
At board meetings, the talk focuses primarily on current proﬁt
performance. But the company’s true performance goes beyond theﬁnancial numbers. Jerre L. Stead, chairman and CEO of NCR, understood this: “I say if you’re in a meeting, any meeting, for 15
minutes, and we’re not talking about customers or competitors,
raise your hand and ask why.”
Here are four Japanese-formulated objectives for achieving exceptional proﬁtability. Each deserves a textbook-size discussion:
1. Zero customer feedback time. Learning from customer reactions as soon as possible.
2. Zero product improvement time. Continuously improving the
product and service.

Public Relations 145
3. Zero inventory. Carrying as little inventory as possible.
4. Zero defects. Producing products and services with no defects.
Too many companies spend more time measuring product profitability than customer proﬁtability. But the latter is more important.
“The only proﬁt center is the customer.” (Peter Drucker)

ublic Relations

I expect companies to start shifting more money from advertising to
public relations. Advertising is losing some of its former effectiveness. It
is hard to reach a mass audience because of increasing audience fragmentation. TV commercials are getting shorter; they are bunched together;
they are increasingly undistinguished; and consumers are zapping them.
And the biggest problem is that advertising lacks credibility. The public
knows that advertising exaggerates and is biased. At its best, advertising
is playful and entertaining; at its worst, it is intrusive and dishonest.
Companies overspend on advertising and underspend on
public relations. The reason: Nine out of 10 PR agencies are
owned by advertising ﬁrms. Advertising agencies make more money
putting out ads than putting out PR. So they don’t want PR to get
an upper hand.
Ad campaigns do have the advantage of being under greater

146 Marketing Insights from A to Z
control than PR. The media are purchased for the ads to appear at
speciﬁc times; the ads are approved by the client and will appear exactly as designed. PR, on the other hand, is something you pray forrather than pay for. You hope that when Oprah Winfrey ran her bookclub, she would nominate your book as the month’s best read; youhope that Morley Safer will run a 60 Minutes segment on why red
wine keeps cheese-eating and oil-eating Europeans healthy.
Building a new brand through PR takes much more time andcreativity, but it ultimately can do a better job than “big bang” advertising. Public relations consists of a whole bag of tools for grabbing
attention and creating “talk value.” I call these tools the PENCILS ofpublic relations:• Publications.
• Events.
• News.
• Community affairs.
• Identity media.
• Lobbying.
• Social investments.
Most of us got to hear about Palm, Amazon, eBay, The Body
Shop, Blackberry, Beanie Babies, Viagra, and Nokia not through advertising but through news stories in print and on the air. We started
to hear from friends about these products, and we told other friends.
And hearing from others about a product carries much more weight
than reading about the product in an ad.
A company planning to build a new brand needs to create abuzz, and the buzz is created through PR tools. The PR campaign
will cost much less and hopefully create a more lasting story. Al and
Laura Ries, in their book The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR,
argue persuasively that in launching a new product, it is better tostart with public relations, not advertising.52 This is the reverse of
most companies’ thinking when they launch new products.

uality

It continues to amaze me how many Americans accepted bad quality
in the past. When I took my newly purchased Buick to the dealer one
week after purchasing it, he said: “You’re lucky. We have only one repair to make.”
General Motors’ theory of wealth creation ran as follows: Produce as many cars as you can in the factory. Don’t ﬁx them there.
Send them to the dealer and let the dealer ﬁx them. There was nothought about the cost to the customer who had to drive back to thedealer, give up the car, and pray that he or she could ﬁnd alternativetransportation while the car was being ﬁxed.
Who was responsible for poor quality? Management blamed theworkers. But the workers were not responsible. The great quality expert W. Edwards Deming declared: “Management is responsiblefor 85% of quality problems.”
The Japanese are sticklers for high quality. When they detect a
defect, they ask the ﬁve Why’s. “Why was there a tear in the leather
seat?” “Why was the leather not inspected when it arrived in our factory?” “Why didn’t the supplier detect the tear before sending theleather to us?” “Why is the supplier’s machine lacking a laser
reader?” “Why is the supplier not buying better equipment?” These147

148 Marketing Insights from A to Zquestions aim to get at the root cause of a defect so that it won’t
happen again.
How high should the quality be? In making computer chips,
Motorola aims for a six sigma quality level so that there will be no
more than three or four defects per million chips. This is muchhigher quality than is needed if the chips are used in cheap radios;and this is lower than one would want in chips guiding 747s. The
right quality level depends on the customer and the product.
Brendan Power, motivational speaker, says: “Our customers
set our quality standards. Our job is to meet them.” Peter
Drucker also sees quality coming from the customer: “Quality in a
service or product is not what you put into it. It is what theclient or customer gets out of it.” Electronics giant Siemens has
the quality motto: “Quality is when our customers come back andour products don’t.”
GE’s Jack Welch ably summed up the importance of quality:“Quality is our best assurance of customer allegiance, ourstrongest defense against foreign competition, and the only pathto sustained growth and earnings.”
The lesson: Cheap quality is expensive; good quality is cheap.

ecession Marketing

When a recession strikes, most companies rush to cut their expenses,
the most obvious one being advertising. Those in top management(mostly ﬁnance guys) don’t believe in advertising, anyway; they tolerate it as a form of defensive insurance, not as a proﬁt generator. They
have set the whole marketing budget as a percentage of expected revenue, and when expected revenue drops, they see every reason to cut
marketing expenditures. But this exposes the illogic of setting marketing expenditures based on expected revenue. This is putting thecart before the horse. One doesn’t know expected revenue except by
setting the marketing budget. The marketing budget is the cause,
not the effect. Set a higher marketing budget and you will get ahigher expected revenue.
Kmart’s CEO decided to cut Kmart’s marketing budget when
the recession struck. The result was disastrous, and Kmart lost far
more in sales than it had saved in marketing costs as customers
moved their business to Target and Wal-Mart.
When a recession appears imminent, the CEO should appoint a multifunctional committee to propose what the company
should do to reduce costs. The committee should examine thecompany’s promotion mix, channel mix, market segment mix, cus-149150 Marketing Insights from A to Z
tomer mix, and geographic mix for activities and expenses that cansafely be reduced. Every company has some losing or weak promotions, channels, market segments, customers, and geographic areas.
A recession calls for housecleaning.
The basic problem is that in good times companies develop a lotof organizational fat. They buy excessively expensive furniture, pay
for high-priced country club memberships, acquire company aircraft,hire a lot of consultants, and say good-bye to thrift. Then they
painfully lay off a large number of workers when the recession strikes.
Companies can save money by switching their salespeople toeconomy-class ﬂights and hotels. They can try to renegotiate purchasing contracts. They can delay selected long-term R&D projects
and postpone capital projects. They can try to speed up collections
and slow down payments.
During a recession, many companies rush to impose cost-cutting
measures. But whatever measures they take, they should observe tworules. First, don’t compromise your customer value proposition. Customers buy from you with a certain set of expectations about productquality and service. Don’t reduce the experience that they have cometo expect. Second, don’t arbitrarily shift the cost burden to your suppliers and dealers without consultation. If you hurt your partner
value proposition, partners will start shifting their alliances to yourcompetitors.
Companies should consider temporarily lowering their prices,even though this will hurt their margins. It is better to hold on to
your customers than to let them switch and sample your competitors.
Because customers are highly price sensitive during a recession, priceconcessions are warranted.
Some smart companies, instead of resorting to cost cutting,may maintain or increase their budgets to grab market share fromcompetitors who are reducing their budgets. If a company has
the resources, it may see the recession as an opportunity to growits business at the expense of its competitors. One study foundRelationship Marketing 151
that companies that maintained their marketing spending during
the recession emerged stronger after the recession that those that
didn’t.53
Even smarter companies will build a cost-conscious culture notjust when recession strikes but all the time. Winnebago Industries,
the leading manufacturer of recreational vehicles in the UnitedStates, has built frugality into the heart of its culture. Every week
Cost Savings Award checks are handed out for cost-saving suggestions. Because Winnebago practices lean business all the time, only
minor surgery is called for when recession strikes.

elationship Marketing

One of the things of most value to a company is its relationships—with customers, employees, suppliers, distributors, dealers, and retailers. The company’s relationship capital is the sum of the knowledge,
experience, and trust a company has with its customers, employees,
suppliers, and distribution partners. These relationships are often
worth more than the physical assets of a company. Relationships determine the future value of the ﬁrm.
Any slips in these relationships will hurt the company’s performance. Companies need to keep a relationship scorecard that
describes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in152 Marketing Insights from A to Z

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regard to the relationship. Your company needs to move fast andrepair any important but weakening relationships.
Traditional transaction marketing (TM) tended to ignore relationships and relationship building. The company was viewed as anindependent agency always maneuvering to secure the best terms.
The company was ready to switch from one supplier or distributor toanother if there was an immediate advantage. The company assumed
that it would normally keep its current customers, and it spent mostof its energy to acquire new customers. The company neglected theinterdependence among its main stakeholders and their roles in affecting the company’s success.
Relationship marketing (RM) marks a signiﬁcant paradigm shift in marketing, a movement from thinking solely interms of competition and conﬂict toward thinking in terms of
mutual interdependence and cooperation. It recognizes the importance of various parties—suppliers, employees, distributors,
dealers, retailers—cooperating to deliver the best value to the target customers. Here are the main characteristics of relationshipmarketing:• It focuses on partners and customers rather than on the company’s products.
• It puts more emphasis on customer retention and growththan on customer acquisition.
• It relies on cross-functional teams rather than on departmentallevel work.
• It relies more on listening and learning than on talking.
Relationship marketing calls for new practices within the 4Ps(see box).
The shift toward relationship marketing does not meanthat companies abandon transaction marketing altogether. Most
companies need to operate with a mixture of the transactional andTeam-Fly®

Relationship Marketing 153

Relationship Marketing and the 4Ps
Product• More products are customized to the customers’ preferences.
• New products are developed and designed cooperatively
with suppliers and distributors.
Price• The company will set a price based on the relationshipwith the customer and the bundle of features and services
ordered by the customer.
• In business-to-business marketing, there is more negotiation because products are often designed for eachcustomer.
Distribution• RM favors more direct marketing to the customer, thus reducing the role of middlemen.
• RM favors offering alternatives to customers to choose
the way they want to order, pay for, receive, install, andeven repair the product.
Communication• RM favors more individual communication and dialogue
with customers.
• RM favors more integrated marketing communications todeliver the same promise and image to the customer.
• RM sets up extranets with large customers to facilitate information exchange, joint planning, ordering, andpayments.

154 Marketing Insights from A to Z
the relational marketing approaches. Companies selling in large
consumer markets practice a greater percentage of TM while companies with a smaller number of customers practice a higher percentage of RM.

etailers and Vendors

When retailers were small, manufacturers had the power. The
strongest manufacturers could dictate the terms and shelf space
they wanted for their products. The advent of giant retailers—hypermarkets, superstores, category killers—changed the power forever. No longer were the retailers the dumping grounds for the
manufacturers’ products; instead they became the customers’ representatives. The retailers chose to carry the goods that would
most satisfy their customers. And the giant retailers ordered suchhigh volume that they could play off the manufacturers against
each other for the best terms. A company such as Toys ‘R’ Us
commanded such a signiﬁcant share of the toy market that it insisted on participating even in the design and packaging of new
toys that it would consider carrying.
The shift of power from manufacturers to retailers is vividly
captured by Bowling Green sales manager Kevin Price’s remark:“A decade ago, the retailer was a chihuahua nipping at theRetailers and Vendors 155
manufacturer’s heels—a nuisance, yes, but only a minor irritant; you fed it and it went away. Today it’s a pit bull and it
wants to rip your arms and legs off. You’d like to see it rollover, but you’re too busy defending yourself to even try.”54
The only force taming giant retailers is the competition they
face from other giant retailers: Home Depot vs. Lowe’s; Sam’s vs.
Costco; Barnes & Noble vs. Borders; Ofﬁce Max vs. Ofﬁce Depot vs.
Staples; Circuit City vs. Best Buy.
Retail is detail. It is hard work. Cyril Magnin, an American merchant, advised: “If you are over 40 years old, you don’t belong inretailing.” An old Chinese proverb adds this advice: “If you cannot
smile, do not open a shop.”
The three success factors in retailing used to be “location, location, location.” With the advent of the Internet, physical location isless important. Millions of people buy books from Amazon.com
without knowing the company’s physical location. All that is neededis an Internet address.
Companies need to solidify their relationships with their vendors. A company should form a vendor council that meets a few
times a year. The vendors should be encouraged to critique the company’s performance and make suggestions. The company needs tosend its experts to visit and help vendors improve their business practices. The company should learn from its best vendors and inform
other vendors of best practices. And the top-performing vendors deserve recognition and better terms.
Today’s retailers must adopt new practices to survive in the brutal marketplace. First, retailers need to spend more time in learning
who their customers are. They should give their customers a club
card and capture information in their customer databases. By analyzing customer purchases, they will know which ones buy a lot of wineor ﬁsh or ice cream, and can then announce and run special events
for these customer segments.
Second, retailers must invest in making retailing an experience156 Marketing Insights from A to Z
rather than a chore. Brand experience counts for much more thanbrand image. By designing a distinctive brand experience, store owners encourage people to come back more often, as has been demonstrated by Barnes & Noble, Stew Leonard’s supermarket, and othertop retailers.
Third, retailers must move more aggressively into private branding. Private brands make more money for retailers than national
brands. At one time, store brands were considered inferior to national brands. Then along came President’s Choice introduced by
Canada’s Loblaws supermarkets, a store brand that exceeded thequality of some national brands. The next step was for retailers tocarry two or three store brands pitched at different quality and pricelevels. The main requirement was to create trust in the retailer and to
give good value to the customer.
Fourth, a retailer should open up a web site and offer customers
more information and opportunity for contact and dialogue.

ales Force

About 11 percent of all employed people, or 18 million people, areengaged in selling. The emergence of the Internet and other direct
marketing techniques, along with the high cost of personal selling, isleading companies to reexamine the size and role of their sales forces.
Are salespeople necessary? According to Peter Drucker: “People are simply too expensive to be used for selling. We cannot, by
and large, sell anymore—we must market, i.e., we must create
the desire to buy which we then can satisfy without a great dealof selling.”
Companies don’t always need their own sales forces. About 50
percent of companies use contract sales forces: manufacturers’ reps,
sales agents, and so on. Many companies hire outside salespeople tohandle more marginal geographical areas and market segments.
In hiring salespeople, you should hire only those who are soldon the company and its products. This is hard to fake. And you
might prefer people who have failed, rather than those who nevertried. And don’t hire any salesperson whom you wouldn’t want to invite to your home for dinner.
In deciding on how much to pay salespeople, remember that
low-paid salespeople are expensive, and high-paid salespeople are157

158 Marketing Insights from A to Z
cheap. Top salespeople in a company often sell ﬁve times as much as
the average salesperson but don’t get paid ﬁve times as much.
Salespeople need to be motivated, much like football players
huddled in a locker room. The real talent is to be able to motivate
the average salesperson, not just the star performers.
Watch out for the salesperson who thinks any sale is good nomatter what its proﬁtability. Tie compensation to the proﬁt on thesale, not to the revenue. Each salesperson should see himself or herself as managing a proﬁt center, not a sales center, and be rewarded
accordingly.
Here are other measures to look at in judging a salesperson’s performance: average number of sales calls per day, average sales-call time percontact, average cost and revenue per sales call, percentage of orders per
hundred sales calls, and number of new and lost customers per sales period.
Then compare this salesperson’s performance to the average salesperson’s performance to detect poor or exceptionally good performance.
Poor performance is often excused by saying the market is mature. But calling a market “mature” is evidence of incompetence. It is
probably easier to make money in a mature industry than in a hightech industry, to take an extreme case.
The hardest job facing a salesperson is to tell a customer that acompetitor has the better product. IBM expects its sales reps to recommend the best equipment for an application, even if this means
recommending a competitor’s hardware. But the sales rep will win
the customer’s respect and eventually his or her business.
Marketing’s role is to support the sales force in the following
ways:• Marketing places ads and buys lists to identify new prospects.
• Marketing prepares a proﬁle of the best prospects so thatsalespeople know who to call on and who not to call on.
• Marketing describes the buying inﬂuences and rationales usedby key customer decision makers.

Sales Force 159• Marketing highlights competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
and how the company’s products rate against competitors’ offerings.
• Marketing documents and distributes sales success stories anduses them in training programs.
• Marketing prepares and distributes communications (advertising, brochures, etc.) to customers to stimulate interest in thecompany’s products and make salespeople more welcome.
• Marketing uses advertising and telemarketing to ﬁnd andqualify leads that can be turned over to the sales force.
Smart companies are equipping their salespeople with sales automation equipment (computers, cell phones, fax and copy machines) and software. Salespeople can research the customer before
the visit, answer questions during the visit, and record important
facts after the visit. Salespeople can retrieve product information suchas tech bulletins, pricing information, customer buying history, preferred payment terms, and other data to facilitate their work.
When the salesperson ﬁnally makes the sale, “The salesmen’sanxiety ends and the customer’s anxiety begins.” (Theodore
Levitt)ales Promotion

Sales promotion describes incentives and rewards to get customers to
buy now rather than later. Whereas advertising is a long-run tool forshaping the market’s attitude toward a brand, sales promotion is a
short-term tool to trigger buyer action. No wonder brand managers
increasingly rely on sales promotion, especially when falling behindin achieving sales quotas. Sales promotions work! Sales promotions
yield faster and more measurable responses in sales than advertisingdoes. Today the split between advertising and sales promotion may
be 30–70, the reverse of what it used to be.
The growth of sales promotion reﬂects the higher priority companies are attaching to current sales than to long-term brand building. It is a return to transaction marketing (TM) rather thanrelationship marketing (RM).
Sales promotion can be directed at retailers, consumers, and thesales force. Retailers will work harder if offered price-offs, advertisingand display allowances, and free goods. Consumers are more likely to
buy in response to coupons, rebates, price packs, premiums, patronage awards, contests, product demonstrations, and warranties. The
sales force operates more vigorously in response to contests withprizes for superior performance.

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Sales Promotion 161
Because of the variety of sales promotion tools, marketers needexperience in knowing which to use. Some large companies have asales promotion specialist who can advise brand managers. Or thecompany can engage the services of a specialist sales promotion
agency. The main need is to not only use promotions but to review
and record results so that the company can improve its sales promotion efﬁciency over time.
Although most sales promotions increase sales, most losemoney. One analyst estimated that only 17 percent of a given set ofsales promotion campaigns were proﬁtable. These are the cases
where the sales promotion brings in new customers to sample theproduct and where they like the new product better than their previous brand. But many sales promotions only attract brand switchers
looking for a lower price, who naturally abandon the brand when another brand goes on sale. Sales promotions are less likely to enticeaway loyal users of other brands.
Thus sales promotions work poorest in product markets of highbrand similarity. They tend to attract brand switchers who are looking for low price or premiums and who won’t be loyal to a brand. It
is better to use sales promotions in product markets of high dissimilarity where new customers may ﬁnd that they like your product andits features better than their previous choice.
Sales promotions tend to be used more by weaker and smaller
brands than stronger brands. Smaller brands have fewer funds tospend on advertising, and for a small cost they can get people to atleast try their product.
Sales promotions in general should be used sparingly. Incessantprices off, coupons, deals, and premiums can devalue the brand in
the consumers’ minds. They can lead customers to wait for the next
promotion instead of buying now.
Companies are forced to use more sales promotion than theywant by the trade. The trade demands discounts and allowances asa condition for putting the product on the shelf. The trade may162 Marketing Insights from A to Z

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demand consumer promotions also. So many companies have little
choice but to comply.
Prefer sales promotions that agree or enhance your brand image
and add value. Try to use sales promotions with advertising. Advertising explains why the customer should buy the product, and sales
promotion provides the incentive to buy. When used together, ads
and sales promotions make a powerful combination.

TEegmentation

In the past, companies such as Sears or Coca-Cola, when asked whotheir customer is, would answer “Everybody.” But a marketer canrarely satisfy everyone in a market. Not everyone will like the same
camera, car, cafeteria, or concert. Therefore, marketers must start bydividing up the market.
Companies that moved away from mass market thinking started
by identifying large market segments. Procter & Gamble, in selling its
Duncan Hines cake mix, would deﬁne the target market as “married
women between the ages of 35 and 50 with families.” Later companies moved from large segments to narrower niches. Estée Laudermight design a product for “black American professional women between the ages of 25 and 35.” Finally, some companies have moved

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Segmentation 163
to the ultimate segmentation scheme, segments of one, namely individual customers.
Today more companies are guilty of undersegmentation thanoversegmentation. They imagine more high-potential prospects fortheir offerings than really exist. The antidote is to divide the market
into several levels of potential. The ﬁrst level consists of those customers who would be the most responsive to the offering. This
group should be proﬁled in terms of their demographic and psychographic characteristics. Then a secondary group and a tertiary groupshould be deﬁned. The company should then focus its initial sellingon its primary prospects; if they don’t respond, the company either
has mis-segmented or its offering is of little interest.
Segments can be identiﬁed in three ways. The traditional approach is to divide the market into demographic groups, such as“women between the ages of 35 and 50.” This has the advantage ofease of reaching this group. Its disadvantage is that there is no reason
to believe that women in this group have similar needs or readinessto buy. Demographic segmentation is more about identifying a population sector than a population segment.
The second approach is to segment the market into need groups,
such as “women who want to save time in shopping for food.” Thisis a clear need that can be met by a number of solutions, such as a supermarket taking telephone orders or Web orders that would be delivered to the home. The hope would be to identify demographic or
psychographic characteristics of such women, such as being more
highly educated or having a higher income.
The third approach is to segment the market by behavior groups,
such as “women who order their food from Peapod and other homedelivery groups.” This group is deﬁned by their actual behavior, notjust needs, and the analyst can then search for common characteristics that they may have.
Once you identify a distinct segment, the question is whether itshould be managed within the existing organization or deserves to164 Marketing Insights from A to Z
be set up as a separate business. In the latter case, Nirmalya Kumar
calls it a strategic segment. For example, food companies such as Kraft
and Unilever focus primarily on their retail sales and only secondarily
on food service systems. But food service requires different quantities, packages, and selling systems. It is a strategic segment andshould be run independently of the food retailing group and manage
its own strategy and requirements.

elling“Everyone lives by selling something,” noted the novelist RobertLouis Stevenson. People are selling either a product, a service, aplace, an idea, information, or themselves.
Cynics view selling is a form of civilized warfare fought withwords, ideas, and disciplined thinking. And they view marketing as
an effort to add an element of dignity to what is otherwise a vulgar
brawl.
There are many images of selling. The YTS school says that selling consists of “yell, tell, and sell.” The S&P school says selling is“spray and pray,” The LGD school says that selling is “lunch, golf,
and dinner.” And the salesperson is described as a “talking brochure.”
There is the well-known story of the Stanley Works in which a

Selling 165
consultant told the tool company, “You are not in the business ofselling drills. You are in the business of selling holes.” Don’t sell features. Sell beneﬁts, outcomes, and value.
Some individuals are gifted salespeople. They can sell refrigerators to Eskimos, fur coats to Hawaiians, sand to Arabs, all at a proﬁt,
and then repurchase them at a discount.
Good salespeople remember that they are born with two ears
and one mouth. This reminds them that they should be doing twice
as much listening as talking. If you want to lose the sale, make a pitch
to the customer.
Some salespeople can be painful bores. Woody Allen lamented:“There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spentan evening with an insurance salesman?”
Salespeople must get used to being rejected. Dennis Tamcsin ofNorthwestern Mutual Life Insurance observed: “We have something in this industry called the 10-3-1 ratio. This means thatfor every 10 calls a salesperson makes, he will only get to make apresentation to three, and if he’s got a good success rate, he’ll
make one sale. We need people who won’t shrink from that kindof rejection.”
IBM trains its salespeople to act as if they are always on theverge of losing every customer.
What makes a successful salesperson? To succeed, a salesperson
must recognize that the ﬁrst person he or she has to sell to is himself
or herself. His job is to get in touch with the buyer within himself.
And his motto should be: “I develop clients, not sales.”The comedian George Burns had his own opinion about whatmakes a successful salesperson: “The most important thing in relationship selling is honesty and integrity. If you can fake them,
you’ve got it made.”
Here is a story that illustrates the difference between great salespeople and average salespeople.

166 Marketing Insights from A to Z

A Hong Kong shoe manufacturer wondered whether a market
existed for his shoes on a remote South Paciﬁc island. He sent
an order taker to the island who, upon a cursory examination,
wired back: “The people here do not wear shoes. There is nomarket.” Not convinced, the Hong Kong manufacturer sent a
salesperson to the island. This salesperson wired back: “Thepeople here don’t wear shoes. There is a tremendous market.”Afraid that this salesrep was being carried away by the sightof so many shoeless feet, the manufacturer sent a third person, a marketer. This marketing professional interviewed thetribal chief and several natives and wired back:“The people here don’t wear shoes. As a result their feet aresore and bruised. I have shown the chief how shoes would
help his people avoid foot problems. He is enthusiastic. He estimates the 70 percent of his people will buy the shoes at $10 a
pair. We probably can sell 5,000 pairs of shoes in the ﬁrst year.
Our cost of bringing the shoes to the island and setting up distribution would amount to $6 a pair. We will clear $20,000 in theﬁrst year, which, given our investment, will give us a rate of return on our investment (ROI) of 20 percent, which exceeds ournormal ROI of 15 percent. This is not to mention the high valueof our future earnings by entering this market. I recommendthat we go ahead.”This illustrates that effective marketing involves careful research
into the market opportunity and the preparation of ﬁnancial estimates based on the proposed strategy indicating whether the returns
would meet or exceed the company’s ﬁnancial objectives.
In the past, a gifted salesperson was one who could “commu-Service 167
nicate value.” But as products have become more similar, eachcompetitive salesperson delivers essentially the same message. So
the new need is for the salesperson who can “create value” byhelping the customer make or save more money. Salespeople mustmove from persuading to consulting. This can take the form ofproviding technical help, solving a difﬁcult problem for the customer, or even helping the customer change its whole way of doing business.

erviceIn an age of increasing product commoditization, service quality is
one of the most promising sources of differentiation and distinction. Giving good service is the essence of practicing a customer
orientation.
Yet many companies view service as a pain, a cost, as something
to minimize. Companies rarely make it easy for customers to makeinquiries, submit suggestions, or lodge complaints. They see providing service as a duty and an overhead, not as an opportunity and amarketing tool.
Every business is a service business. You are not a chemicalcompany. You are a chemical services business. Theodore Levitt
said: “There is no such things as service industries. There are168 Marketing Insights from A to Z
only industries whose service components are greater or lessthan those of other industries. Everybody is in service.”“Businesses planned for service are apt to succeed; businesses planned for proﬁt are apt to fail,” observed American educator Nicholas Murray Butler.
What service level should a company deliver? Good service is
not enough. Nobody talks about good service. Sam Walton,
founder of Wal-Mart, set a higher goal: “Our goal as a company
is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.” The three Fs of service marketing are be fast, ﬂexible,and friendly.
What is poor service? There are stories that tell of a hotel in
Spain that advertises that it will accept service complaints at the front
desk only from 9 to 11 A.M. each day. And there is a store in England
whose sign reads, “We offer quality, service, and low price. Choose
any two.”
There are two ways to get a service reputation: One is to be thebest at service; the other is to be the worst at service.
Ellsworth Statler, who founded the Statler hotels, trained his
people with the dictum: “In all minor discussions between
Statler employees and Statler guests, the employee is deadwrong.”
You can check on the service quality of your organization by becoming a customer for a day. Phone your company as if you are acustomer and put some questions to the employee. Go into one ofyour stores and try to buy your product. Call about returning a product or complaining about it and see how the employee handles it.
You are bound to be disappointed.
Check the smile index of your employees. Remember, “A smileis the shortest distance between two people.” (Victor Borge)ponsorship

Companies are constantly invited by various groups to sponsor
events, activities, and worthwhile causes. Companies also actively
seek venues where they can get their names before the public. For example, Coca-Cola has been a long-term participating sponsor of
Olympic Games, World Cups, Super Bowls, and Academy Awards.
By shelling out large sums of money, Coca-Cola hopes to gain favorable public attention and also treat its associates to big-time events.
Companies will put out good money to place their names on
physical facilities such as buildings, universities, and stadiums to keep
their names in the public’s eye. Sometimes this backﬁres; Houston
had to ﬁnd a new name for Enron Field.
Companies can sponsor an important cause (such as better eating, more exercise, regular doctor appointments, saying no to drugs)
in what is called “cause-related marketing.” By partnering with acause that many people believe in, the company can enhance its corporate reputation, raise brand awareness, increase customer loyalty,
build sales, and increase favorable press coverage.55
Companies are increasingly borrowing the auras of celebrities to
add radiance to their own names. Celebrities bring high attention to
the brand, add to its credibility, and offer reassurance. Not surprisingly,169170 Marketing Insights from A to Z
singers, actors, and sports ﬁgures stand ready to sell their auras.
Reebok has acquired the aura of Venus Williams ($40 million contract)
and Nike has acquired Tiger Woods’ aura ($100 million contract).
But be careful. PepsiCo borrowed the auras of Michael Jackson,
Mike Tyson, and Madonna, all of which backﬁred. And Hertz borrowed O. J. Simpson’s aura, only to regret it.
Sponsorship can turn out to be either an expense or an investment. If the money doesn’t generate increased sales or corporate equity, then it is an expense. Companies that want to make theexpenditure an investment have to be much more careful in deciding
what to sponsor.
The question is what does a company gain from putting its
name on a stadium, a Formula One racing car, a golf tournament,or an art show? Does it help the company sell more stuff? Most
companies haven’t really thought through their sponsorships. In
fact, they often start a sponsorship that they continue indeﬁnitely
because of inertia or from their fear of being criticized for dropping
the sponsorship.
If your company is going to sponsor something, make sure that
it is a reasonable and relevant match to your target market and typeof product/service. A good example is Timex’s sponsorship of theIronman Triathlon to convey that its watches “take a licking andkeep on ticking.” On the other hand, it wouldn’t make sense for
Nestlé’s baby food division to sponsor a nursing home event.
Make sure that you decide on the objectives you are trying toachieve with the sponsorship. The money must have a positive impact
on awareness, image, or customer loyalty that somehow turns into
more sales. Ask how much your sales will have to increase to justify
the cost. After each sponsorship, do a postaudit of whether it
achieves the objectives. Granted, it is difﬁcult to measure the value acompany receives from many of its sponsorship dollars. If you ﬁndthat it didn’t contribute much value, write it off as philanthropy.56

trategy

Strategy is the glue that aims to build and deliver a consistent anddistinctive value proposition to your target market. Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group, warned: “Unless abusiness has a unique advantage over its rivals, it has no reason
to exist.”
If you have the same strategy as your competitors, you don’t
have a strategy. If the strategy is different, but easily copied, it is aweak strategy. If the strategy is uniquely different and difﬁcult tocopy, you have a strong and sustainable strategy.
Harvard’s Michael Porter drew a clear distinction between operational excellence and strategic positioning.57 Too many companies
think they have a strategy by pursuing operational excellence. They
work hard at “benchmarking” the “best-of-class performers” to stayahead of their competition. But if they are running the same race as
their competitors, their competitors may catch up. Their real need is
to run a different race. Companies that target a speciﬁc group of customers and needs and deliver a different bundle of beneﬁts can besaid to have a strategy.
Several companies can be cited as having distinctive strategies.

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• Southwest Airlines, the most proﬁtable U.S. airline, is run differently than other airlines in dozens of ways: It targets pricesensitive, short-trip passengers; it ﬂies point-to-point rather
than through hubs; it uses only 737s, thus reducing spareparts inventory and pilot training costs; it sells only economy
class and doesn’t give seat assignments; it doesn’t serve food;it doesn’t move baggage to other carriers; and so on. The net
results are that Southwest can take off after landing in 20 minutes compared to the average of 60 minutes for competitors,
and its equipment is in the air longer and yields a higher return on its investment.
• IKEA, the world’s largest furniture retailer, searches for lowcost real estate in a major city, builds a giant store with arestaurant and day care center, sells good quality furniture at alower price that customers take home in their cars and put together, offers membership privileges leading to even lower
prices, and in a dozen ways remains hard to copy by any
would-be imitators.
• Harley Davidson not only sells motorcycles but provides entry
into a social community that rides together, has races, andshares the Harley Davidson lifestyle with its HD leather jackets and clothing, watches, pens, watches, and restaurants.
Companies have a unique strategy when (1) they have deﬁned
a clear target market and need, (2) developed a distinctive andwinning value proposition for that market, and (3) arranged adistinctive supply network to deliver the value proposition to thetarget market. Nirmalya Kumar calls this the 3Vs: value target,
value proposition, and value network. Such companies cannot easily
be copied because of the unique ﬁt of their business processes andactivities.
Companies that forge a unique way of doing business gain
lower costs, higher prices, or both. While their competitors increas-

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Strategy 173
ingly resemble each other and are forced to compete on price, strategically positioned companies avoid the bloodbath by following thebeat of a different drummer.
Looking at strategy this way prevents companies from thinking
they have a strategy because they are going on the Internet, or outsourcing, or restructuring, or acquiring other ﬁrms, or adopting customer relationship management. These business initiatives can easily
be copied. They don’t deﬁne how a business is going about building
a sustainable strategy.
One of the best rules for strategy development is to strive toﬁnd out what the target customers like and do more of it; and ﬁnd
out what they dislike and do less of it. This means spending time in
the marketplace and seeing what matters. As stated by Al Ries andJack Trout, “Strategy should evolve out of the mud of the marketplace, not in the antiseptic environment of an ivory tower.”Your strategy should be some unique synthesis of features, design, quality, service, and cost. You have succeeded in building an enviable strategy when it has created such an advantageous market
position that competition can only retaliate over a long time period
and at a prohibitive cost.
What is bad strategy? We know it when we see it.
• Yesterday’s strategy. Sears and GM, for example, tend to be responsive to the marketplace of yesterday. “You can’t have abetter tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all
the time.” (Charles F. Kettering, American inventor) In too
many companies, the old strategy is “baked in.” Dee Hock,CEO emeritus of Visa, said: “The problem is never how to
get new innovative thoughts into the mind, but how to
get the old ones out.”• Protectionism. American steel companies lack strategy because
they spend their time urging protectionism. Protectionism is asure way to lose your business.

174 Marketing Insights from A to Z
• Marketing shootouts. Price wars and mutual destruction indicate the absence of strategy rather than its presence.
• Overfocusing on problems. Peter Drucker warned against“feeding problems while starving opportunities.”• Lack of clear objectives. Companies often fail to spell out or
prioritize their objectives. “If you don’t know where you’regoing, it’s really hard to get there.” (Viri Mullins, president, Armstrong’s Lock & Supply). I have a strong bias toward advising a company to do what is strategically rightrather than what is immediately proﬁtable.
• Relying on acquisitions. Companies that build their growthplans on acquisitions rather than innovation are suspect. Halfof a company’s acquisitions will become tomorrow’s spin-offs.
• Middle-of-the-road strategy. What happens to those who havea middle-of-the-road strategy? They get run over.
• Believing if it isn’t broke, don’t ﬁx it. That is one of the worst
rules of management. “In today’s economy, if it ain’t
broke, you might as well break it yourself, because it soon
will be.” (Wayne Calloway, CEO of PepsiCo)
The sad fact is that most companies are tactics-rich and strategypoor. Sun Tzu in the fourth century B.C. observed: “All men can see
these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is thestrategy out of which victory is evolved.”58

uccess and Failure

J. Paul Getty, the fabulously wealthy founder of Getty Oil, shared histhree secrets for success: “Rise early, work late, strike oil.” Toomany of us can only do the ﬁrst two.
Irving Berlin, the songwriter, lamented: “The toughest thing
about success is that you’ve got to keep on being a success.” “Success is never ﬁnal,” as Winston Churchill observed.
Success, in fact, is the major cause of failure. Five years of successwill ruin any business. Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard,
confessed: “The single biggest problem in business is staying withyour previously successful business model . . . one year too long.”
The success of a company depends ultimately on the success of
its customers and partners. But a company should not try to please
everyone. That would be a sure way to fail.
Failure shouldn’t be viewed as always bad. Henry Ford said:“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” He added that he wouldn’t hire anyone who has never failed.
Thomas Huxley, the English biologist, concurred: “There is thegreatest practical beneﬁt in making a few failures early in life.”

175

uppliers

The company’s marketers should be interested in the company’s suppliers, not just its distributors and dealers. One reason is to make surethat the company’s purchasing people buy quality supplies so that thecompany can deliver its promised quality level to its target customers.
Another reason is that undependable suppliers can lead to production delays and therefore to broken delivery promises to customers.
A third reason is that good suppliers will provide value-adding ideas
to the company beyond simply supplying the product.
Although the company’s purchasing people should seek thebest suppliers, they also are judged by their ability to keep company
procurement costs down. This pressure can lead to compromises in
the choice of suppliers. When Ignatio Lopez ran General Motors’
procurement, he treated the suppliers harshly, always demanding a
rock-bottom price even if this put some suppliers on the edge of survival. This is shortsighted. One can guess that these hard-pressed
suppliers would favor the other auto companies when it came to handling shortages or unveiling innovations.
Today most companies are reducing the number of their suppliers. The thought is that one good supplier is better than three average ones. Some companies have chosen to work with a prime

176

Target Markets 177
supplier rather than playing off suppliers against each other in thehope of gaining concessions. The auto industry has moved toward
using a prime supplier for seating, another for engines, another forbraking systems, and so on. These prime suppliers are treated as partners who coinvest in the success of the customer.
And if you are supplier, be thankful when you have a demanding customer. Rolls-Royce calls Boeing “the toughest customer wehave” and they’re grateful for it. By meeting the standards of a demanding customer, the company ﬁnds it much easier to satisfy theirless demanding customers.

arget Markets

The age of companies aiming at the mass market is coming to an
end. Someone said, “Mass marketing is putting the product inthe market, and going to mass on Sunday and praying someone
buys it.”
Mass marketing requires developing a picture of the averagecustomer. But averages are deceiving. If you have one foot in boilingwater and another in ice water, on the average you’re comfortable. If
you aim for the average, you will lose.
Today many companies are trying to sell products and services
to the “small business market.” So they hire an ad agency to develop

178 Marketing Insights from A to Za mass market campaign to small businesses, with little success. It
would be better to focus on a speciﬁc industry or profession and toreach the corresponding small businesses through someone who hasa standing in that industry or profession. Intuit Inc. sells its small
business software programs not directly but by giving a sales commission to accountants who recommend Intuit’s software to small business clients.
Your company does not belong in any market where it can’t be
the best. John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard mutual fund company, said, “We’ve never wanted to be the biggest, but the best.”
In choosing a market, remember: It is easier to sell to people
with money than to people without money. And try to sell to users,
not buyers.

echnology

Every new technology is a force for “creative destruction.” Your
company is more likely to be buried by a new technology than by its
current competitors. Horse-drawn carriage makers were not defeatedby a better horse-drawn carriage but by the horseless carriage. Transistors hurt the vacuum-tube industry, xerography hurt the carbon
paper business, and the digital camera will hurt the ﬁlm business.
New technology can also change social relations and lifestyles.

Telemarketing and Call Centers 179
The contraceptive pill, for example, was a factor leading to smallerfamilies, more working wives, and larger discretionary income—resulting in higher expenditures on vacation travel, durable goods,
and luxury items.
New technologies will hopefully increase productivity at a greaterrate than their cost. But avoid adding a new technology to an old organization. This will only result in an expensive old organization.

elemarketing andCall Centers

Using the phone to hear from customers and to talk with customers
can be a great asset if done right. Not only can you learn more about
each customer but the conversation can leave the customer with afeeling of being well served. Done right, telemarketers can pick up
new ideas from customers, carry out surveys to learn about the market, and even cross-sell other items.
Lands End does it right. About 85 percent of their orders comein by phone. New operators are given 75 hours of training before going on the job. Customers can phone 24 hours a day, and Lands End
can answer 90 percent of the calls within 10 seconds. Overﬂow calls
are routed to stand-by operators working at home. And customers

180 Marketing Insights from A to Z
who use Lands End’s web site can also reach a live operator just by
clicking an icon on their computer screens.
Unfortunately, most companies don’t run their phone service
in this enlightened way. Companies have rushed to automate theirphone service and remove any human interface. One calls andhears a digital voice offering nine different choices, followed byanother four choices, followed by three choices. And very often,
the phone line is busy (because the company refuses to haveenough terminals or operators), or one is put on a long waiting
line before hearing a human voice. And the human voice half thetime is tired, curt, or bored.
One airline goes so far as to disconnect its waiting customers after 59 minutes, all because the manager is compensated based on the
average time required to handle customer calls. Can you imagine
waiting 59 minutes and then being disconnected, and the impact of
this experience on customer feelings toward the company?
There is a legitimate issue of how much time to spend on thephone with a customer who tends to be talkative. Most companies
have trained their telemarketers how to handle a talkative personwith grace. Aim essentially for customer satisfaction, not for phone
speed.
Management should let telemarketers know that their conversations will be monitored. The purpose is to make sure that customers
are treated respectfully and to learn best practices from the better
telemarketers. Beyond this, some companies ask their executives to
do some telemarketing to sense its power and problems.
Telemarketing in the future must move from one-way sales
pitches to two-way conversations; from cold calls to efforts at relationship building; and from knowing nothing about the prospect tomaking targeted, meaningful offers.

rends in Marketing
Thinking and PracticeHere are the main marketing trends that I see:• From make-and-sell marketing to sense-and-respond marketing.
Your company will perform better if you view the marketing
challenge as that of developing a superior understanding ofyour customer needs rather than as simply pushing out yourproducts better.
• From focusing on customer attraction to focusing on customer
retention. Companies need to pay more attention to serving
and satisfying their present customers before they venture in
an endless race to ﬁnd new customers. Companies must movefrom transaction marketing to relationship marketing.
• From pursuing market share to pursuing customer share. The
best way to grow your market share is to grow your customer
share, namely to ﬁnd more products and services that can besold to the same customers.
• From marketing monologue to customer dialogue. You cancreate stronger relationships with customers by listening toand conversing with them than by only sending out oneway messages.

181182 Marketing Insights from A to Z

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• From mass marketing to customized marketing. The mass
market is splintering into mini-markets and your company
now has the capability of marketing to one customer at atime.
• From owning assets to owning brands. Many companies are beginning to prefer owning brands to owning factories. By owning fewer physical assets and outsourcing production, thesecompanies believe they can make a greater return.
• From operating in the marketplace to operating in cyberspace.
Smart companies are developing a presence online as well as
off-line. They are using the Internet for buying, selling, recruiting, training, exchanging, and communicating.
• From single-channel marketing to multichannel marketing.
Companies no longer rely on one channel to reach andserve all their customers. Their customers have different
preferred channels for accessing the company’s products
and services.
• From product-centric marketing to customer-centric marketing.
The sign of marketing maturity is when a company stops focusing on its products and starts focusing on its customers.
These trends will affect different industries and companies atdifferent rates and times. Your company must decide where it stands
with respect to each marketing trend.

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alue

The marketing job is to create, deliver, and capture customer value.
What is value? Value primarily is the putting together ofthe right combination of quality, service, and price (QSP) for
the target market. Louis J. De Rose, head of De Rose and Associates, Inc., says: “Value is the satisfaction of customer requirements at the lowest possible cost of acquisition, ownership,
and use.”Michael Lanning holds that winning companies are those thatdevelop a competitively superior value proposition and a superiorvalue-delivery system. A value proposition goes beyond the company’s
positioning on a single attribute. It is the sum total of the experiencethat the product promises to deliver backed up by the faithful delivery of this experience.
Jack Welch put this challenge to GE: “The value decade isupon us. If you can’t sell a top quality product at the world’s
lowest price, you’re going to be out of the game.”
McDonald’s used to say that it is in the fast food business. Laterit said that it is in the quick service business. Today it says that it is in
the value business.
A company’s ability to deliver value to its customers is closely183184 Marketing Insights from A to Z
tied with its ability to create satisfaction for its employees and otherstakeholders.
Value ultimately depends on the perceiver. A child came upon
three masons and asked, “What are you doing?” “I’m mixing mortar,” said the ﬁrst. “I’m helping ﬁx this wall,” said the second. The
third one smiled: “We’re building a cathedral.”Smart companies not only offer purchase value but also offer use
value as well. You invest $30,000 in an automobile and you expect
the dealer to help with respect to maintenance, repair, and answeringa host of questions. Ryder, the truck leasing company, not only rents
a truck but provides a free book on how to pack and move. Nestlé
not only sells baby food but has a 7/24 service to answer parents’questions about baby food.
Companies worry about spending more money to satisfy theircustomers. They need to distinguish between value-adding costs andnon-value-adding costs. A hotel may consider adding afternoon bedturning service that would raise the cost per room by $2. Before doing this, it should survey whether its customers would be willing to
pay $2 for this service. If the answer is no, then bed-turning service isa non-value-adding cost. But if the hotel puts an ironing board andiron in each room at a cost of $2 and guests think it is worth $3, thenthis would be a value-adding cost.

ord of Mouth

No ad or salesperson can convince you about the virtues of a productas persuasively as can a friend, acquaintance, past customer, or independent expert. Suppose you are planning to buy a PDA (personal
digital assistant) and you have seen all the ads for Palm, HP, andSony. You even go to examine them at Circuit City and listen to thesalesperson. You’re still undecided and don’t buy. Then a friend tells
you how Palm has changed her life. That does it. Or you read a column by an expert who tested and describes each one and recommends Palm.
Companies would love to trigger word-of-mouth campaigns
surrounding their new product launches. High-tech ﬁrms send their
new products to well-respected experts and opinion leaders praying
for strong editorial endorsements. Hollywood hopes for a good
Roger Ebert review.
Marketers advertise their new product’s beneﬁts hoping thatthey would be believed and carried by word of mouth. But few know
how to use experts and their customers to bring in new customers.
According to word-of-mouth expert Michael Cafferky: “Word of
mouth . . . marches proudly but quietly onward as its Madison
Avenue cousins try in vain to replicate its dramatic results. . . .

185

186 Marketing Insights from A to Z
Word of mouth is the brain’s low-tech method of sorting
through all the high-tech hype that comes to it from the market
place.”
Companies have been turning increasingly to word-of-mouthmarketing. They seek to identify individuals who are early
adopters, vocal and curious, and with a large network of acquaintances. When a company brings its new product to the attention ofsuch inﬂuentials, the inﬂuentials carry on the rest of the work as“unpaid salespeople.”
Some companies hire people to parade their new products inpublic areas. Someone might park a new Ferrari at a busy intersection. A stranger might ask you to take her picture; she hands you a
new phone with a built-in camera, leading to an immediate conversation. Someone in a bar answers his new videophone, and everyone
wants to know more about it. In March 1999, the Blair Witch ﬁlmmakers hired 100 college students to distribute missing person ﬂyers
in youth culture hubs to promote the ﬁlm.
Today we see the rise of “aggregated buzz” in such forms as Zagat, which collects New York restaurant reviews from diners (notrestaurant critics) or epinions, where people voice their opinions of
products. Soon consumers will be able to tell the good guys from thebad guys and no longer have to rely on advertising.

est

There are two reasons to include zest in this marketing lexicon. The
ﬁrst, and more important, reason is that a Z word is necessary to justify the book’s title.
The second is that a marketer cannot be effective without zest.
Zest is deﬁned as hearty enjoyment, gusto, enthusiasm for life. This
attitude is epitomized by the way certain CEOs practiced their marketing. One is Richard Branson of Virgin, to whom marketing is thefun of creating new, better, and more satisfying solutions for people
as they interact with everyday products and services. Another is Herb
Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, who thoroughly enjoyed working at his airline and hired only people who would similarly enjoy making customers happy. Hire only marketers who have azest for life. Otherwise send them into accounting.

187

otes

1. Lester Wunderman, Being Direct: Making Advertising Pay (NewYork: Random House, 1996).
2. Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices(New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 64–65.
3. See Rolf Jensen, The Dream Society: How the Coming Shift from
Information to Imagination Will Transform Your Business (NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 1999).
4. See David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (New York:Atheneum, 1988).
5. Ibid.
6. See Stan Rapp and Thomas L. Collins, Beyond MaxiMarketing:
The New Power of Caring and Daring (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1994).
7. Sergio Zyman, The End of Advertising As We Know It (NewYork: John Wiley & Sons, forthcoming—2003).
8. Regis McKenna, Total Access: Giving Customers What They Wantin an Anytime, Anywhere World (Boston: Harvard Business
School Press, 2002).
9. Heidi F. Schultz and Don E. Schultz, “Why the Sock Puppet Got
Sacked,” Marketing Management (July–August 2001), pp. 35–39.

189

190 Notes
10. Richard D’Aveni with Robert Gunther, Hypercompetitive Rivalries: Competing in Highly Dynamic Environments (New York:Free Press, 1995).
11. Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001).
12. Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (New York:
Harper & Row, 1982).
13. James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habitsof Visionary Companies (New York: HarperBusiness, 1994).
14. Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, The Discipline of Market
Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate
Your Market (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995).
15. Arie De Geus, The Living Company (Boston: Harvard Business
School Press, 1997).
16. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap
. . . and Others Don’t (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001).
17. See Michael E. Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (New York: Free Press, 1980);
and see his Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (New York: Free Press, 1985).
18. Theodore Levitt, The Marketing Mode: Pathways to Corporate
Growth (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969).
19. Anita Roddick, Body and Soul: Proﬁts with Principles, the Amazing Success Story of Anita Roddick and the Body Shop (New York:
Crown, 1991).
20. Gregory S. Carpenter and Kent Nakamoto, “Consumer Preference Formation and Pioneering Advantage,” Journal of Marketing Research (August 1989), pp. 285–298.
21. Jan Carlzon, Moments of Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger
Pub. Co., 1987).
22. Drucker, op. cit.

Notes 191
23. Richard Forsyth, “Six Major Impediments to Change and How
to Overcome Them in CRM,” CRM-Forum (June 11, 2001).
24. Frederick Newell, Why CRM Doesn’t Work: The Coming Empowerment Revolution in Customer Relationship Management (NewYork: Bloomberg Press, forthcoming—2003).
25. See Frederick Reichheld, The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Proﬁts, and Lasting Value (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
26. Appeared in www.1-to-1marketing.com online. Also see Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time
(New
York:
Currency/Doubleday, 1993).
27. Seth Godin, Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into
Friends, and Friends into Customers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
28. Theodore Levitt, “Marketing Success through Differentiation ofAnything,” Harvard Business Review (January–February 1980),
pp. 83–91.
29. Jack Trout with Steve Rivkin, Differentiate or Die: Survival in
Our Era (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000).
30. Gregory S. Carpenter, Rashi Glazer, and Kent Nakamoto,“Meaningful Brands from Meaningless Differentiation: The Dependence on Irrelevant Attributes,” Journal of Marketing Research (August 1994), pp. 339–350.
31. Hal Rosenbluth, The Customer Comes Second: and Other Secretsof Exceptional Service (New York: Morrow, 1992).
32. John P. Kotter and James L. Heskett, Corporate Culture and Performance (New York: Free Press, 1992).
33. B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 1999).
34. Hermann Simon, Hidden Champions (Boston: Harvard Business
School Press, 1996).

192 Notes

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35. Adrian J. Slywotzky and Richard Wise, “The Growth Crisis—andHow to Escape It,” Harvard Business Review (July 2002), pp.
73–83.
36. See Philip Kotler, Marketing Management, 11th edition (Upper
Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003), pp. 685ff.
37. See Jean-Philippe Deschamps and P. Ranganath Nayak, Product
Juggernauts: How Companies Mobilize to Generate a Stream ofMarket Winners (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1995).
38. See Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000).
39. See Akio Morita, Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony (NewYork: Dutton, 1986).
40. See James Champy, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make
the Leap—and Others Don’t (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001).
41. Howard R. Bowen, Social Responsibilities of the Businessman(New York: Harper & Row, 1953), p. 215.
42. Robert Lauterborn, “New Marketing Litany: 4P’s Passe; CWords Take Over,” Advertising Age (October 1, 1990), p. 26.
43. Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1999).
44. Ernest Dichter, Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The Psychology of the World of Objects (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
45. See Kevin Lane Keller, Strategic Brand Management (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1998), pp. 317–318.
46. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, When Giants Learn to Dance (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1989).
47. Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
(New York: Warner Books, 1982).
48. Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, The Discipline of Market
Leaders (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994).
49. Fred Crawford and Ryan Mathews, The Myth of Excellence: Why
Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything (NewYork: Crown Business, 2001).

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Notes 193
50. Carl Sewell and Paul B. Brown, Customers for Life: How to TurnThat One-Time Buyer into a Lifetime Customer (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
51. Ram Charan and Noel M. Tichy, Every Business Is a Growth Business: How Your Company Can Prosper Year after Year (New York:Times Business/Random House, 1998).
52. Al and Laura Ries, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR(New York: HarperBusiness, 2002).
53. See the 1998 PIMS study reported in CampaignLive, May 3,
1999, Haymarket Publishing, U.K.).
54. Quoted in “Trade Promotion: Much Ado about Nothing,”
Promo (October 1991), p. 37.
55. See Hanish Pringle and Marjorie Thompson, Brand Soul: How
Cause-Related Marketing Builds Brands (New York: John Wiley& Sons, 1999); Richard Earle, The Art of Cause Marketing (Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC, 2000).
56. See the discussion of sponsorship in Sergio Zyman, The End ofAdvertising As We Know It (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
forthcoming—2003).
57. Michael E. Porter, “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review(November–December 1996), pp. 61–78.
58. Sun Tzu, The Art of War (London: Oxford University Press,
1963).

ndex

A&P, 17
Accountants/accounting department, roleof, 101, 104–105
Account managers, in B2B, 15
Acquisitions, 71, 174
Activities, interests, and opinions (AIOs),
43
Actors, in marketing plan, 112
Advertising:aim of, 2, 18–19
brand development and, 9, 161
budget, 3, 6–7, 145
competition and, 23
creativity in, 2–3
customer satisfaction in, 42deﬁned, 2development process, 2, 4
development software, 82
effectiveness of, 6–7
ﬁve Ms of, 4–5
limitations of, 7–8
measurement, 6–7
media selection, 4–5
message text, 5product life cycle and, 110
sales promotion, 160–162
successful campaigns, examples of, 3–4
wear-out, 1–2
Advertising agency:
budget, 7functions of, 2, 4–5
pay-for-performance basis, 63
Alberto Culver, 51
Allied Van Lines, 75
Amazon.com, 12, 84, 146, 155
American Airlines, 33

American Express, 14, 71
America Online (AOL), 86
Analytics, 80–82
Anchoring, 29
Annual-plan control, 78
Apple Computer, 9, 12, 47–48, 93, 97, 127,
142
Armstrong, J. S., 121
Armstrong World Industries, Inc., 72
Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), 88
Asset turnover, 62, 69
AT&T, 72
A. T. Cross, 74
Atimex, 170
Attention Economy, The (Davenport/Beck),
19
Attribute listing, 28
Audits, 79, 115
Avis, 137
Balance sheets, 62
Bang & Olufsen, 47–48
Barnes & Noble, 84, 93, 154, 156
Bass Pro, 62
Battle plan, see Marketing plans
Baum, Herbert, 118
Bayer, 12
BBBK Pest Control, 75
Beanie Babies, 146
Becher, 66
Beck, John, 19
Behavior groups, 163
Being alive, 29
Beneﬁt marketing, 76
Bernbach, William, 1
Berra, Yogi, 67, 70

195

196 Index
Best Buy, 155
Best practices, 155
Beyond MaxiMarketing (Rapp/Collins), 7
Bezos, Jeff, 14, 59, 109, 139
Big Five accounting ﬁrms, 137
Big Three auto ﬁrms, 137
Black & Decker, 12Blackberry, 146
BMW, 97, 135
Body Shop, The, 31, 146
Boeing, 20, 177
Bogle, John, 178
Borders, 55–56, 154
Bossidy, Larry, 59, 71
Brainstorming, 29–30, 84
Branch ofﬁces, global expansion, 88
Brand(s):advertising and, 9–10
attributes of, 10–11
beneﬁts of, 10
building models, 13-14
development process, 9–12, 146differentiation, 49
extension, deﬁned, 11–13
importance of, 8line extension and, 11–13
loyalty and, 8–9, 97
management of, 13
name selection, 10, 12
personality, 11, 27
preference for, 8–9
pricing strategies, 13
stretch, 11
successful, 11
value, 86
Brand-customer relationship, 10
Branding, 7
Brand management myopia, 13
Brand manager, role of, 82, 161
Branson, Richard, 10, 12, 187
Braun, 83
Brighthouse, 28British Airways, 57
Britt, Dr. Steuart Henderson, 3
Budget:advertising, 3, 6–7, 145
ﬁnancial marketing, 62
marketing plan, 113, 149
Built to Last (Collins/Porras), 21
Burger King, 10
Burnett, Leo, 2, 28
Business cards, 125
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing,
15–16, 65
Business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, 15
Butler, Nicholas Murray, 168
Cadillac, 10Cafferky, Michael, 185

Call centers, 179–180
Campbell Soup, 11
Capital market, 84
Carlzon, Jan, 32
Carpenter, Greg, 31, 50
Cash ﬂow statements, 62
Cashing out, 29, 128
Casio, 83
Catalogs, 52
Category killers, 154
Caterpillar, 20, 26–27
Cathay Paciﬁc, 23
Celebrity spokespeople, 7, 169–170
CEO, see Chief executive ofﬁcer (CEO)Chambers, John, 92
Champion, 87
Change, importance of, 16–18, 122. See also
Innovation; New product development
Channel conﬂict, 54–55
Channel relationships, 87
Chapman, Harry, 100
Charan, Ram, 143
Charles Schwab, 56
Chief executive ofﬁcer (CEO):brand development, 14
customer orientation, 32
ﬁnancial marketing, 63
marketing role, 119
success factors, 94–96
Chief ﬁnancial ofﬁcer (CFO), 95–96
Chief operating ofﬁcer (COO), functions of,94
Churchill, Winston, 95, 175
Circuit City, 155
Cisco Systems, 14, 59
Citicorp, 72
Clanning, 29
Club Med, 84
Club membership, beneﬁts of, 9, 40
CNN, 84
Coach, 87
Coca-Cola, 1, 6, 8, 12–13, 23, 47, 72, 86,
107, 140, 169
Cocooning, 29, 128
Cold calls, 180
Collins, Jim, 21
Collins, Thomas, 7Command-and-control economies,
122
Communication(s):deﬁned, 18
in 4Cs, 109
integrated marketing communications(IMC), 18Internet and, 91–92
promotion, 18–19
relationship marketing, 153
sales force, 159
team guidelines, 105–106

Index 197
Companies, generally:size of, 20–21, 111
success factors, 21
types of, 20
Competitive advantage, 22–23, 56, 59,76
Competitors:
awareness of, 24
customer needs and, 31
customer service and, 24
effective, 24
positioning and, 136
sales promotions, 111
shift to, 150
successful companies and, 23
types of, 23
Complaint handling strategies, 40
Computer software programs:
CRM-Forum, 35
database marketing, generally, 104
development of, 82
marketing automation software, 81
marketing process automation, 82
marketing strategy simulators, 114
partner relationship management (PRM),
55
real-time inventory management, 81
real-time selling, 81–82
sales automation software, 80–81
supply chain software, 104
types of, generally, 82
Concept test, 82
Consultants, 25–26
Consumer marketers, 111
Consumer packaged goods (CPG):
brand building process, 13–14
customer service, 42Consumer panels, 115
Continuous improvement, 84, 144Contract management, 82
Controls:
distribution/channels, 54–55
efﬁciency, 79
ﬁnancial marketing, 63
in marketing plan, 113
proﬁtability, 79
strategic, 79
Convenience, importance of, 109
Copyrights, 86Core competencies, 101, 132
Core processes, 101
Corporate branding, 26–27. See also Brands
Corporate Culture and Performance(Kotter/Heskett), 59
Corporate growth:
examples of, 72
goal-setting, 69
opportunities for, 73
strategies for, 70–72

Corporate image, 27. See also Image;
Reputation
Costco, 154
Cost-cutting strategies:
overview, 63–64, 71, 143
recession marketing, 150
Cost of capital, 63Countertrading, 90
Crawford, Fred, 137
Creativity:
development strategies, 27–28
idea markets, 29–30
importance of, 27
techniques, 28–29
trend spotters, 29
uniqueness, 27–28
Credit department, 104
CRM-Forum, 35
Cross-selling, 34–35
Customer(s), generally:acquisition of, 37–38, 41
advocacy, 14
attraction, 181
awareness of, 37, 39
base, value of, 86
classiﬁcation system, 40
compensation systems, 38–39
complaints from, 40
corporate growth, role in, 73
costs, 109
defection rate, 41deﬁned, 37
dialogue, 181
experience, 137
intimacy, 137
life cycle, 37
lifetime value, 37
loyalty, 3, 8–9, 13, 42, 98, 161,
170
loyalty award program, 98
needs, 30–31, 39, 73
new product development process,127
orientation, 32–34
perceptions of, 36–38
power of, 59
privacy issues, 45–46
relationships, 39, 87
retention, see Customer retention
satisfaction, 3, 14, 21, 38–39, 41–42
Customer-centered companies, 33–34
Customer-centric marketing,182
Customer-driven companies, 21
Customer management of relationships(CMR), 36
Customer managers, 33
Customer-oriented companies, 33, 131
Customer-owning focus, 36

198 Index
Customer relationship management (CRM),
see Database marketing
beneﬁts of, generally, 36
components of, 35–36
deﬁned, 13, 34
effectiveness of, 35
Customer retention:
focus on, 181
implications of, 14, 42
strategies for, 38, 41
Customer service:complaint handling strategies,40
functions of, 105
importance of, 7, 23
quality of, 168
Customers for Life (Sewell), 141
Customer share:
implications of, 37, 109, 181
value proposition, 150
Customized marketing, 182
Dana Corporation, 85
Database marketing:beneﬁts of, 44–45
customer privacy and, 45–46
data collection strategies, 43–44
deﬁned, 39
effectiveness factors, 45
updating information, 44
Data collection strategies, 43–44
Data mining, 44, 118
D’Aveni, Richard, 17
Davenport, Thomas, 19
Dealers, creativity and, 29
Decapitalization, 87
Decision trees, 29
De Geus, Arie, 21, 82
Delivery, competition and, 23. See also
Distribution/channels
Dell Computer, 42, 56, 84, 93, 107, 124,
144
Delta Air Lines, 32–33
Demand ﬂow, 81
Deming, W. Edwards, 147
Demographics/demographic groups, 35, 43,
163
De Rose, Louis J., 183
Design:criteria for, 47
service businesses and, 48
style distinguished from, 46–47
target customer, identiﬁcation of,48
types of, 46
value-added products, 48
Developing countries, 88–89
Dichter, Ernest, 117
Differentiate or Die (Trout), 50

Differentiation:commodities and, 49–50
development strategies, 50–51
importance of, 50
types of, 49–50
Direct mail, 52
Discipline of Market Leaders, The(Treacy/Wiersema), 21
Discontinuous innovation, 84
Disney, 33, 59, 84, 107
Disney, Walt, 57, 61
Distribution/channels:
channel conﬂict, 54–55
channel partners, 55–56
customer reward programs, 56
global expansion, 88
go-to-market, 53–54
implications of, 56
integrated channels, 56
market control, 54–55
market coverage, 54
multiple channels, 55–56
partner relationship management (PRM),
55
relationship marketing, 153
Distributors, creativity and, 29
Dollar General, 129
Domino’s Pizza, 84
Dot.coms, 93
Down-aging, 29, 31, 128
Drucker, Peter, 26, 37, 54, 70, 77, 100,
139, 144, 148, 157, 174
Earnings per share (EPS), 69
Ease of access, 137
Eastern Airlines, 33
Eastman Kodak, 20, 77–78
eBay, 9, 146
E-commerce, 93–94
Economic value added (EVA), 62–63,
68
Efﬁciency control, 79
Emmperative, 82
Emotional marketing, 76–77
Employee(s):brand values and, 59
compensation, 58
creativity and, 29
as customer, 57
customer satisfaction and, 59–60
growth mentality, 73
hiring practices, 32–33, 57–58,
187
importance of, 57, 59
internal marketing, 58–59
recognition of, 59
recruitment, 91
relationships, 87
service quality, 168

Index 199
smile index, 168
training, 33, 179–180
value, 86
value proposition, 58
Empowerment, customer, 35–36
Engineering department, 103, 127
Entrepreneurship, 60–61
Environmental design, 46
Environsell, 115
E.piphany, 82
Estée Lauder, 162
Events, brand development and, 9Every Business Is a Growth Business: How
Your Company Can Prosper Year afterYear (Charan/Tichy), 143Experiential marketing, 61–62
Exporting, 88–89
Failure, inﬂuential factors, 175
Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, The(Ries/Ries), 146
Fans, customers as, 38
Fantasy adventure, 29
Fay, Christopher, 139
Federal Express, 2, 84, 107
Feed forward/feed back system,
79
Ferragamo, 2
Ferrari, 2Ferris, Dick, 96
Finance department, 103
Financial marketing:
CEO role in, 63
components of, generally, 62–63
marketing controllers, 63
marketing effectiveness, 64marketing efﬁciency, 63
Financing, competition and, 23
FitzGerald, Niall, 9Focus groups, 115–116
Focusing, 64–66
Forbes 100, 20
Forced relationships, 28
Ford, 20, 37, 106
Ford, Henry, 175
Forecasting, 66–68
4Cs, 109
4Ps, 108–109
Free cash ﬂow, 62
Frequency, in advertising campaign,5
Frequent-ﬂier programs, 98
Fujitsu, 23
Gabor, Dennis, 68
Gardner, John, 128
Gates, Bill, 24, 92
General Electric, 14, 20, 59, 93, 104, 107,
133

General Motors, 20, 136, 147, 173
Gerstner, Lou, 96
Getty, J. Paul, 175
Giant retailers, 154–155
Gillette, 48, 50
Gilmore, James, 61
Glazer, Rashi, 50
Globalization, impact of, 139
Goals:
importance of, 68
incentive programs and, 135
types of, 69–70
Godin, Seth, 46
Goizueta, Roberto, 8, 23, 72
Golden Rule of Marketing, 38
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make theLeap . . . and Others Don’t (Collins),
21
Gorillas, in niching, 64–65
Go-to-market strategy:
alternatives to, 53–54
deﬁned, 53
Graham, Katherine, 95
Graphics/graphic design, 27, 46
Grove, Andrew, 16, 100
Growth strategies, 70–73
Guarantees, 74–75
Gucci, 2
Guerrilla marketing, 64–65
Guido, Pietro, 30
Hamel, Gary, 58, 83–84, 143
Hampton Inn, 74
Hanes, 87
Hanlin, Russell, 8Hard Rock Café, 61Harkness, Richard, 100Harley Davidson, 9, 27, 38, 97, 137, 141,
172
Heinz, 12Henderson, Bruce, 141, 171
Hertz, 170
Heskett, Jim, 59
Hewlett-Packard (HP), 14, 16, 56, 107,
127, 185
Hewlett-Packard/Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC,
12, 47
Hidden assets, 73
Hidden Champions (Simon), 65
Hillshire Farms, 87
Hock, Dee, 173
Holiday Inn, 42
Holistic marketing, 119–120
Home Depot, 71, 155
Honda, 42, 83
HP/Compaq, 93
Hudson River Group, 114
Human resources, see Employee(s);Recruitment; Training programs

200 Index
Huxley, Thomas, 175
Hypercompetition, 139
Hypercompetitive Rivalries (D’Aveni), 17
Hypermarkets, 154
Hyundai, 136

pricing strategy, impact on, 139retail industry, impact on, 155
Interviews, market research, 117–118
Intranet, 92
Inventory management, 81

Iacocca, Lee, 139
IBM, 23, 40, 49, 93, 107, 122, 158,
165
Idea manager, role of, 85
Idea markets, 29–30, 84
IKEA, 22, 27, 84, 129, 132, 137,
172
Image:
brand, 156, 162differentiation strategies, 51
importance of, 76–77
Impact, in advertising campaign, 5Implementation:buy-in, 78
problems with, 77–78
Incentive programs, 59, 135
Income statements, 62
Industry-oriented companies, 131
Industry par, 137
Information exchange systems, global
expansion, 89
Information gathering, see Data collection
strategies
Information management, 80–82
Information technology (IT) department,
104
Innovation:
importance of, 31, 83–85
index, 85
In Search of Excellence (Peters/Waterman),
21
Inside-out thinking, 73
Intangible assets, 86–87
Integrated channels, 56
Integrated marketing communications(IMC), 18Intel, 16, 59, 107
Intellectual capital value, 86–87
Internal marketing, 17, 58–59
International expansion, 71
International marketing:beneﬁts of, 87
brand name, 87–88
developing countries, 89
development stages, 88
failure factors, 90
management, 89
market share, 89
troubled countries, 89–90
Internet:
beneﬁts of, 91–93, 182
corporate web site, 94
e-commerce, 93–94

Jaguar, 46–47
Japanese strategies:
customer needs, 30
innovation, 83–84
inventory management, 81
marketing departments, 130
market research, 116
performance measurement, 133
proﬁt/proﬁtability objectives, 144–145
quality management, 147–148
J. D. Powers, 42
Johnson & Johnson, 8, 65, 107,
125
J. P. Morgan, 20
Junk mail, 46, 52
Kaizen, 100
Kamprad, Ingvard, 127
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, 99, 129
Kelleher, Herb, 59, 187
Kellogg, 20
Kmart, 17, 149
Knowledge:
management, 80
value of, 86
Kotter, John, 59
Kraft, 141
Kumar, Nirmalya, 164, 172
Lands End, 60, 179
Lanning, Michael, 183
Lao-tzu, 95
Lauterborn, Robert, 109
Layoffs, 150
Leacock, Stephen, 2
Leadership:
chief executive ofﬁcer (CEO), 94–96
chief ﬁnancial ofﬁcer (CFO), 95–96
chief operating ofﬁcer (COO), 94
circle, 137
effective, 95–96
egotism and, 96
functions of, 95
respect for, 95
success factors, 95–96
vision, 95–96
Lean businesses, 87, 151
Le Carré, John, 100
Levi’s, 12, 94
Levitt, Theodore, 23, 50, 140, 142,
167
Lexus, 12–13, 83
Licenses, 86Index 201
Light, Larry, 13
Line extension, 11–13
Line management, functions of, 78,
89
List brokers, 124
Living Company, The (De Geus), 21
L. L. Bean, 33, 37, 75
Loblaws, 74, 156
Logos, 27Lopez, Ignatio, 176
Lowe’s, 155
Low-price ﬁrms, 144
Loyalty:brand, 97
customer, 98
deﬁned, 97
Loyalty award program, 98
McDonald’s, 84, 116, 124–125, 183
McKenna, Regis, 7
Macro forces, in marketing plan, 112
Make-and-sell marketing, 181
Management:
committees, 100–101
core processes, 99
functions of, generally, 99–100
success factors, 100
Management by objectives, 70
Manufacturing department, 104, 127
Margins, 133Market capitalization, 63
Market control, 54–55
Market coverage, 54Market-driven companies, 21, 31
Market-driving companies, 31Marketers, roles of, 119–121
Marketing, generally:
ability, 121assets and resources, 101–102
budget, 149
department interfaces, 102–106
effectiveness, 64
efﬁciency, 63
ethics, 106–107
monologue, 181
myopia, 140plans, see Marketing plans
research, see Market researchroles and skills, 119–121
shootouts, 174
strategy simulators, 114
Marketing auditor, marketing control role,
79
Marketing automation software, 81Marketing control, types of, 78–79
Marketing controller, role of, 63, 79
Marketing department:interfaces, 102–106
roles of, 127

Marketing mix:
company size and, 11
4Cs of, 109
4Ps of, 108–109
product life cycle and, 110–112
push strategies, 111
Marketing plans:
applications, generally, 113
beneﬁts of, 114
budget, 113
controls, 113deﬁcient, 114
implementation of, 114
objectives, 112–113
situational analysis, 112–113
strategy, 113
success factors, 114
tactics, 113–114
Marketing process automation, 82
Market leadership, components of, 21, 31
Market life cycle, 37
Market of one, deﬁned, 122Market research:data mining, 118
focus groups, 115–116
importance of, 115, 118
in-depth interviews, 117–118
in-home observations, 116
in-store observations, 115–116
marketing experiments, 118
motivational, 117
mystery shoppers, 118
observations, generally, 116
questionnaires, 115, 117
surveys, 115, 117Markets, types of, 121–122
Market segments, deﬁned, 162. See also
Segmentation
Market share:
global expansion and, 89
importance of, 39, 41, 69
performance measurement and,133
pursuit of, 181
Markups, 139
Marriott, 14, 57, 141
Mars Company, 124
Marsteller, William, 26
Mass market/marketing, 46, 121, 177–178
Mathews, Ryan, 137
Matsushita, 142
Mature markets, 71, 158
Maytag, 107
Measurement, in advertising, 4. See also
Performance measurement
Media:
in advertising, 4
new product development and, 126
types of, 122–123

202 Index
Observations:in-home, 116
in-store, 115–116
types of, generally, 116
Obsolete products, 23, 127
Ofﬁce Depot, 155
Ofﬁce Max, 155
Ogilvy, David, 3, 8
Ogilvy & Mather, 116
Olson, Ken, 67
One-to-one marketing, 44
Operational excellence, 137, 171
Opportunity, recognition of, 128–129,
150–151
Oracle, 94
O’Reilly, Tony, 98
Organization, implications of, 130–131. See
also Companies
Organizational culture:
employee incentives/recognition, 59, 135
global expansion and, 88
intrapreneurial spirit, 61
recession marketing, 151
Organizational fat, 150
Osborn, Alex, 30
Outside-in thinking, 73
Outsourcing, 102, 131–132, 157, 182
Overfocusing, 174

TE

AM
FL
Y

Mercedes, 13, 97
Message, in advertising, 4–5
Microsoft Corporation, 9, 21, 97, 107, 142
Middle management, marketing control role,
78
Mission:in advertising, 4
importance of, 124–125
Modiﬁcation analysis, 28
Moments of truth, deﬁned, 32
Moments of Truth (Carlzon), 32
Monaghan, Tom, 38
Money, in advertising, 4, 6
Montblanc, 47
Morita, Akio, 30, 84–85
Morphological analysis, 28
Most Growable Customers (MGCs), 40
Most Proﬁtable Customers (MPCs),
40
Most Troubling Customers (MTCs),
40
Most Vulnerable Customers (MVCs),
40
Multichannel marketing, 182
Multidivisional companies, 130–131
Multinational corporations, 89–90
Mystery shopper research, 118
Naisbet, John, 29
Nakamato, Kent, 31, 50
Name selection, in brand development,
10
Narrower niches, 162
National brands, 156
Need groups, 163
Nestlé, 84, 170, 184
Netscape, 127
Neutragena, 137
New Economy, 14
Newell, Frederick, 35–36
New product development:
importance of, 71, 82, 84, 126
outsourcing, 131–132
success factors, 126–127
Niching, 64–66
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 18
Nike, 71–72, 76, 131, 170
Niketown, 62
99 lives, 29
No-need society, 30
No-Need Society, The (Guido), 30
Nokia, 16, 146
Non-value-adding costs, 184
Nucor, 71
Objectives:
importance of, 68–70
in marketing plan, 112–113
prioritizing, 174

Packaging, 7Palm, 9, 12, 31, 47, 146, 185
Partner relationship management (PRM), 55
Partner value:deﬁned, 86
proposition, 150
Patents, 86
Pay-for-performance, 6, 63
PENCILS, 146
PepsiCo, 6, 90, 170
Perdue, Frank, 50
Performance measurement:
importance of, 133–134
sales force, 158–159
types of, 134–135
Permission marketing, 46, 52
Personalization, 109
Personal selling, 110. See also Sales force
Personnel, see Employee(s)Peters, Tom, 17, 21, 37, 50
Philanthropy, 170. See also Social causes
Physical assets, 87, 101, 182
Physical differentiation, 49
Physical evidence, marketing mix and,108
Pierce, John R., 67
Pine, Joe, 61
Place, in 4Ps, 108–109
Planet Hollywood, 61
Platt, Lew, 175

Team-Fly®

Index 203
Playtex, 87
Pleasure revenge, 29
Politics, 108
Pollard, Bill, 58
Popcorn, Faith, 28–29
Porras, Jerry, 21
Porsche, 135
Porter, Michael, 22, 171
Positioning, 135–138
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
(Ries/Trout), 135
Positive-sum theory of marketing,142
Postmeasurements, in advertising, 6Potter, Robert, 130
Power, Brendan, 148
Power brands, 141
Premeasurement, in advertising, 6
President’s Choice, 156
Price:
in 4Ps, characteristics of, 108–109,
153
in positioning strategy, 137
relationship marketing, 153setting, see Pricing strategies
signiﬁcance of, 138–139
value and, 138wars, 174
Price, Kevin, 154
Pricing strategies:
brand development and, 13
corporate growth and, 71
in global expansion, 88–89
inﬂuential factors, 139
markup and, 139
recession marketing, 150
Private brands, 156
Procedures, 108
Procter & Gamble, 107, 162
Product:
awareness, 2
design, 46
differentiation strategies, 51
in 4Ps, characteristics of, 108–109, 153
leadership, 136–137
life cycle, 110–111
in positioning strategy,
137
problem analysis, 28–29
relationship marketing, 153
selection factors, 140
Product-centric marketing, 182
Product development, innovation process,
83–85. See also New productdevelopment
Product directors, role of, 89
Product-driven companies, 33–34
Productivity, innovation strategies, 85
Product juggernauts, 83

Product-making focus, 36
Product-oriented companies, 130–131
Proﬁts/proﬁtability:
control, 79
cost-cutting strategies and, 143
Japanese-formulated objectives, 144–145
low-price ﬁrms, 144
positive-sum theory of marketing, 142
pricing strategies and, 144zero-sum thinking, 142
Promotion, see Advertising; Sales promotion
deﬁned, 18
effectiveness of, 19
in 4Ps, 108–111
strategies for, 19
Protectionism, 173
Prudential, 76
Psychographics, 35, 43
Publicity, 7
Public relations (PR):advertising vs., 145–146
functions of, generally, 9, 12, 19, 27, 108,
126, 146–147
new product development, 146
PENCILS of, 146
Pull strategies, 111
Purchasing department, 103–104, 176
Push strategies, 111
Quality:importance of, 127, 147–148
Japanese perspective, 147–148
managerial responsibility, 147in performance measurement,
134
pricing strategies and, 141–142
Quality, service, and price (QSP),
183
Questionnaires, 115, 117
Quinn, James Brian, 114
Rapp, Stan, 7Rawlins, Gregory, 23
Reach, in advertising campaign, 5Real-time inventory management,
81
Real-time selling, 81–82
Recession marketing, 149–151
Recruitment, 91, 187
Reebok, 72, 170
Reengineering, 99, 130
Reeves, Rosser, 1
Referrals, 98
Regional headquarters, global expansion,
88–89
Regional management, functions of,89
REI (outdoor equipment store), 62
Relationship capital, 151

204 Index
Relationship differentiation, 50
Relationship marketing (RM):
characteristics of, 151–152
deﬁned, 152
4Ps and, 153
sales promotion and, 160
shift to, 152–153, 154
Relationship scorecard, 151
Reputation, importance of, 69, 113
Research and development (R&D), 89, 119,
127
Resegmentation, 72
Retail anthropologists, 115–116
Retailers, 154–156
Retailing, success factors, 155–156
Return on assets (ROA), 62
Return on investment (ROI), 62–63
Return on sales, 69
Ries, Al, 12, 135–136, 146,
173
Ries, Laura, 146
Ritz-Carlton, 48
Roddick, Anita, 31, 57
Rogers, Martha, 44
Rolex Watch Company, 55
Rolls-Royce, 177
Roosevelt, Franklin, 95
Rosenbluth Travel, 57
Royal Ahold, 88
Ryder, 184
Sales automation software, 80–81
Sales department, functions of, 130
Sales force:compensation, 157–158
functions of, generally, 105marketing role, 158–159
motivation for, 158
need for, 157
outsourcing, 132
performance measurement, 158–159
sales automation equipment, 159
strategies, see Sales strategies
Sales promotion, 19, 160–162
Sales strategies:
business-to-business (B2B) marketing,
15–16
personal selling, 110–111
pull strategies, 111
push strategies, 111
videoconferencing, 16
Sam’s, 155
Sara Lee Corporation, 87
Saturn (carmaker), 75
Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS), 32
Schultz, Heidi and Don, 13
Schwab, Charles, 14
Sears, 20, 173
Sectors, segments vs., 163

Segmentation:in corporate growth, 71–72
types of, 162–164
Segments of one, 163
Selling:
effective salespeople, 165–166
images of, 164–165
personal, 110–111
rejection, dealing with, 165
success factors, 165–167
telemarketing, 179–180
value creation, 167
Sense-and-respond marketing, 34, 181
Service, see Customer service
design, 46
differentiation strategies, 51
importance of, 167–168
Service businesses, design considerations,48
7-Eleven, 81
7-Up, 137
Sewell, Carl, 141
Shareholder value, 63
Siebel, Tom, 21, 95
Siemens, 131, 148
Simon, Hermann, 65
Singapore Airlines, 23
Single-channel marketing, 182
Situational analysis, in marketing plan,
112–113
Slywotzky, Adrian, 73
Small indulgences, 29
Smile index, 168
Social causes, participation in, 9, 169
Sony, 10, 12, 14, 26, 48, 83, 107, 142, 185
Southwest Airlines, 22, 27, 129, 132, 137,
144, 172
Spin-offs, 174
Spokespersons, 7, 9, 169–170
Sponsorship, 7, 9, 169–170
Staff management, marketing control role,78
Stakeholders, 113
Stanley Works, 164–165
Staples, 155
Starbucks Coffee Company, 9, 14, 48,
54–55, 61, 84
State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance,98
Statler, Ellsworth, 168
Stead, Jerre L., 144
Steiner Optical, 65–66
Stew Leonard’s, 156
Strategic control, 79
Strategic positioning, 171, 173
Strategic segment, 164
Strategy:bad, examples of, 173–174
components of, 172

Index 205
examples of, 172
importance of, 171–172
middle-of-the-road, 174
strategic positioning, 171, 173
value proposition, 171–172
Style, in design, 46–47
Success factors, generally, 175
Sunkist, 8
Sun Tzu, 23, 174
Superstores, 154
Suppliers:
creativity and, 29
importance of, 176–177
relationships, 87
Supply chain software, 104
Surveys, in market research, 115, 117
Swatch (watchmaker), 84
SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,
threats) analysis, 112–113, 152
Synectics, 29
Taco Bell, 72
Tactical marketing, 119
Tag line, 27
Takeuchi, Hiroyuki, 130
Talent market, 84
Tamcsin, Dennis, 165
Target (stores), 149
Target customer, identiﬁcation of, 48. See
also Target market
Target market:
customer research, 35–36
deﬁned, 122
in global expansion, 88
identiﬁcation of, 19
importance of, 177–178
segmentation of, 162–163
value proposition, 171–172
Technological advances, 178–179
Telemarketers/telemarketing, 44, 135, 159,
179–180
Television advertising, 123, 145
Tetra Food, 66
Thompson, John, 59
3M, 59, 83, 102, 107
3Vs, in strategy development, 172
Tichy, Noel M., 143
Tiffany, 2
Tofﬂer, Alvin, 29
Top management, marketing control role,
78–79
Total product, 141
Townsend, Robert, 26, 95
Toyota, 12, 48
Toys ‘R’ Us, 154
Trademarks, 86
Training programs, 33, 180
Transaction history, 43
Transaction marketing (TM), 152, 154, 160

Transaction-oriented marketing, 46
Treacy, Michael, 21, 136
Trends:customer-centric marketing, 182
customer dialogue, 181
customer needs and, 31
customer retention, focus on, 181
customer share, pursuit of, 181
customized marketing, 182
cyberspace, operating in, 182
detection strategies, 44, 122
multichannel marketing, 182
owning brands, 182
sense-and-respond marketing,181
Trend spotters, 29
Trout, Jack, 12, 50, 135–136, 173
Truman, Harry, 68, 95
Tylenol, 12Underhill, Paco, 115–116
Unica, 82
Unilever, 80, 141
Uniqueness, 27
United Parcel Service, 107
Up-selling, 34–35
USAA, 65
Value, generally:
creation, 167deﬁned, 183disciplines, 136
network, 172
perception of, 184
proposition, see Value proposition
purchase, 184
target, 172
use, 184
Value-added, generally:
products, 48
service, 137
Value-adding costs, 184
Value-delivery system, 183–184
Value proposition:customer, 150deﬁned, 183
importance of, 58, 98, 172
partner, 150
Vendors, 154–156
Venture capital, 94
Vertical organizations, 130
Viagra, 9, 126, 146
Videoconferencing, 16
Vigilant consumers, 29
Virgin Atlantic Airways, 125
Virgin brand, 10, 12, 26
Virtual organizations, 132
Vision, importance of, 95, 112
Volvo, 135, 138

206 Index
Walgreen, Charles R., III, 95
Walgreen Co., 95
Wal-Mart, 22, 71, 81, 84, 93, 129, 132,
137, 144, 149
Walton, Sam, 59–60, 168
Wanamaker, John, 4Warehouse withdrawals, 115
Warehousing, competition and, 23
Waterman, Bob, 21
Watson, Thomas J., 67
Wealth creation, 147
Web sites, beneﬁts of, 94, 156
Welch, Jack, 16–17, 38, 59, 67, 72, 92, 96,
133, 148, 183
Western Union, 17
When Giants Learn to Dance (Kanter), 129
Whirlpool, 116
Why We Buy (Underhill), 115
Wiersema, Fred, 21, 136
Wilson, Earl, 127

Winnebago Industries, 151
Wise, Richard, 73
Word-of-mouth campaigns, 185–186
Working capital, 81, 101
Wrigley, 44
Xerox, 12, 31, 74, 127
Zagat, 186
Zaltman, Gerald, 117
Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique(ZMET), 117–118
Zero customer feedback time, 144
Zero defects, 145
Zero inventory, 145
Zero product improvement time,
144
Zero-sum thinking, 142
Zest, 187
Zyman, Sergio, 7