Counterintuitive Marketing
Achieving Great Results Using Common Sense
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Why does American business seem to sputter along where it ought to thrive? What is the source of the current plague of downsizing, disappearing companies, dot-com crashes, and here-today-gone-tomorrow advertising campaigns? Why do more products flop than ever before? Marketing experts Kevin J. Clancy and Peter C. Krieg have the answers.
In Counterintuitive Marketing, Clancy and Krieg trace the high rate of business failure back to bad marketing strategy, and the even worse implementation of that strategy. Excess testosterone, they argue, compels senior managers to make decisions intuitively, instinctively, quickly, and, unfortunately, disastrously.
In this informative and enlightening book, Clancy and Krieg confront these "over-and-over-again" marketers, who don't have time to do it right the first time, but endless time and a company bankroll to do it wrong over and over again. The authors draw from their decades of consumer and business-to-business marketing experience to describe the intuitive decision-making practices that permeate business today, and demonstrate how these practices lead to disappointing performance.
Chapter by chapter, Counterintuitive Marketing contrasts how marketing decisions are made today with how they should be made. The authors give equal treatment to targeting, positioning, product development, pricing, customer service, e-commerce, marketing planning, implementation, and more as they present counterintuitive ideas for building and introducing blockbuster marketing programs.
Readers will discover in this iconoclastic treasure chest hundreds of penetrating insights that have enabled the authors' firm, Copernicus, to transform companies and become a "brand guardian" to the Fortune 500 and emerging businesses around the world. The tools to create exceptional marketing programs really do exist, and they are all here in Counterintuitive Marketing, the ultimate practical guide for any company of any size.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In one of the most thoughtful marketing books of the year, Clancy (coauthor of The Marketing Revolution, etc.) and Krieg hammer home the point that nothing is more important to a business's success than marketing. They maintain that, at a time when most corporate growth has resulted from mergers and acquisitions, many companies use fuzzy qualitative research to make quick, uncontested "gut" decisions. The result is marketing campaigns with a dismal return of one to four percent, say Clancy (former chairman of the respected Yankelovich, Clancy and Shulman research/polling firm) and Krieg (cofounder with Clancy of Copernicus, a marketing research firm). In subsequent sections, they parse traditional marketing strategies for everything from positioning to new product development, pinpointing flawed practices (e.g., studying habits of heavy buyers) and offering alternatives (e.g., segmentation studies). They conclude with advice for shoring up implementation of a well-designed marketing plan, including test marketing on the Internet. Throughout, Clancy and Krieg follow up their clearly presented insights with questions for self-assessment. While they admit that solid marketing (such as that executed by British Airways, Dell, Harley-Davidson and Pepsi) is hard to do well, they believe that it's the only means for long-term success, since "the purpose of a business is to create customers, not to reward stockholders, not make a quarterly dividend." More theoretical and less hip than Sergio Zyman`s Building Brandwidth (Forecasts, Oct. 16), Clancy and Krieg's book is a valuable tool for those willing to invest the time to extract their insights.
