The one-sentence summary
When you start looking at exactly how much things cost and how much profit you are making you become a much better marketer.
WHAT THE BOOK SAYS
- Marketing today is all about image, but it isn’t working properly
- Marketing is a science, not an art
- Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department
- Marketers must be accountable to shareholders
- Focus on results, not activities
- Megabrands are a rotten idea
WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT
- It is full of ballsy assertions such as Traditional marketing is not dying, it’s dead, and Why have marketing? To make money
- The section on How to sell the most stuff and make the most money has some helpful steps you can copy:
- How to make positioning a two-way street
- How branding creates identity
- How to stop brands becoming static
- How to compete against yourself
- How to define consumer expectations that your competitors can’t meet
- All the quotes you want are in bold for easy picking:
- “When you start looking at exactly how much things cost and how much profit you are getting…you become a much better marketer”
- “Narrow how your competitor is defined to a single trait or quality whilst simultaneously broadening yours”
- “The old conventional thinking that said that if you grab people’s hearts, their wallets will follow is dead, kaput, finished…people need reasons to buy”
- At the end there are the 28 principles of new marketing (see list)
WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH
- The author is the former Chief Marketing Officer of Coca-Cola, so there are a lot of Coke examples
- He has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about being disliked by creative ad agencies, which can make some of his points defensive (“Agencies can never make smart, fully informed decisions because they are never going to be fully informed”)
- The 28 principles of new marketing aren’t exactly new
- Implementing his approach might encourage machismo in the office