Page 10 - Marketing the Basics 2nd
P. 10
2 Marketing: the Basics
At the same time, as globalization continues to foster closer social, economic and political ties, there is an increasing need for the new generation of marketing managers to think with an integrative perspective in an international context.
New strategies offer new choices, but which to choose? How are these methods and success measured? How does marketing strategy fit with the overall corporate strategy? The difficulties of marketing in the twenty-first century are real and tangible.
The marketing manager of tomorrow must start thinking in such dynamic terms at the onset of their education. Existing textbooks impart a sense of marketing’s role in the firm. Where they too often fail is in promoting a sense of internationalism and opportunism. By opportunism, we don’t mean it in the self-serving sense of the word. Opportunism means recognizing and understanding how new trends are creating new opportunities. We feel they fail because textbooks are written specifically for a particular geographic region and restrict themselves to traditional ‘Old Economy’ examples. Localizing the content traps the reader into thinking locally and acting globally, not the other way round. And telling old war stories prepares the troops for the old battles. We’ve been living in a new world order for over 20 years now.
For practitioners, we hope we’ve put together a book that you’ll reference when you’re in need of a quick refresher on the old or new basics of marketing. Chapters 1, 3 and 4 are of particular interest to you, as well as our examples in Chapters 5 through 8 on customer relationship management and online marketing.
For those of you who are students, we created this book with the aim of being the sole textbook you’ll ever need to buy during your academic career. We’ve covered all the primary topics you’ll find in other books of a similar ilk, at the same time we balanced the content not only with real life stories based on our own experience as professional marketers (and we’ve been lucky to have worked with some of the biggest and most innovative brands out there), but by also writing in a relaxed, conversational style to make the learning process easier for you. We tried our best to avoid over- hyping the benefits of the latest marketing fad, while pointing out the reasons why some of the older techniques were so innovative for their time. We hope that after reading this book you will learn