The Marketing Code

Death stalks the streets of Edinburgh, as marketing lecturer Simon Magill receives a gruesome message about a mysterious website. He is plunged into a marketing maelstrom that sweeps from the glitz of Las Vegas to the grime of West Belfast, taking in the Freemasons, the Knights Templar, the conspiracies surrounding the sinking of the Titanic and, not least, the insidious marketing campaign behind Dan Brown's blockbuster novel, The Da Vinci Code.

As Simon Magill struggles to make sense of the riddle, he uncovers a startling truth about the irredeemably commercial character of the Holy Grail. Racing against time, he discovers that there is, and always has been, a cabal at the heart of Western capitalism - a secret society that possesses the key to business success. Based at a prominent American business school, this clandestine organization has been systematically misleading the marketing community for millennia. As Magill soon discovers, it will stop at nothing to prevent its jealously guarded secret being revealed…

1. How Now Cash Cow
2. The Ginger Man
3. Wizard of the North
4. The Future's Bright
5. Divide and Rule
6. O Captain! My Captain!
7. Carve His Name With Pride
8. who's the Paddy?
9. The Hound of Hustler
10. A Brown Study
11. The Kane Mutiny
12. The Unsinkable Brand
13. A Night to Remember
14. The Beuys Are Back in Town
15. The Ascent of Dan
16. Babbling Brooks
17. Kane and Babel
18. Buy One, Get One Freemason
19. The Folks on the Hill
20. The Fremont Street Experience
21. Full Force Gale
22. Dark End of the Street
23. Fine Place, Rough People
24. Viva, Viva, Las Vegas
25. All the Sixes, Clickety Click
26. King Solomon's Mine
27. P2, or Not P2?
28. Crouching Minger, Flying Drag Queen
29. Simon Magill and the Last Crusade
30. I Wish I Was in Templepatrick
31. The Man Nobody Knows
32. Show Me the Malory
33. O Brotherhood, Where Art Thou?
34. Simon Magill and the Temple of Doom
35. The Odyssey
36. Barton Brady's Big Mistake
37. Anagramalama
38. Hurry, While Shocks Last
39. Song of Solomon
40. Here's Looking at You, Kate
41. Oak Park 'n' Ride
42. Kitchen Confidential
43. Heart of the Ocean
44. Gimme Gimme Gimme a Brand After Midnight
45. Down and Out in Oak Park, Ill.
46. Whack First, Yack Later
47. The Wild Bunch
48. United We Stand
49. Arms and the Dan
50. Sugar Paddy
51. O, Danny Boy

• Author's Note
• Postscript

Rest assured that you will not learn one ounce of marketing from this book, as it is incoherent, badly written and manages to sprout bullshit, all at the same time.

Personally, I believe Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was pure bull, but this book manages to even transcend that low-end excuse to trash. This book is written to be partly a satire to that book, but it fails to even be this. Yes, you may find some mildly funny parts in the book, if you know the Management Marketplace inside-out or if you're a former resident of the University of Ulster, but for the vast majority of us, we can safely skip this sorry excuse to paper waste.