Marketing as Strategy

Today's marketers face a dire situation. CEOs name marketing challenges such as retaining customers and avoiding price wars as top priorities, yet they increasingly doubt whether marketers can handle those challenges. Marketing's traditional goal — getting close to customers — has become the organisation-wide mandate, yet marketing as a function has lost importance. Once viewed as a critical expenditure, marketing is now considered a cost sink. What happened? More important, what can marketers do to regain a prominent role in their organizations?

Nirmalya Kumar argues that the only way for marketers to get back on the CEO's agenda is to tackle issues that merit the CEO's attention — and conducting market research and placing ads don't make the cut. The fate of marketing hinges on elevating the role of marketing executives from promotions-focused tacticians to customer-focused leaders of transformational initiatives that are strategic, cross-functional, and bottom-line oriented.

Based on more than fifteen years of researching, teaching and consulting in a field of marketing, Marketing as Strategy outlines seven organisation-wide transformation initiatives that will win marketing a prominent seat at the executive table. Through revealing company examples, Kumar shows how a focus on the "three Vs" — the valued customer, the value proposition, and the value network — can help marketers lead then shift:

• From tactical market segemts to strategic segments that enable deep differentiation
• From selling commodity products to providing customer solutions
• From shunning new distribution channels to exploiting the right ones to generate growth
• From an organizational mind-set focused around countries and products to a global mind-set oriented around customers and relationships
• From aggressively acquiring brands to actively consolidating the brand portfolio
• From incremental innovation spawned by market research to market-driving innovation spawned by radical new ideas
• From tactical SBU-level marketing to strategic corporate marketing

Provocative and timely, Marketing as Strategy goes inside the mind of the CEO to reveal what marketers must do to secure the future of their field and shape the destiny of their firms.

1. From Marketing as a Function to Marketing as a Transformational Engine
2. From Market Segments to Strategic Segments
3. From Selling Products to Providing Solutions
4. From Declining to Growing Distribution Channels
5. From Branded Bulldozers to Global Distribution Partners
6. From Brand Acquisitions to Brand Rationalization
7. From Market-Driven to Market-Driving
8. From Strategic Business Unit Marketing to Corporate Marketing

I really wanted to like this book. Don't get me wrong, there is value in reading it. But unfortunately, what could have been a well-thought out book on marketing as part of strategy, it comes off as an academic piece, that any experienced strategist mostly can see beyond immediately and detect the sometimes painful flaws in the reasoning. Any serious business developer will discard it fast. I believe the real target groups are MBA-students and management consultants that are looking for the "next-great-idea".

Still, it is worth reading, just to get the authors perspective, but you must read other marketing, strategy and business development books to get anything useful out of this book.