Billions of dollars have been wasted on marketing programs that couldn’t possibly work, no matter how clever or brilliant. Or how big the budgets. Many managers assume that a well-designed, well-executed, well-financed marketing program will work. It’s not necessarily so. And you don’t have to look further than IBM, General Motors, and Sears, Roebuck to find examples. The tools and techniques used at Sears, Roebuck might have been right, sometimes even spectacular. And the managers who ran the GM programs might have been the best and the brightest.
Certainly the best and the brightest people traditionally have been attracted to the biggest and the best companies, like GM and IBM. But the programs themselves were based on assumptions that were flawed. John Kenneth Galbraith, when asked what he believed was America’s perception of the country’s giant corporations, said that we feared corporate power. Today, we fear corporate incompetence!
All companies are in trouble. Especially big companies. General Motors is a good example. Over the past decade the company paid a terrible price for destroying the identity of its brands. (It priced them alike as well as made them look alike.) Ten share points evaporated, which translates into about $10 billion a year in sales. GM’S problem wasn’t a competitive problem, although competition did increase. It wasn’t a quality problem either, although GM obviously wasn’t delivering top-notch quality.
It was very definitely a marketing problem.
When a company makes a mistake today, footprints quickly show up on its back as competition
runs off with its business. To get the business back,
the company has to wait for others to make mistakes
and then figure out how to exploit the situation.
So how do you avoid making mistakes in the
first place? The easy answer is to make sure your
programs are in tune with the laws of marketing.
(Although we have defined our ideas and concepts under the “marketing” banner, they are useful no matter where you are in a company, and no
matter what product or service your company is
selling.)
What are these marketing laws? And who brought
them down from Mount Sinai on a set of stone tablets?
The fundamental laws of marketing are those
described in this book.
But who says so? How come two guys from Connecticut
I
