2004 Q1 Book Review
Counter-Intuitive Marketing
by Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg
The authors trace the high rate of business failure back to bad marketing strategy, and the even worse implementation of that strategy. Many examples are given that describe the intuitive decision-making practices that permeate business today and demonstrate how these practices lead to disappointing performance.
Marketing is the only way to grow a business. Since the purpose of a business is to find and keep customers, the business enterprise has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.
The authors classify 22 marketing management functions and further split the functions into 80 benchmark areas totaling 700 questions. Based on surveying several hundred companies regarding “best practices” the average score was only 49 out of 100 suggesting the need for better marketing. The authors cite many reasons for the poor performance by companies in their marketing efforts including how competitors guide decisions of many companies, that real customer needs and problems are either unknown or ignored and that too few alternatives for each decision are evaluated.
The authors do a good job of pinpointing the vulnerabilities in many marketing programs and suggest a multitude of ideas on how to overcome deficiencies.