“Marketing Thinking” by AlexanderRepiev
Alexander Repiev
Marketing Thinking
or
Clientomania
Knowledge is a tool, not an end in itself.
Leo Tolstoy
To teach not thoughts, but thinking.
Immanuil Kant
Has been translated into English
Available at Amazon.com /
This provocative book is not a traditional compendium of marketing definitions, schemes, diagrams, and matrices. It’s an exciting story about marketing thinking, a fairly elusive substance, which is akin to the musical ear. The absence of that “ear” turns a Harvard graduate into a useless and even dangerous marketing robot. Its presence makes even a rough-and-ready shop keeper into a bullet-biter and achiever.
Now that we have entered a brave new world of the turbulent “new economy,” marketing battles will be won not by “instrumentalists.” They will be won by marketing thinkers, by those who can think and feel like the Client and for the Client, by those who can live and breathe the Client, by those infected with Clientomania, by those bristling with disciplined creativity and inventiveness.
This book is both philosophic and pragmatic. It offers no easy formulas, but rather a guidance on how to acquire marketing thinking and apply it to a gamut of daunting marketing chores.
The book’s provocative highlights are:
–Corporate & personal dangers of pseudo-marketing
–The way marketing decisions are, and must be made
–Make-or-break importance of marketing thinking in marketing decision making
–A magnified-glass look at His Majesty the Client
–The Living Man and his RESOURCES, such as interestedness, attention, memory, etc., a subject normally ignored by marketing and especially branding texts
–The Buying Man viewed from a slew of angles
–Segmentation based on Client insights
–“A well-selling product or a well-known ‘brand’?” looks at the many prejudices and stupidities associated with the now-so-fashionable branding fantasias
– Marketing communications – everything communications, advertising being a dubious choice
Preface
I HAVE BEEN NURTURING this book for years. Most ideas it incorporates have resulted from decades of my experience as a practical marketer, copywriter, consultant, and teacher. Some have been prompted by my spells in seemingly irrelevant domains such as the navy, physics, foreign service, translations, and even stunt horse riding. Other valuable sources of inspiration have been business memoirs of successful practitioners, and discussions in various business audiences and Internet forums.
Throughout my marketing career, I have tantalizingly been groping for answers to two questions. The first one is:
What predetermines the success of a practical marketer? – Knowledge and experience? Skills and habits? Just testosterone and good luck? Or something else?
As to marketing knowledge, I have repeatedly been frustrated by the fact thatvenerable compendiaof marketing “learnedness” have been of no help whatsoever with my practical tasks, especially in Russia. Moreover, steeped in the strict scientific tradition, I have searched in those texts forsigns of scientific knowledge, i.e., for valid empirical postulates and tried-and-true theories, which would enable me to predict something in practice – this is a hallmark of real scientific knowledge. I was in for a shocking revelation:There is NO scientific knowledge in marketing!
As to experience, I have come across many an “experienced” marketing chair-polisher and number cruncher, good for nothing, to say the least, as a moneymaker for his organization.
As to testosterone and good luck – well, both might come in handy in whatever endeavor, provided the testosterone is tempered by acumen and reasoning, of course!
I have gradually and painfully arrived at the following answer to this question:
А practical marketer will hardly ever be successful unless he is endowed with a special marketing thinking.
This thinking is akin to the musical ear: some people have it, others don’t. My experience has shown that some can develop a marketing “ear,” whereas others are hopelessly deaf to marketing “music.”
I am dead sure now that practitioners without marketing thinking may be dangerous; and that the principal reason behind marketing failures is exactly the absence of marketing thinking in marketers and CEOs involved, or even in an entire organization.
The second question is:
Why has a marketer’s success nothing to do with his formal marketing education?
The answer is simple. At universities and business-schools, marketing students largely grow intellectual “fat,” not intellectual “muscles.” To use Kant’s words:
Current marketing education is about “thoughts,” not “thinking.” It is rather about pseudo-marketing, not marketing.
Hence, we have hordes of marketing robots laden with useless “thoughts” and all too few creative marketing “thinkers.”
What’s in this book
The book offers no easy formulas, but rather a guidance on how to acquire marketing thinking and apply it to a gamut of marketing chores. It is both philosophic and pragmatic.
The book consists of three Parts.
Part 1 begins with an introduction to the current problems of marketing, or rather pseudo-marketing. These include primarily ghettoization of academia and their irresponsibility to the marketing practitioner. Among its “derivative” maladies are scholasticism and bureaucracy. A section on decision-making in marketing leads the reader up to the make-or-break importance of marketing thinking, which is a subject of a separate section. After an overview of qualities a creative marker should display, the reader is introduced to marketing thinking “techniques.” The last section discusses in some detail the extremely important theme of selling points.
Part 2 is called “Your Client.” It starts with insights into the Living Man. One section is devoted to an issue that is generally overlooked in academic marketing texts – that of the resources of a human being. The last section looks at the Buying Man.
Part 3, called “Workshop,” is essentially a guidance on how to employ marketing thinking in the everyday work of a marketing practitioner. The section “Marketing: wings and fuselage” stresses the importance of a synergy between marketing thinking and adequate organizational structure. A section on market research looks carefully into the many prejudices associated with surveys. A large section discusses the many aspects of products. One of the most contentious sections in the book is that called “A well-selling product or a well-known ‘brand’?” It looks at the now fashionable topic of “branding” from the Client’s perspective. The winding sections are concerned with the applications of marketing thinking in marketing communications, especially in advertising.
The ideas of this book have been tested extensively in practice and class.
Alexander Repiev
Moscow, Russia, 2007
Table of Contents
1
“Marketing Thinking” by AlexanderRepiev
Preface
PartI
Marketing:knowledge, thinking, decisions
Marketing and pseudomarketing
Ismarketing obsolete?
Marketing “soul” or a marketing “department”?
Definitions of marketing
The “Client” in marketing
Science, art, or craft?
Pseudo-marketing: irresponsibility to practice
Pseudo-marketing: scholasticism
Pseudo-marketing: faulty reasoning
Pseudo-marketing:wrong education
Pseudo-marketing:bureaucracy
Marketing: performance skills
Marketing: it is getting harder!
Marketing: universal thinking, unique decisions
Marketing: disciplined creativity
What and how to teach marketers
Decisions in marketing
Negative sides of decisions
Education
“Correct” experience
Information
Marketing thinking
Brain hemispheres
Definition of “marketing thinking”
Marketing thinking non-stop
Some history
The core of the profession
Switching to marketing thinking
Corporate marketing thinking
Internalmarketing
Ergonomics and marketing
Marketing thinking for NON-marketers
What helps marketing thinking
Qualities of the creative marketer
Personal opinion
No dogmatism!
Common sense and intellect
“Imagination tempered by marketing acumen”
Creative intuition
Inventiveness that sells
Marketing thinking “techniques”
Client-questions non-stop
Marketing audit
From a hypothesis to a decision
Selling points
The language of selling points
Can characteristics sell?
Identification of selling points
False selling points
“Secret” selling points
Corporate selling points
Creationofnovel selling points
Advantage or disadvantage
Cross-cultural marketingand selling points
Selling points of imported goods
Client objections
PartII
Your Client
The Living Man
Human values
Man and information
Herd behavior
How we all hate changes!
Who is an authority to us?
Lay notions of quality
Resources of a human being
The conscious and subconscious minds
Time
Interestedness
Eye sight
Other sensory organs
Attention
Desire to strain oneself
Intellect and education
Memory
Humor
Sexuality
Ambitions and vanity
Fear
Trust
Money
Privacy
Needs
Levels of needs
How needs occur
Do we know the needs of the Client?
Does the Client know his needs?
Kinds of needs
Creation of new needs
Cultural needs
Ways of meeting needs
The Buying Man
Do people like to buy?
Overwhelming choice
Customer behavior
Purchases
Classification of Clients
How do people buy a product?
Segmentation
The unhappy Client
PartIII
Workshop
Marketing: wings and fuselage
Attitude to marketing in the company
Attitude to marketing in the marketing department
Work with selling points
Internal marketing
Marketing communications
New products
Pricing
Distribution
Other elements
Market research
To research or not to research?
Marketing thinking and research
The respondent: ideal and real
Surveys
Interpretation of data
Answers and real actions
Research for new products
Competition research
Ethics, time, finances
Observations of Clients
Products
Product: a good + services
Product: a good + services + atmosphere
Products and needs
WHAT does the Client buy?
Product categories
HOW does the Client buy?
The Client at the point of purchase
After a sale
Consumption
Prejudices in the market
Country as a selling point
Latent needs
Newness
Trademark awareness
Availability at retail outlets
A well-selling product or a well-known “brand”?
“Brand-ologists”
“Brand-masters”
Everything in the garden is just lovely
“Brand” – an utterly obscure notion
A stop-over
Historical roots of the chaos
“Brands” and business
“Economic” definition of “brand”
Awareness
Associations
Loyalty
Superbenefits
Identifiers
Company names
What is a good “brand”?
“Branding” and human resources
“Emotional ties”
“Brandability” of product categories
Conclusions
Creation of new products
Product idea
Preparation
R&D
Manufactured article
Product
List of selling points
Name of a product
Marketingof packaging
Manuals
Sales guides
“How-to-choose” guides
Marketing communications
Testing everything!
Marketing communications
Everything communicates!
Definition of marketing communications
Nature and volume of communications
Start with internal marketing!
Investments rather than costs
“Two-way street”
Priority of selling points
Advertising
What is advertising?
Purpose of advertising
Different advertising for different products
Do you need advertising?
Efficiencies of advertising
Problems of advertising
Advertising thinking
The Living Man and advertising
Environment of advertising
Simplicity
Consumption of advertising
AIDA
Attention of a target audience
Visual perception of advertising
To read or not to read?
Readability
Testing of advertisements
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