Counterintuitive Marketing

Why does american business seem to sputter along where it ought to thrive? what is the source of the current plague of downsizing, disappearing companies, dot-com crashes, and here-today-gone-tomorrow advertising campaigns? why do more products flop than ever before? marketing experts kevin j. clancy and peter c. krieg have the answers.incounterintuitive marketing, clancy and krieg trace the high rate of business failure back to bad marketing strategy, and the even worse implementation of that strategy. excess testosterone, they argue, compels senior managers to make decisions intuitively, instinctively, quickly, and, unfortunately, disastrously.in this informative and enlightening book, clancy and krieg confront these "over-and-over-again" marketers, who don't have time to do it right the first time, but endless time and a company bankroll to do it wrong over and over again. the authors draw from their decades of consumer and business-to-business marketing experience to describe the intuitive decision-making practices that permeate business today, and demonstrate how these practices lead to disappointing performance.chapter by chapter,counterintuitive marketing contrasts how marketing decisions are made today with how they should be made. the authors give equal treatment to targeting, positioning, product development, pricing, customer service, e-commerce, marketing planning, implementation, and more as they present counterintuitive ideas for building and introducing blockbuster marketing programs.readers will discover in this iconoclastic treasure chest hundreds of penetrating insights that have enabled the authors' firm, copernicus, to transform companies and become a "brand guardian" to the fortune 500 and emerging businesses around the world. the tools to create exceptional marketing programs really do exist, and they are all here in counterintuitive marketing, the ultimate practical guide for any company of any size. kevin j. clancy is chairman, ceo, and co-founder of copernicus marketing consulting and research, a firm that provides marketing consulting and research services to fortune 500 companies and emerging businesses worldwide. he is the co-author ofthe marketing revolution andmarketing myths that are killing business. he lives in gloucester, massachusetts. excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved. chapter one: strategic plan your way to nowhereconsidered from one perspective, the 1990s were the best of times. a period of robust economic growth with thousands of new businesses creating hundreds of thousands -millions -of new jobs. a time of low interest rates, virtually nonexistent inflation, and a booming stock market and at the close of the decade rising corporate profits.the phenomenal success of internet companies has clouded our thinking about business. tens of thousands of companies have been started. billions of dollars invested. market capitalizations greater than corporations with factories, tangible assets, and histories.considered from another perspective, the 1990s represented the worst of times. a time of corporate downsizing, asian economies wracked by instability, workers on the brink of despair, and many great names suffering during a booming economy.coca-cola's decline is a particularly sad story, although one that we believe might have been predicted based on observations we've made throughout this book. coke announced in early february 2000 that it was cutting its work force by 20 percent -around 6,000 jobs, including nearly half of those at coke headquarters, atlanta -and shifting more power to executives abroad to try to boost sales around the world. the changes were the most dramatic in coke's 114-year history.we're new englanders and are particularly unhappy to see local companies like digital equipment, gillette, lotus development, ocean spray, polaroid, prime computer, and wang m