Preface

Most business executives work for enterprises that are characterized by continuous rather than disruptive business models and practices. Their challenge is not to invent the next Google or eBay, but to meet Wall Street expectations for sustained high levels of top-line revenue growth that generate consistent increases in profitability. Their businesses may have been around for more than 100 years, like Procter & Gamble (P&G), and they seek to emulate that company’s performance in coaxing new growth out of old brands. Or it may be a newer business that has started to hit a flatter part of the growth curve, like Microsoft, and is looking to find the next accelerator.

Marketing is the capability that can provide these executives with the engine for growth. We use the word “capability” deliberately to represent a new way of thinking about marketing, much different from how conventional marketing is conceived and practiced. To succeed, management (not just marketing professionals) must adopt a new mind-set for change. This new way of thinking includes the following:

• Reengineering marketing via process, technology, metrics, and new organization forms

• Embedding marketing processes to ensure that business plans reflect vital consumer and customer insights

• Employing marketing technology to unleash creativity, innovation, and growth

• Applying iron discipline to the metrics of the marketing demand creation process

Marketing is no longer a function, but a core competence in growing and sustaining businesses. Major global corporations such as P&G, Wachovia Bank, Hyatt Corporation, Brown-Forman, and Kimberly-Clark have begun to reengineer their concept and practice of marketing to get more growth from every dollar of marketing investment.

EMM Group is prominent among the practitioners who work with these leading companies to successfully implement these new marketing concepts and practices. We provide the case histories of companies in major industries and views of some of the most successful business professionals as they testify to the transformation of their business through the application of marketing processes and the use of the new marketing technology.

This book is about how to engineer marketing—from concept to practical application—to profitably increase growth for existing businesses that need to be ignited for sustained return on investment. We show you what you need to know and how to get it done.

Hunter Hastings