Do You Buy the New Marketing?

Business today is changing more dramatically than it has at any time in the past hundred years. Every day seems to bring a record-breaking IPO in a business that didn't exist five years ago. Tens of millions of people are using the Internet to connect with one another -- and to change how they connect with commerce. And yet, for all this change, the business of business remains the same: to attract new customers and to hold on to the ones you've already got. In other words, you can't claim to be a great company unless you're great at marketing.

Of course, marketing is changing too. The new question for marketers: How do you get people to pay attention to your messages when they are dealing with more email than they can possibly read, more Web sites than they can possibly surf, more TV commercials than they can possibly watch? Several new books -- some by longtime marketing gurus, some by Net-era pioneers -- offer intriguing answers. Together, they provide a cutting-edge curriculum for connecting with your customers. Get it while it's hot.

Marketing's New Positioning

For Sergio Zyman, former chief marketing officer of Coca-Cola, the future of marketing is about getting back to basics. In "The End of Marketing As We Know It" (HarperBusiness, 1999, $26), he argues that marketers have forgotten their job: "The sole purpose of marketing is to get more people to buy more of your product, more often, for more money." The focus today is on the trappings of marketing -- "the glitz, the awards presentations, the jetting off to 'do a shoot' on some tropical isle." In effect, marketing has become more about impressing the profession than about motivating the customer.

Zyman didn't have that problem at Coke. During his tenure, from 1993 to 1998, the number of cases that Coke sold each year increased by 50%, from 10 billion to 15 billion, and the company's market value jumped from $58 billion to $165 billion. Zyman attributes those results in part to his approach to marketing: He treated his work as a "serious business discipline" rather than as a mysterious, "magical process." That's why he pulled such crowd-pleasing, award-winning ads as the classic "I'd like to teach the world to sing" spot: They generated more goodwill than they did sales.

Producing big results in the future, Zyman argues, will mean grappling with a fundamental reality of the new economy: the democratization of customer culture through access to the Net and to global media. It's the marketer's job to speak directly to individual customers and to help them make decisions. Which is why Zyman says it's just as important to "watch the world" as it is to watch markets. At Coke, he began the practice of hiring pollsters who had worked on a successful presidential campaign right after an election. At that moment, he figured, those people knew more about what was going on in the minds of Americans than anybody else did.

Marketing guru Philip Kotler, the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Northwestern University's J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, goes a step further. He argues that marketers today need to collaborate with their customers -- to codesign the products and services that they want to sell. In "Kotler on Marketing: How to Create, Win, and Dominate Markets" (Free Press, 1999, $27.50), he offers lessons on how to do just that. The first step is to abandon practices that don't work: equating marketing with selling, focusing on customer acquisition instead of "customer care," and looking for profits before creating relationships. His book is a persuasive call for marketers to raise their game.

The Buy Side

There are plenty of new techniques for delivering your message to customers. But those techniques raise another question: How do you know what's on your customers' minds? What messages are going to resonate with them? In "Why People Don't Buy Things: Five Proven Steps to Connect with Your Customers and Dramatically Increase Your Sales" (Perseus Books, 1999, $24), Harry Washburn and Kim Wallace propose a kinder, gentler sales pitch -- one that's based on consumer psychology.

The authors, both market-research experts based outside of Boston, divide buyers into three personality types. The "commander" operates from the gut and is action-oriented. The "thinker" is analytical -- inclined to rely on logic and rules to make decisions. The "visualizer" responds to tangible features and cosmetic appearances. These archetypes are merely guideposts, say the authors. The real lesson: "People are different," and the only way to connect with them is to get at the motives behind their buying. If marketers begin to work at that level, the authors argue, they too will see "sales resistance [not] as a barrier but as a source of information on how the customer is processing a decision."