Kellogg on Marketing

Citation

Smith, M.F. (2003), "Kellogg on Marketing", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 37 No. 1/2, pp. 329-330. https://doi.org/10.1108/ejm.2003.37.1_2.329.1

Northwestern University’s Kellogg School marketing faculty has written a collection of essays that is an inspiration to seasoned professionals, marketing managers, and marketing professors who want to review marketing methods and become acquainted with cutting edge strategies and techniques for achieving success in this ever changing marketplace. This absorbing book is divided into six sections.

Sidney J. Levy’s “Forward” gives a brief history of marketing and an overview of the composition of the Kellogg School’s Marketing faculty. Philip Kotler’s “Preface” reflects on the rapid changes in marketing thinking in response to, for example, the World Wide Web, the new economy, data mining, and tremendous growth in B2B e‐commerce. Dawn Iacobucci’s “Introduction” emphasizes the faculty’s varied interests and areas of marketing expertise.

Section One focuses on strategic, visionary thinking about customers and the marketplace strategies and consists of six essays. The first essay provides a strategic approach to segmentation and targeting that is usage‐based. The next essay, brand positioning, continues with describing the integration of competition‐based and goal‐based positioning, explores the challenges that arise in developing and sustaining a strong brand position, and provides a framework that can be used to develop a positioning statement. The essay ends with how technology may influence segmentation, targeting, and positioning. The “brand design” essay focuses on how to approach branding as a matter of business practice. The remaining section essays examine how brands create value and how market‐driving strategies can create unique brand advantage, and provide a specific framework to help organizations manage the new product development process for strategic competitive advantage.

Section Two focuses on learning about the customer and marketplace and consists of three essays. The first essay breaks wide open stereotypical thinking about the conventional wisdom behind marketing research; that is, “its hallmark is that data is primary, quantitative data is preferred, and that the ability to generalize from data comes from large samples” (p. 153). The second essay contains a section on exporting qualitative techniques to cyberspace. The last essay presents two new quantitative research tools, network data and collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering is a cluster analysis approach to e‐commerce (secondary data).

Section Three focuses on implementation issues needed to manage the marketplace and consists of eight essays. Readers will learn how to develop strategies for effective advertising and examine the productive purpose of the marketing channel in overall marketing strategy. The pricing essay connects market share, profitability objectives and price actions and discusses the role of costs, customer value, competition, channels, and regulation in setting prices. The next essay provides a model of the consumer, the fundamental “customer equity equation”, that captures the basis for valuing, analyzing, and managing marketing activities. The services essay provides an overview of services, their importance and differences from products. The business marketing essay examines marketing offerings that have become commodities and suggests ways to rebuild differentiation for these offerings. The essay also presents a “flexible marketing offerings” approach to managing offerings along with implementation strategies. The sales organization essay develops a framework for examining and assessing the sales force. The last essay, “Marketing in the age of information technology”, is a prescription for what marketing should look like in the future.

This collection of essays is heavy on the side of consumer marketing, and some of the information is common knowledge for marketing professors. However, for managers this book will update and sharpen their marketing thinking and for educators it can provide cutting edge marketing management instruction to senior‐level and MBA‐level students. The book could be used as a supplement or as even a text for a senior seminar.