Counterintuitive Marketing Achieving Great Results Using Common Sense

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 Marketingcontrasts 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 of The Marketing Revolution and Marketing Myths That Are Killing Business. He lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Contents

Preface

SECTION I
Revolutionaries, Pioneers, and Cowboys:

How Testosterone Drives American Business

1 Strategic Plan Your Way to Nowhere

2 Driving Growth: The Little Engine That Could

3 Testosterone Decision-making: The Manly Way to Screw Up

4 Warning: Commonsensical Research Can Be Dangerous to Your Career

SECTION II
Counterintuitive Thinking Behind

Great Marketing Strategies

5 Stunted Brands: Too Much Juice, Too Little Equity

6 Marketing Visionaries: Seeing What Is Not There

7 Guess Again: Intuitively Appealing Targets Are Rarely the Most Profitable

8 Positioning:...And That Would Mean What?

9 Sleeper and Subliminal Effects Don't Increase Sales

10 Direct Marketers Need More Than Just Better Lists

11 Three Scoops for a Quarter Is Two Too Many

12 Give All Your Customers a New Car

13 Raise Your Prices: Uncommon Approaches That Make Sense

14 E-commerce Rules Are the Same as T-commerce Rules

SECTION III
Implementing Counterintuitive

Marketing Programs

15 Prayers and Divine Intervention: No Marketing Miracles to Date

16 Testing in Cyberspace Is Better Than Testing in the World

17 Good Implementation May Be More Important Than a Great Strategy

18 You Can't Measure Success Without a Score Card

19 Always Time to Do It Over; Never Time to Do It Right

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Authors and Their Company