The Marketer's Handbook: Reassessing Marketing Techniques for Modern Business

517 Pages·2011·2.25 MB·English

by  Laurie Young

THE MARKETER’S
HANDBOOK

THE MARKETER’S
HANDBOOK
Reassessing Marketing Techniques
for Modern Business
Laurie Young
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This edition fi rst published 2011
© 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Young, Laurie, 1955-
The marketer’s handbook : reassessing marketing techniques for modern business / Laurie Young.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-74687-5 (hardback)
1. Marketing. I. Title.
HF5415.Y7917 2011
658.8—dc22
2011007563
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-470-74687-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-119-97352-2 (ebk)
ISBN 978-1-119-97850-3 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-119-97851-0 (ebk)
Set in 11 on 13 pt Bembo by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited, Hong Kong
Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
For Joyce & Ken, who never had a chance but gave me one.

CONTENTS
Preface ix
The Blind Men and an Elephant xii
What’s In and What’s Not xiv
The Ratings xxi
Alphabetical Entries 1
In Conclusion 461
References 469
Index 479

PREFACE
Now that I have published several books, I am often asked how long it takes to
write one. The normal answer is between eighteen months and three years. This
one, though, took thirty - fi ve years.
Its tone was set by an incident which happened when, in my mid twenties, I was
asked to be executive assistant to the Deputy Chairman of BT. He (the former Deputy
Chair of Barclays Bank) was brought into the company by Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, to run the privatization. I was his only assistant and was closely involved
in the marketing of the fl oat. There followed eighteen months of demanding work
with a project that set all kinds of fi rsts. Afterwards, though, the newly privatized fi rm
had to set up several radically new approaches. One was a mechanism to assess and
approve capital projects, a level of spend which dominated the new company because
of its extensive backbone network. My boss wanted to set up a “ capital appraisal
committee ” to ensure that more commercially orientated decisions were made at the
acquisition and spend of capital investment. He asked me to investigate “ discounted
cash fl ow analysis ” and “ internal rate of return” in order to draft the methods by
which this capital spend (which at the time was massive) would be evaluated and
approved.
I spent several hours with internal and external accountants, and academics, on
this interesting project. At some point it struck me, though, that these concepts (like
many management tools) were merely a way to structure the thinking of executives
in order to spend shareholder funds to best effect. They looked objective, numerical,
and detailed; yet they still called for the judgement of the senior team on where they
would allocate scarce resources; they were concepts designed to help reach better
decisions. As a result, I went back to source and, with the advice of much more
experienced people, set up mechanisms to dramatize the choices, based on the analysis.
In other words, we understood the strengths and weaknesses of the tool and adjusted
it to suit our circumstances.