Marketing management

This is the field's definitive textbook, now in a 15th edition tuned to digital realities. Read it if you want a complete, rigorous map of marketing strategy—from research and segmentation to pricing, channels, and brand equity—rather than scattered tactics. Founders, brand managers, and MBA students get a shared vocabulary and a step-by-step process for every major marketing decision.

1. 1Chapter 1

   Marketing is a value-exchange process, not a sales pitch

   The book defines marketing, quoting the American Marketing Association's 2017 definition: 'the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.' From there it lays out the marketing process as a sequence—understand the marketplace and customer needs, design a customer value-driven strategy, construct an integrated marketing program, engage customers and build profitable relationships, and finally capture value from customers to create profits and customer equity. The book presents the 'New Marketing Realities' of the 21st century: technology (digitalization, AI, the Internet of Things), globalization, and social responsibility, forces that have dramatically changed the marketplace.

   The idea

   The definition matters because it stretches marketing beyond the selling moment. Value must be created before it can be communicated, delivered, and exchanged—and the process only pays off at the final step, when the firm captures value back as profits and customer equity. The three new realities explain why the old playbooks feel stale: digitalization, AI, and the Internet of Things change how customers learn and buy, globalization widens the competitive field, and social responsibility raises the stakes on every public decision. A marketer who masters the sequence but ignores the realities is running yesterday's strategy.

   Try this: Write your company's marketing process in five steps—needs, strategy, program, relationships, value capture—and mark which step is weakest today.

2. 2Chapter 2

   Build strategy where you genuinely add value

   To decide where value gets created, the book brings in Michael Porter's value chain: primary activities (inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales, service) supported by firm infrastructure, HR, technology development, and procurement. The value chain is presented as a tool for identifying ways to create more customer value. It then defines core competency—a source of competitive advantage must make a significant contribution to perceived customer benefits, have applications in a wide variety of markets, and be difficult for competitors to imitate. Tying it together is the holistic marketing orientation: development, design, and implementation of marketing programs, processes, and activities that recognize their breadth and interdependencies, spanning relationship marketing, integrated marketing, internal marketing, and performance marketing.

   The idea

   Strategy is a series of narrowing questions. The value chain shows where value is made; core competency shows which of those activities you should defend and deepen; the holistic orientation warns that the answers only work together. Relationship, integrated, internal, and performance marketing are interdependent—great ads cannot rescue a broken service process, and a loyal customer base cannot compensate for inconsistent communications. Firms that treat marketing as one department's job miss the breadth the framework demands.

   Try this: List your firm's activities against Porter's nine value-chain cells, then circle the two that pass all three core-competency tests.

3. 3Chapters 3-4

   Measure demand before you bet on it

   Before any strategy, you need information. The book defines a marketing information system (MIS) as people, equipment, and procedures to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate, and distribute needed, timely, and accurate information to marketing decision makers. The book states: 'there are three sources of market demand: new customers entering the market, existing customers buying more, and existing customers replacing worn-out or obsolete products.' The marketing research process is defined in six steps: define the problem and research objectives, develop the research plan, collect the information, analyze the information, present the findings, and make the decision.

   The idea

   Growth math becomes simple once demand is decomposed. Every unit of future sales comes from someone new entering, someone buying more, or someone replacing what wore out—so forecasts and growth plans should name which source they rely on. The MIS keeps that analysis fed with timely, accurate information rather than anecdotes, and the six-step research process keeps spending disciplined: defining the problem and objectives first prevents expensive studies that answer the wrong question and end in a shelf, not a decision.

   Try this: Split last year's revenue growth into new customers, increased purchases, and replacement sales to see which engine actually drove it.

4. 4Chapter 5

   Retention beats acquisition on cost

   The chapter defines customer perceived value (CPV) as the difference between the prospective customer's evaluation of all the benefits and costs of an offering and the perceived alternatives—total customer benefit minus total customer cost. The book states: 'acquiring new customers can cost five times more than satisfying and retaining current customers.' The book defines customer lifetime value (CLV) as the net present value of the stream of future profits expected over the customer's lifetime purchases.

   The idea

   Perceived value reframes competition: you are not fighting rivals directly, you are fighting the customer's comparison between your total benefits and costs and the alternatives'. The five-times cost gap turns retention from a soft virtue into a hard financial argument—every dollar spent keeping a customer avoids five spent replacing one. CLV completes the shift from transaction thinking to relationship thinking, because a customer's worth is the discounted stream of future profits, not the last receipt.

   Try this: Compute your acquisition cost per customer and compare it to your annual retention spend; if the gap approaches five to one, rebalance the budget.

5. 5Chapters 6-7

   Buying happens inside a black box

   The model of consumer behavior is presented: marketing stimuli (the 4 Ps) and other stimuli (economic, technological, political, cultural) enter the consumer's 'black box'—consumer psychology and characteristics—and produce responses in buying attitudes, preferences, and behavior. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is presented as a theory of motivation, with human needs arranged in a pyramid from most pressing to least: physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-actualization. The buying center is the decision-making unit of a buying organization, made up of all individuals and groups who participate in the purchasing decision-making process, playing the roles of initiators, users, influencers, deciders, approvers, buyers, and gatekeepers.

   The idea

   The black box model is a humbling tool: you control the stimuli, but the response emerges from psychology and characteristics you can only study, not dictate. Maslow's pyramid tells you which need your product actually serves, which shapes message and price. In business markets the unit of analysis changes entirely—one organization, many people, seven distinct roles. Selling to the gatekeeper while ignoring the decider, or dazzling the user without the approver, stalls deals that looked closed.

   Try this: Map your next B2B deal by naming who fills each of the seven buying-center roles, then plan contact for every role you have never met.

6. 6Chapters 9-10

   Pick markets you can win, then plant a flag in the mind

   Market segmentation is the process of dividing a market into distinct groups of buyers with different needs, characteristics, or behaviors who might require separate products or marketing mixes, using geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral variables. A target market is defined as a set of buyers sharing common needs or characteristics that the company decides to serve, reached through four strategies: undifferentiated (mass) marketing, differentiated marketing, concentrated (niche) marketing, and micromarketing. Positioning is the act of designing a company's offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the minds of the target market, producing a customer-focused value proposition—a cogent reason why the target market should buy. Points-of-difference (PODs) are attributes or benefits consumers strongly associate with a brand, positively evaluate, and believe they could not find to the same extent with a competitive brand, while points-of-parity (POPs) are associations not necessarily unique to the brand but shared with others.

   The idea

   These chapters form a funnel: slice the market, choose the slice, then claim a mental position within it. The POD pairing is the practical genius—points-of-parity neutralize competitors by meeting category expectations, while points-of-difference give buyers a reason only you can supply. A value proposition that leans only on POPs is forgettable; one that claims a POD customers do not positively evaluate is noise. Distinctiveness in the mind, not in the factory, is what positioning actually builds.

   Try this: Draft your value proposition in one sentence, then list one POD you can defend and one POP you must match to stay credible.

7. 7Chapter 11

   Brand equity is a pyramid you climb

   Brand equity is the added value endowed on products and services, reflected in how consumers think, feel, and act with respect to the brand, as well as in the prices, market share, and profitability the brand commands. The brand resonance model by Kevin Lane Keller is presented as a pyramid with four steps—brand identity (salience), brand meaning (performance and imagery), brand response (judgments and feelings), and brand resonance (intense, active loyalty). Each step depends on the one below it.

   The idea

   The definition captures equity's double life: it lives in consumers' thoughts and feelings, but it cashes out as price premiums, market share, and profitability. The pyramid's discipline is its ordering—asking for loyalty before establishing who the brand is and what it means skips steps that cannot be skipped. Salience comes first because a brand that is not thought of cannot be judged; resonance comes last because intense, active loyalty is earned only after meaning and response are secure.

   Try this: Place your brand on Keller's four steps honestly, then name the single weakest step and one action to strengthen it this quarter.

8. 8Chapters 8, 12-13

   Grow by widening the market, not just the share

   Growth has a geography and a playbook. The four stages of a company's internationalization are: no regular export activities, export via independent representatives, establishment of overseas sales subsidiaries, and establishment of overseas production facilities. The book states that 'market leaders can expand the total market' by finding new users, new uses, and more usage of its products. The five product levels in the customer-value hierarchy are: core benefit, basic product, expected product, augmented product, and potential product.

   The idea

   Market-leader thinking flips the share question: before fighting rivals for the same buyers, enlarge the pool through new users, new uses, and more usage. The four internationalization stages give that expansion a sequence—each step commits more capital and control, so skipping stages multiplies risk. The five product levels explain where differentiation lives: the core benefit is table stakes, the augmented product is where competitors fight, and the potential product is tomorrow's upgrades waiting to be discovered.

   Try this: Brainstorm one new use and one new user group for your main product, then estimate which market-expansion lever is cheapest to pull.

9. 9Chapters 14-15

   Services and new products obey their own rules

   Services are defined by four key characteristics: intangibility, inseparability, variability, and perishability. The new product development process is an eight-stage framework: idea generation, idea screening, concept development and testing, marketing strategy development, business analysis, product development, market testing, and commercialization. Each stage is a filter, and the expensive stages come last for a reason.

   The idea

   Every service characteristic creates a management problem with a known shape. Intangibility demands tangible cues and evidence. Inseparability makes the provider part of the product. Variability requires training and standardization. Perishability forces demand-smoothing through pricing and scheduling. The eight-stage new-product process works the same way: idea screening and business analysis exist to kill weak concepts early, so commercialization—the most expensive stage—only happens to ideas that survived concept testing and market testing.

   Try this: Audit your service against the four characteristics and fix the one causing the most complaints—usually variability in who delivers it.

10. 10Chapters 16-18

    Price signals value; channels are strategy, not plumbing

    The three major pricing strategies are: customer value-based pricing (setting price based on buyers' perceptions of value), cost-based pricing (setting price based on the costs of producing, distributing, and selling the product plus a fair rate of return), and competition-based pricing (setting price based on competitors' strategies, costs, prices, and offerings). A marketing channel system is the particular set of interdependent organizations involved in the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption, and the book states that 'a channel system... represents a significant opportunity cost for the firm.' The wheel of retailing concept explains that new types of retailers usually begin as low-margin, low-price, low-status operations but later acquire more elaborate facilities and increase costs and prices, eventually becoming vulnerable to new, low-cost entrants.

    The idea

    Value-based pricing starts where cost-based pricing ends—beginning with the buyer's perception rather than the ledger, which is why the same product can command different prices in different segments. The channel quote reframes distribution as a choice with real trade-offs: every channel commitment forecloses alternatives, making it an opportunity cost, not a logistics detail. The wheel of retailing warns incumbents that today's premium position invites tomorrow's low-cost disruptor—the cycle that dethroned one generation of retailers awaits the next.

    Try this: Recompute the price of one product starting from customer perceived value instead of cost-plus, and compare the two numbers.

11. 11Chapters 19-22

    Choose the communication mix that fits the message

    The eight major modes of the marketing communications mix are: advertising, sales promotion, events and experiences, public relations and publicity, online and social media marketing, mobile marketing, direct and database marketing, and personal selling. The five M's of advertising are: Mission (sales or brand-building objectives), Money (budget factors and methods), Message (generation, evaluation, execution, and social responsibility review), Media (reach, frequency, impact, and media types), and Measurement (communication and sales impact). The book defines social media as 'a means for consumers to share text, images, audio, and video information with each other and with companies, and vice versa,' with main platforms including online communities and forums, blogs, and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The six-step personal selling process is: prospecting and qualifying, preapproach, presentation and demonstration, overcoming objections, closing, and follow-up and maintenance.

    The idea

    The eight modes are a menu, not a checklist—each mode suits different objectives, audiences, and budgets, so the mix should follow the strategy. The five M's impose order on advertising's most chaotic decisions, especially Measurement, which closes the loop between communication impact and sales impact. Social media's definition highlights the two-way flow: consumers share with companies as much as companies share with consumers. Personal selling's six steps show why follow-up and maintenance belong to the sale itself, not an afterthought.

    Try this: Score each of the eight communication modes against your current objective, then cut the two lowest scorers and reinvest in the highest.

12. 12Chapter 23

    Run marketing as a system you can measure

    The balanced scorecard approach translates a company's strategic objectives into a coherent set of performance measures from four perspectives: financial, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth. The point is longevity—managing the holistic marketing organization for the long run means marketing's health is tracked from every angle, not just the quarter's revenue line.

    The idea

    A scorecard with four perspectives prevents the classic failure of optimizing one number while the others rot. Financial measures confirm the past; customer measures test whether value is actually being delivered; internal business process measures reveal whether operations can sustain it; learning and growth measures ask whether people and capabilities can improve. Together they make marketing accountable as a system, which is what long-run management requires.

    Try this: Draft one measure per scorecard perspective for your marketing team and review all four together at month-end.

MBA students, brand and product managers, and founders who need the complete, canonical map of marketing in one place. Also ideal for experienced marketers who want a shared framework vocabulary to align their teams.

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