What Is Marketing?

Sometimes you need more then a one-sentence answer. While the term marketing generally refers to what a company does to create value for customers, practicing marketers know they have a major role in setting their company’s strategic direction. Successful marketing requires a deep knowledge of customers, competitors, and collaborators―and great skill in serving customers profitably.
The book provides the foundation for developing those skills and insights. It’s organized according to the design of the first-year marketing course in Harvard Business School’s MBA program. Each chapter was written by HBS faculty and used by MBA students to analyze marketing opportunities and develop and execute successful marketing strategies. Areas covered include:
<li>Consumer behavior</li>
<li>Business-to-business markets</li>
<li>The four P’s-product, placement, promotion and price</li>
<li>Market segmentation, target market selection, and positioning</li>
<li>Unique value propositions</li>
<li>The design of new products and services</li>
<li>Product line extensions and repositioning of exciting businesses</li>
<li>Brand valuation and brand equity</li>
<li>Fulfillment and after-sale service</li>
<li>Direct, retail, and wholesale distribution channels and networks</li>
<li>Marketing communications and promotions</li>
<li>Advertising, public relations, and choice of media</li>
<li>Pricing for profitability</li>
<li>Personal selling and sales management</li>
<li>Customer relationship management and customer privacy</li>
<li>Customer acquisition, retention, and dismissal</li>
<li>Basic math for making marketing decisionsTimeless yet timely, this book provides valuable background information for understanding and interpreting business and competition from a marketing point of view. That makes it useful in both formal and informal educational settings, including on-the-job training. Simply put, it’s required reading for marketing students and a must-have recourse for marketing professionals.
</li>

Business & Money

Review, Harvard Business

Silk, Alvin J.

Marketing & Sales

Harvard Business Review Press

Every day on the job, you face common challenges. And you need immediate solutions to those challenges. The Pocket Mentor Series can help. Each book in the series is packed with handy tools, self-tests, and real-life examples to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and hone critical skills. Whether you're at your desk, in a meeting, or on the road, these portable, concise guides enable you to tackle the daily demands of your work with speed, savvy, and effectiveness. The latest volume in the series: Executing Strategy That strategy you've defined for your group is brilliant--promising better market share, higher profits, or some other impressive business result. But your strategy won't deliver the expected outcomes if you and your group don't execute it that is, if you don't put it into action by implementing the right strategic initiatives. This volume helps you master the challenging art of strategy execution. You'll learn how to: -Craft action plans for the strategic initiatives required to meet your goals -Keep your action plans on course despite the inevitable setbacks and surprises -Cultivate employees' sense of ownership and accountability for your plans -Create a group culture in which everyone views strategy as their job

Executing Strategy (Pocket Mentor)

Management & Leadership

Every day on the job, you face common challenges. And you need immediate solutions to those challenges. The Pocket Mentor Series can help. Each book in the series is packed with handy tools, self-tests, and real-life examples to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and hone critical skills. Whether you're at your desk, in a meeting, or on the road, these portable, concise guides enable you to tackle the daily demands of your work with speed, savvy, and effectiveness.The latest volume in the series: Fostering CreativityTo survive in today's hypercompetitive climate, businesses must innovate constantly. Innovation hinges on creativity--generating novel and useful ideas. By fostering creativity in your team, you help unleash your company's innovative powers. But this requires a disciplined process for leveraging employees' unique experiences, thinking styles, and expertise.

Fostering Creativity (Pocket Mentor)

To be a successful manager, you need to master the skills that characterize strategic thinking--from examining situations to interpreting information--and know how to apply those skills on the job. In Thinking Strategically, you'll learn to: Understand what strategic thinking is and why it is valuable View strategic thinking as a process Recognize the personal traits, behaviors, attitudes, and cognitive capacities that strategic thinkers demonstrate

Thinking Strategically (Pocket Mentor)

What can you, as a manager, do to attract top talent and keep your company's high-performing employees? In Retaining Employees, you'll learn ways to stay competitive in the war for talent by using creative and effective retention strategies, including: Managing or removing common obstacles to retention, such as burnout and work-life imbalance Developing programs to better meet employees' diverse needs and interests Hiring the right employees in order to improve retention

Retaining Employees (Pocket Mentor)

In challenging times, companies must serve their customers faster and more efficiently. This makes improving your business processes more critical than ever. In this book, you'll learn key steps for carrying out a business process improvement initiative, including how to: -Plan a business process improvement initiative -Analyze and redesign a current process that needs improvement -Obtain the resources needed to change a process -Develop a systematic approach for creating and implementing change

Improving Business Processes (Pocket Mentor)

Leading teams is an essential skill every manager must possess. To do it effectively, you must know how to instill commitment in your team, improve communication among group members, and diagnose common problems that can derail a team. In this book, you'll find valuable advice and proven strategies for managing teams, including how to: · Diagnose common problems that can impede team progress · Take corrective measures to remove team problems and improve performance · Resolve team conflicts · Promote interdependence within teams

Managing Teams (Pocket Mentor)

Closing individual sales, in most businesses, is not enough for success. Success depends on developing profitable lifetime relationships with customers. But gaining customer loyalty requires hard work, care, and attentiveness. In this book, you'll learn to assess the lifetime value of a customer, and why it makes sense to build loyalty among your target customers. You'll also learn to: - Understand the service-profit chain - Leverage the interrelationships among customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, employee capability, and company profitability - Build and refine a process for delivering extraordinary value to your customers

Focusing on Your Customer (Pocket Mentor)

How do you decide the best course of action for your company to take advantage of new opportunities? You must develop a business case to explore multiple alternatives before making a recommendation to support a particular option. This book shows you how to use a business case to define an opportunity, identify and analyze alternatives, and present your final recommendation to key stakeholders. You'll learn to - Clearly define the opportunity you'll want to address in your business case - Identify and analyze a range of alternatives - Recommend one option and assess its risks - Create a high-level implementation plan for your proposed alternative - Communicate your case to key stakeholders

Developing a Business Case (Pocket Mentor)

Change is the one constant in business, and we must adapt or face obsolescence. Yet certain challenges never go away. That's what makes this book "must read." These are the 10 seminal articles by management's most influential experts, on topics of perennial concern to ambitious managers and leaders hungry for inspiration--and ready to run with big ideas to accelerate their own and their companies' success.
If you read nothing else - full stop - read:
<ul>
<li>Michael Porter on creating competitive advantage and distinguishing your company from rivals</li>
<li>John Kotter on leading change through eight critical stages</li>
<li>Daniel Goleman on using emotional intelligence to maximize performance</li>
<li>Peter Drucker on managing your career by evaluating your own strengths and weaknesses</li>
<li>Clay Christensen on orchestrating innovation within established organizations</li>
<li>Tom Davenport on using analytics to determine how to keep your customers loyal</li>
<li>Robert Kaplan and David Norton on measuring your company's strategy with the Balanced Scorecard</li>
<li>Rosabeth Moss Kanter on avoiding common mistakes when pushing innovation forward</li>
<li>Ted Levitt on understanding who your customers are and what they really want</li>
<li>C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel on identifying the unique, integrated systems that support your strategy</li>
</ul>

HBR'S 10 Must Reads: The Essentials

Porter, Michael E.

Christensen, Clayton M.

GOLEMAN, DANIEL

DRUCKER,PETER F.

Reference

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