When I started my career in consulting about 10 years ago, my partner (=boss) would remind me, every now and then, to go back to the proposal we had written for the client, and read it again. There, she said, I would get a fresh look at the objectives of our engagement (why were doing a piece of work), the approach and the timetable. It was like keeping an eye on the dashboard of a fast car, or stirring a sailboat.
I was exchanging a couple of interesting views last week on market segmentation with Michel de Guilhermier recently (CEO of Photoways, an online service to develop films in France), on his recent launch of a discount brand along his premium brand. And I finished my comment saying 'anyway... I am not a marketing person'.
There we go, what I needed was to go back to basics, and read some marketing theory again. So on friday night, I grabbed an interesting book in my bookshelves (I tend to buy many books, and read them a long time afterwards ;): Kotler on Marketing: how to create, win and dominate markets.
Beware: this is no B-school textbook. For that, Marketing Management seems to be the ultimate management (I forgot to buy it in B-school and somehow got away with it, thanks to the lectures of a great professor that make reading the book less relevant ;). This book is a nice and quick read by the world's marketing guru written for field practioners.
Kotler offers two nice definitions of marketing:
1) "marketing is the science and art of finding, keeping and growing profitable customers" (p.121)
2) "marketing's central purpose is demand management, the skills needed to manage the level, timing and composition of demand." (preface xiii)
The book covers all the basic principles of marketing and most of the tools in a comprehensive way. For more insight on each concept, of course, there is an extensive bibliography pointing to the seminal work in each area (with articles in the HBR, Journal of ..., etc.). Nevertheless, I found the book useful for entrepreneurs, as it clearly talks about the issues we should normally see in business plans, and that more often than not are not there: how do you define your market? what market pain does your product solve ? how do you differentiate from competition ? how do you price your product ? how do you sell your product ?
Each chapter closes with a list of questions to consider, which I believe would be useful to give some thought to if you are writing your business plan, probably by helping you reevaluate or further refine your thoughts and hypothesis.
Finally, each chapter opens with a few quotes. I won't repeat them all here, but for the sake of illustration, here are a few to think about when designing a new product on a market:
"quality is when our customers come back and our products don't" (Siemens quality motto)
"the best way to predict the future is to invent it" (Dennis Gabor)
"it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data" (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
"having a competitive advantage is like having a gun in a knife fight" (anonymous).
I attended a truly interesting breakfast presentation this morning with Virginie Calmels, the freshly minted (last september) Directrice Générale of Endemol France, the TV show producers of such TV shows as the French version of Big Brother: Loft Story, Star Academie, On ne peut pas plaire à tout le monde, Le Big Deal, Miss France, etc.
