The principles and insights outlined in this highly engaging book have been invaluable to me in leading the marketing efforts at Victoria's Secret Stores as well as on several P&G brands. --Jill Beraud, Executive Vice President, Marketing/Limited Brands and Victoria's Secret Differentiate yourself more effectively, protect yourself against competition, and drive higher margins Bring entrepreneurial power to distribution, sales management, PR, promotion, advertising, and more For marketers in every kind of company, from startup to global enterprise Focus your marketing on what really works--and make the most of every marketing investment! Marketing That Works introduces breakthrough marketing tools, tactics, and strategies for differentiating yourself around key competencies, insulating against competitive pressures, and driving higher, more sustainable profits. From pricing to PR, advertising to viral marketing, this book's techniques are relentlessly entrepreneurial: designed to deliver results fast, with limited financial resources and staff support.They draw on the authors' decades of research and consulting, their cutting-edge work in Wharton's legendary Entrepreneurial Marketing classes, and their exclusive new survey of the Inc. 500's fastest-growing companies. Whether you're launching a startup or working inside a huge global enterprise, this will help you optimize every marketing investment you make. You'll learn how to target the right customer, deliver the right added value, and make sure your customers will pay a premium for it--now, and for years to come.Build the foundation for extraordinary profit Discover faster, smarter techniques for positioning, targeting, and segmentation Drive entrepreneurial attitude throughout all your marketing functions Master entrepreneurial pricing, advertising, sales management, promotion--and even hiring Maximize the value of all your stakeholder relationships Profit by marketing to investors, intermediaries, employees, partners, and users Generate, screen, and develop better product ideas Engage combat on the right battlefields Launch new products to maximize their lifetime profitability Stage the winning rollout: from fixing bugs to gaining reference accounts Every dime you spend on marketing needs to work harder, smarter, faster. Every dime must differentiate your company based on your most valuable competencies. Every dime must protect you against competitors and commoditization. Every dime must drive higher profits this quarter, and help sustain profitability far into the future. Are your marketing investments doing all that? If not, get Marketing That Works--and read it today. Includes online access to state-of-the-art marketing allocation software! ABOUT THE AUTHORS Leonard Lodish, Ph.D., is Samuel R. Harrell Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School. He is co-founder and Chair of Wharton's Global Consulting Practicum, and innovator of Wharton's MBA Entrepreneurial Marketing course. His research specialties include marketing decision support systems, marketing experimentation, and entrepreneurial marketing. He has consulted with clients ranging from Procter & Gamble and Anheuser-Busch to Tropicana and ConAgra. Howard L. Morgan is Director and former Vice Chairman of Idealab, the pioneering internet incubator; and founder and partner in First Round Capital, an early stage venture capital firm. He has served as Professor of Decision Sciences at The Wharton School and Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at The Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania, and as Visiting Professor at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School. Shellye Archambeau is CEO of Metricstream, Inc., a recognized leader in compliance and governance. She previously served as CMO and EVP of Sales for Loudcloud, Inc., responsible for all global sales and marketing activities.There, she led Loudcloud's transformation into an enterprise-focused company while growing sales by 50 percent year over year. As President of Blockbuster, Inc.'s e-commerce division, she was recognized by Internet World as one of the nation's Top 25 click and mortar executives. CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 MARKETING-DRIVEN STRATEGY TO MAKE EXTRAORDINARY MONEY 11 CHAPTER 2 GENERATING, SCREENING, AND DEVELOPING IDEAS 35 CHAPTER 3 ENTREPRENEURIAL PRICING--AN OFTENMISUSED WAY TO GARNER EXTRAORDINARY PROFITS 59 CHAPTER 4 DISTRIBUTION/CHANNEL DECISIONS TO SOLIDIFY SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 87 CHAPTER 5 PRODUCT LAUNCH TO MAXIMIZE PRODUCT/SERVICE LIFETIME PROFITABILITY 131 CHAPTER 6 ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVERTISING THAT WORKS--VAGUELY RIGHT OR PRECISELY WRONG?145 CHAPTER 7 HOW TO LEVERAGE PUBLIC RELATIONS FOR MAXIMUM VALUE 179 CHAPTER 8 SALES MANAGEMENT TO ADD VALUE 191 CHAPTER 9 MARKETING-ENABLED SALES 221 CHAPTER 10 ENTREPRENEURIAL PROMOTION AND VIRAL MARKETING TO MAXIMIZE SUSTAINABLE PROFITABILITY 239 CHAPTER 11 MARKETING RESOURCE DEPLOYMENT AND ALLOCATION--THE ALLOC SOFTWARE 253 CHAPTER 12 ENTREPRENEURIAL MARKETING FOR HIRING, GROWING, AND RETAINING EMPLOYEES 273 CHAPTER 13 MARKETING FOR FINANCING ACTIVITIES 281 CHAPTER 14 BUILDING STRONG BRANDS AND STRONG COMPANIES 295 INDEX 309

Customer Rating:
Summary: Helped my startup TAKE OFF!!!
Comment: The authors have put a lot of material together to support the main message that entrepreneurs like myself seem to overlook - it's all about messaging your brand and core values to not just one audience (customers), but to many audiences (investors, operators, suppliers).

For my startup Pay Parade ([...]), this book takes the cake for wringing the most intelligence out of pricing sensitivity testing.

Keep it up and keep on turning us serial entrepreneurs into better marketers!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Essentials of Entrepreneurial Marketing in Building a Company's Enduring Value
Comment: The tangible value of marketing is well illustrated for both the aspiring and established entrepreneur in this perceptive, well-organized textbook by Len Lodish, a Wharton marketing professor; Howard Morgan, former vice chairman of leading internet incubator Idealab, and Shellye Archambeau, chief executive of MetricStream, a company focused on compliance and governance solutions. The co-authors succinctly show how the days of marketing as a discretionary expense are obsolete, that it is as much a business driver as operational efficiency and innovative product development. Moreover, they bring to light how marketing can shape the success of not only actual products but also a company's stock and corporate image.

The book revolves around a straightforward, cross-selling matrix, which shows that every venture has three key things to sell - products/services, shares and image - to five different constituents. These constituents include customers, the one who give money in exchange for something they want, but there are separate targets identified as users who may or may not pay, investors, employees and others such as suppliers and strategic partners. Only when there is a conscious effort to address every type of constituent across the three dimensions does a company have a probable chance toward sustaining success. More often, companies focus so much on marketing the product that little effort is made in marketing, for example, the stock to the investor. Toward that end, the co-authors delve into critical questions regarding pricing and the importance of knowing why customers will pay you for a product.

They point to smart marketers like Victoria's Secret, who investigate and experiment, learning not only what competitors charge but also precisely why customers value a particular product or service. When possible, these companies try different prices and strive to charge more if their offerings have distinctive qualities valued by customers. That's how Victoria's Secret took a simple product and repositioned it as desirable, naughty female apparel and elevated the brand into a $3.2 billion-a-year business. Through adaptive experimentation, the company has significantly changed the perception people have of an already established commodity into a relatively inexpensive way for women to feel good about themselves. Looking at price by itself, according to the co-authors, is a precarious exercise, especially when the price point is well known by the public.

The natural urge to match a competitor's price has to be counterbalanced by a heightened attention to the brand and measuring its value within a marketplace that could be changing in value itself. A company that epitomizes this broader approach is Apple, which under Steve Jobs' leadership, has figured out how to build products that transcend their functionality into a direct tie-in to people's enjoyment and sense of empowerment. Renowned examples like Victoria's Secret and Apple bring home the co-authors' points about maintaining differentiation in an evolving marketplace that encompasses globalization, corporate mergers, stricter government regulations, increasing interests for "green" issues, sensitivity around privacy and security. Lodish, Morgan and Archambeau have put together a helpful marketing primer for the future.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Geat Guidance for the Young Entrepreneur
Comment: "Marketing that Works" is a quick read that provides very valuable insight into how to properly position your company, product, services, etc... The examples that are used are both personal triumphs (and failures) of the authors as well as companies that you've probably heard of (or should have, had the companies heeded the advice in this book).

If you are thinking big, then even one small kernel of guidance from this book will pay you back in spades and more than cover the cost of the book. I am already applying some of the wisdom the book imparts to my current entrepreneurial enterprise and can see a significant difference in how I will successfully sell my product. And when I do, I expect my company to be mentioned in the Second Printing of this book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Power of "Entrepreneurial Marketing"
Comment:
Marketing "works" if it creates or increases demand for whatever is offered for sale, be it a product, a service, or both. Hence the importance of Peter Drucker's widely quoted observation, "If you don't have a customer, you don't have a business." In fact, you don't have (or won't have for long) a business if you don't have enough customers who purchase enough of what you offer, for a sufficient profit. In this volume, the co-authors (Leonard M. Lodish, Howard L. Morgan, and Shellye Archambeau) explain how entrepreneurial marketing can add sustainable value to any sized company. The term "entrepreneurial" refers to a mindset that stresses speed, agility, resilience, independence, unorthodox, etc. In other words, what Jay Conrad Levinson characterizes as "guerilla marketing."

The authors carefully organize and then present their material within 14 chapters whose subjects range from "Marketing-Driven Strategy to Make Extraordinary Money" to "Building Strong Brands and Strong Companies." Along the way, they help their reader to answer questions such as these:

1. Does the market segment want the perceived value that my positioning is trying to deliver more than other segments?

2. How can the segment be reached? And how quickly?

3. How big is the segment?

4. What are likely impacts of changes in relevant environmental conditions (e.g. economic conditions, lifestyle, legal regulations) on the potential response of the target segment?

5. What are current and likely competitive activities directed at the segment?

I agree with the authors that each marketing venture must answer the "what am I selling to whom, and why will they buy?" question before it can create a successful marketing strategy and plan. With regard to the term "customer-oriented marketing," the stakeholders may also include investors, supply chain/channel partners, and employees. "Each stakeholder needs a relevant value proposition on why to stay engaged with the firm. So the same concepts of segmentation and positioning apply to them."

In Chapter 9, Lodish, Morgan, and Archambeau shift their attention to an important but often neglected element of sales: marketing initiatives that help to shorten the sales cycle, increase win rates, and protect margins. Salespeople are not marketing people. They need marketing tools to support the process of selling. For example, lead generation, target customer description, product collateral (i.e. datasheets and brochures), customized presentation materials, product demonstrations, and competitive intelligence data. Lodish, Morgan, and Archambeau offer a number of practical, cost-efffective suggestions insofar as marketing tools to support the sales process are concerned.

When concluding this valuable chapter, they observe that marketing plays a crucial, but often overlooked, role in properly enabling sales success. "From identifying prospective customers through lead generation, to providing sales tools to the sales force to handle prospect objections and close deals, marketing needs to be in lock-step with sales. Marketing needs to understand the sales process to close as well as sales does. Ensuring that the right tools are created to assist sales at each step is a critical responsibility of marketing." I could not agree more.

Presumably Lodish, Morgan, and Archambeau would be among the first to agree that it would be a fool's errand to attempt to execute all of the strategies and tactics examined in their book. It remains for each reader to absorb and digest the material with meticulous care, then select those concepts that are most appropriate to the needs and objectives of her or his own organization. When completing that selection process, I consider it imperative to keep in mind that the sales mindset and the marketing mindset are quite different, and those differences must be fully understood and (yes) respected. That said, it is also imperative that - as the authors correctly insist - "marketing needs to be in lock-step with sales" to sustain effective and productive communication, cooperation, and most important of all, collaboration if both marketing and sales are to be successful.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: How marketing should be done
Comment: I must confess that I have historically had a low opinion of the marketing people that I have firsthand knowledge of. They always seemed to be overstating glad-handers, over-promising to land potential customers and not really interested in learning how difficult it is to implement their promises. When I was writing code full-time, we referred to it as the "couldn't you just" condition. As in "couldn't you just put in this feature" and ignoring any rational response explaining that while the feature appears simple, it could take weeks to add it to the software. I was personally the recipient of a marketing person telling everyone how I was negatively cynical and not a team player when I strongly voiced my objections to an absurd promise that the marketer had made to a potential customer.
Therefore, it was with a great deal of skepticism that I opened this book and began reading. It did not take long before I was sold on the ideas of the authors. They reject the over-promising and blast the world nonsense that so many marketers consider the way to sell their products. Their approach is that of the entrepreneur that lacks a great deal of money for marketing, and that you must avoid an overstatement at all costs. It is better to understate and be proven wrong than overstate and be considered (or proven to be) an unreliable fool. They consider marketing to be a way to add sustainable value to the company, much like the delivery of a quality product.
If I am ever again in the situation where I am confronting a marketing person who values unjustified hype over honest accuracy, I will give them a copy of this book, ask that they read it and then offer to discuss it with them.

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